MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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The letter below from Ron Diener, of Wendell, North Carolina, came to me as I was contemplating the folly of human life. I had learned about the ecological disaster being heaped atop the other ecological disasters being suffered in the Balkans. This time the source was mining in Rumania that was poisoning the Danube River, the major tributary at the heart of Europe. The timing couldn't be much worse. Fisherman in Yugoslavia were showing the world the dead fish washing up on the shores of the Danube. The preceding link takes you to our past reporting about the ecological disasters in Yugoslavia. Some people were predicting that now the Danube will be contaminated for twenty years. The United Nations is trying to organize the clean-up of the cyanide from the Danube. ---RATO THE EDITOR - The recent spill of cyanide into a tributary of the Danube River in Rumania reminds me of an incident just a few years ago when I was living in Wyoming. A Canadian mining firm was proposing to build a gold mine in Montana within shouting distance of Yellowstone National Park. The park is situated chiefly in Wyoming, with a narrow strip on the north and west edges in Montana. Opposition was immediate from various sources, including many ecology conscious organizations, farmers and ranchers down the Yellowstone River and several local governments.
The mine operator proposed to crush and grind the gold ore into a powdery substance, pile it in huge stacks, then leech cyanide in a liquid form through the ore to collect gold at the bottom. Cyanide, mind you! Simple common sense would tell you that this is probably the most insane method imaginable for collecting a valuable metal.
This technique ranks with Edward Teller and his insane plans for bombs sufficient to poison all the earth's atmosphere. The cyanide would run off the pile and into pools, whence it would be recollected, re-charged and poured over the crushed ore once again. The pools, if breached, could flow into the Yellowstone River, one of the very few western rivers that flow freely without dams. But, rejoined the mine operator, such a breech could never happen! Well, in the end there was a political pay-off and the proposal was shelved. President Clinton bought off the land owner and prospective mine operator with cash and with other opportunities for gold mining.
Newspapers in the East, however, bought the company's line. The ecology folks in the Rockies were bonkers, according to the media, for opposing this new state-of-the-art method for mining. The locals were against progress, against capitalism, against this lucky woman who owned property shot through with gold.
The World's Magazine: g21.net
Event # 203: DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
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Now we read of the same methods used in Rumania, where I am sure that everyone was told by their own engineers that a breech in the cyanide pools would be impossible. All life forms, down to the smallest organisms, are dead along long, long stretches of the river.
The Lesson: Do not heed the experts. Follow common sense.
CYBER-SECURITY FOLLOW-UP
Today the White House held its summit on "cyber-security." This follows hard on President Clinton's public warnings about the threat of cyber-terrorism from organized crime, international political terrorists, and hacker/crackers. And hard on last week's fortuitous Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on major US e-commerce sites. Both reported in this space last week. So it's more Big News about the Internet.Now a hacker whose Internet "pseud" is Mixter has reportedly come forward to inform the Justice Department that he developed the program used in last week's DoS episode. He is said to be cooperating with the United States Justice Department to track down the perpetrators. Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also announced today that they are cooperating with the United States government in tracking down the perpetrators of last week's event.
The program used in last week's attack is reported to have used computers at UCLA and UC Berkeley as "drones," while a router at Stanford University is said to have been compromised by the program.
At today's summit, the Clinton Administration unveiled a series of proposals to combat such interruptions of Internet service and shore up Internet security. Among those proposals:
- Broader rules for government surveillance of phone and data lines.
- Cooperation by the computer industry in providing the government with "keys" that would it allow it to crack encryption codes.
- Creation, in cooperation with the private sector, of a Federal Intrusion Detection Network.
While industry concerns applauded the United States government's quick reaction to the challenge, privacy advocates are concerned. Some cannot help but come away from these events with a "Reichstag fire" feeling.
The salient question, from this quarter, how invasive do we want these new government "protections" to be?
One cannot help but wonder if this media hysteria over what amounts to little more than a temporary outtage for a few e-commerce sites is not being used to steamroll the public into giving up the relative freedoms it enjoys in cyberspace. The "protections" being proposed by the Clinton Administration and co-signed by private corporations seem almost as onerous, in the view of G21, as the problem they are meant to cure.
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