From: "Linda Muller"
Date sent: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 09:15:04 -0500
Subject: [BRIGADE] Homosexuals, Fulani, and Me
Dear Brigade,
I thought that title would get your attention!
This note is for Pat's supporters who are concerned about the support of Lenora Fulani and others. Also see below a comment from Pat Choate.
Let me say this Brigade, at first I was outraged about the Fulani deal. I even sent a few emails to friends telling them so. But then, I remembered an important event that I was involved in 1997.
In late June 1997, I was living in Huntsville Alabama when a few friends and I got wind of a plan by the AL Department of Public Safety to begin forcing all citizens to be fingerprinted before they could obtain a drivers license.
You want to talk about outraged?
To make a long story short, our small band of activist set out to prevent this from happening. We formed a group called "Fight the Fingerprint". I set up a website and over the Internet we organized a diverse coalition of citizens and activist groups who banded together who not only stood up to Big Brother - we put an end to his scheme - in under 3 weeks!
We were up against dismal odds - the fingerprinting equipment had been purchased, the employees trained, the databases were set up, and the fingerprinting had already begun in a few cities.
Yet, because we united with others, we were able to win that battle. On this one issue, people and organizations who normally would never speak to each other, came together. We had the Christian Coalition, the ACLU, Concerned Women for America, Gun Owners of America, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Eagle Forum, Electronic Frontiers, the Southern League, the US Taxpayers Party, and many more.
If any of you know me at all, then you know that there is no one more hardcore on the Right than me. But when I was forming this coalition and organizing the activists, do you think for a minute that I cared whether any of them were homosexual? Did I ask them if they were pro-life? And guess what? Not one of them questioned my loyalty to Pat Buchanan - even though many of them were probably opposed to him. All of us put aside our differences and united on this one issue and we were able to slay the dragon.
BTW - I've also included a column below: "True Identity Fraud" that covers just some of the reasons why we need to be concerned about the fingerprinting and privacy issue.
So, what's the moral of this story?
To anyone who has written to me complaining about Lenora Fulani, homosexuals, pro-aborts, et al, you have a choice. You can sit on your hands and talk about how mad you are that Pat has accepted the support of people you do not agree with. You can waste your support and money on candidates, who may be good men, but will never be permitted to win their party's nomination. And then you can cast your vote for the Bush/Gore ticket. Because if you don't stop you're whining and get off your butts and help Pat right now - they are going to be in the White House in 2000. Or, you can accept that these people who have offered to support Pat, just might be able to bring him more votes - and that is the bottom line.
Pat has never compromised. He will never change his stand on our issues. Many of these new supporters do not agree with Pat on everything, but they have put aside their differences. Most Americans want a President they can trust -- even if they do not always agree with him. They want a President who will govern with integrity, end the corruption, and put America and Americans First again.
As far as I'm concerned, even if Pat - or his campaign ( ;-> ) -- does a few things that get me miffed, he is still so far ahead of the other candidates that they will never, ever, measure up to him.
Pat is the Man Brigade!!
GO PAT GO!!!!!!!
Linda
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Date sent: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 11:29:41 -0500
From: patchoate - patchoate@mciworld.com
Subject: Re: NYT - Fulani before Buchanan?
To: Ed McClelland - ReformParty@webtv.net
CC: linda@buchanan.org
Ed: As I have written to you before, Fulani will NOT be Buchanan's VP. That has been made clear both by him and by her. She is going to assist in getting the Black and Minority Vote in the general election. She is also working very hard to help Pat get the nomination of the Reform Party. If she get publicity in the process, that is fine with Pat and Bay Buchanan. Fulani is part of Buchanan's campaign. Not Trump's. Not Ventura's. Not Anderson's. Not Weicker's. And she will stay part of the Buchanan campaign to the end. The left hates this because they know a left-right coalition can win the Presidency. Put another way, I am not reading much about the Green, Constitution, or Libertarian Parties because they are not a threat to the established order.
The question people should be asking themselves is this: Do I wish to support Pat Buchanan who has the endorsement and help of Lenora Fulani or do I so despise Fulani that I will use my energies to either be passive in this election, support someone else or actively try to undermine Pat Buchanan's and the Reform Party's chance to win the Presidency?
Pat Choate
--------------------------------------
August 1997
True Identity Fraud by Nathan J. Muller
Misplaced Trust in Technology Aids Criminals
There seems to be a big push lately among bureaucrats at all levels of government to implement new technologies that are intended to safeguard the integrity of vital documents. This is understandable, considering that billions of dollars could be lost each year (nobody really knows the extent of this type of fraud) to criminals who steal the identities of unsuspecting victims for the purpose of pillaging bank accounts, running up credit cards, and committing other types of fraud--all in someone else's name.
Whatever the scam, the results are the same: the victims go through years of frustration and financial hardship trying to get their lives back in order; the criminals are treated as petty thieves who, when caught, often continue committing these crimes while out on bail. A 1998 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office--Identity Fraud: Information on Prevalence, Cost, and Internet Impact is Limited--cited a Secret Service estimate that identity fraud cost Americans $745 million in 1997.
The ordinary drivers license has become the gateway document that makes possible all kinds of fraud, including "true identity fraud". With a genuine-looking drivers license, a checking account at a bank can be opened, credit cards can be obtained, and welfare benefits can be collected. In fact, an entire identity--real or fictitious--can be built from scratch or duplicated using a drivers license as the starting point.
Easy Fabrication
In many states, drivers licenses are fairly easy to fabricate in anyone's name. All that is needed is an official looking photograph of the user. Fortunately for would-be criminals, these can be obtained in a choice of backgrounds from virtually any photo store that offers instant passport photos.
To make drivers licenses fraud-proof, the federal government has recommended to the states that they start issuing licenses with the fingerprint of the applicant. These fingerprints would be digitized and stored in a database that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies to help track down con men, dead-beat dads, convicted sex offenders, tax cheats and, presumably, anyone else the government might have a problem with.
The bureaucrats tell us that this database will be used as a crime fighting tool only, and that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. In fact, they say, fingerprints on our drivers licenses will protect the public from true identity fraud because the fingerprint is the one thing that is unique to each of us and cannot be duplicated--it is the ultimate proof that we are who we say we are. One's fingerprint cannot be denied. In a court of law, the fingerprint is the key piece of evidence that can determine guilt or innocence.
Trust Us, We're Here to Help
The assurances of bureaucrats on technology and privacy matters have rarely panned out. In fact, there is a long history of bureaucratic blundering in this area, the most glaring of which is the continuing saga of the IRS wasting billions of tax dollars on an ill-fated effort to upgrade its 20-year-old computer systems.
And let's dispense with the idea that private information of any kind can be protected against unauthorized access and abuse. This year, the IRS admitted for the first time that dozens of clerical and administrative staff have been disciplined for snooping into the tax records of celebrities and others. Presumably, much of this snooping was done to satisfy personal curiosity, but it could just have easily been done for easy cash paid by tabloids, private investigators, government operatives, and criminals. There is really no way to know for sure.
Even the computers at the Pentagon are not immune from snooping. In 1995, there were at least 250,000 break-in attempts, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO), posing a serious threat to national security. A significant number of these attempts succeed and it is not always known what information has been accessed, who the hackers are, or for what purpose the information will be used. This is noteworthy because the Defense Department estimates that hacker attacks against its computers are doubling every year. That means over 1 million break-in attempts will occur by year-end 1997 and 2 million by year-end 1998.
Most of the intrusions are from the Internet, which Pentagon researchers helped develop in the 1970s. In its report released in May 1996, the GAO also found that the Pentagon has become too dependent on the Internet for e-mail and other applications, and that current encryption technology does not adequately defend against many of the intrusions.
Even the government's Digital Encryption Standard (DES), long considered the world's most secure scrambling method for ensuring the privacy of sensitive information during transmission, has finally been broken. Developed in 1977 by IBM with the assistance of the National Security Agency (NSA), DES is so complex that an electronic bandit would have to find the one numerical combination, or "key," out of 72 quadrillion possibilities (72,057,594,037,927,936) that unlocks the encrypted message. Yet a group of programmers acting cooperatively over the Internet broke the code earlier this year.
Sometimes a government agency invites snooping into its computers through sheer ignorance. The Social Security Administration (SSA), for example, came up with the brilliant idea of providing everyone with access to their records over the Internet. This, despite a continuing barrage of news stories demonstrating how easy it is for hackers to use the Internet for assaults on government computers. Eventually, public concern and Congressional pressure forced the SSA to remove access to this information from its Web site.
Nevertheless, the episode clearly demonstrates how naïve bureaucrats can be about technology. Officials at the SSA still don't understand what all the fuss was about. Likewise, some states continue to include the Social Security number on drivers licenses, revealing a total disregard for individual privacy and the potential for fraud. Many states even sell drivers license information to marketing firms as a way of raising revenue.
Considering these and numerous other cases of bureaucratic ineptitude, the government's insistence that software companies create back-door entrances to encryption programs for law enforcement is laughable. It never seemed to occur to anyone that if back doors are intentionally built into software programs, anyone could eventually find and exploit them, not just law enforcement. Instead of accidentally discovering a security flaw that allows access to a program, hackers will know that a back door exists. They only have to find it instead of using law enforcement's key to unlock it.
Let's get back to the case at hand--preventing true identity fraud committed with forged documents. Here, the bureaucrats seem to understand the problem, but the solutions create more problems that are infinitely more damaging. It's almost as if they're trying to put out a raging fire with cans of gasoline.
New Players in Crime
Take the drivers license. Some bureaucrats have gone to great expense to implement measures designed to prevent the unauthorized production of drivers licenses. In California, for example, each drivers license features a photo, several holograms, and a metallic strip for fraud prevention. But this didn't stop employees of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles from issuing bogus licenses to anyone willing to fork over the right amount of cash. An estimated 250 DMV employees have issued over 25,000 genuine-looking, but fraudulent licenses in a two year period. Some were paid as much as $1,000 for such licenses. "Ironically, as our documents become more tamper-proof, it's become more of a problem,'' DMV Director Sally Reed admitted to the San Jose Mercury News.
The California case demonstrates that the use of sophisticated technologies merely shifts the point of production from a small cottage industry that relies on the skills and expertise of a few individuals to a government activity that relies on bribery and corruption, with potentially vast numbers of people becoming "players" in churning out legitimate looking documents in vast quantities. This kind of fraud has been going on for years with so-called "green cards" issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The amounts of money involved make it worth the risk of getting caught. Aside from getting fired, the penalties are often negligible. Jail terms generally range from one to three years, if anything at all.
More Protection Schemes
Despite the failure of technology to protect us, government bureaucrats seem eager to embrace just about any bone-headed idea that comes along. In the past, these schemes could be criticized for their expense or ineffectiveness and be dismissed as just another case of bureaucratic bungling that fleeces hardworking taxpayers. Now comes the latest scheme--adding fingerprints to drivers licenses. This is actually being done in five states--Georgia, California, Colorado, Hawaii and Texas--in response to federal recommendations. (Only in Alabama and Utah has this effort been successfully defeated.)
According to the ACLU, there is a larger agenda behind fingerprinting than mere fraud prevention that protects the public. "States are being encouraged by the federal government to issue a tamper-proof ID," observes Teresa Nelson, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia. She told the Netly News Network, a Time-Warner Pathfinder service on the Internet, "Since the national ID card didn't pass, there have been many attempts to get something in through the back door."
Facilitating New Crimes
Almost more important than the arguments raised by the ACLU about national identity cards and personal privacy--if allowed to continue, the fingerprinting scheme can actually subvert the entire justice system by facilitating new crimes that trap the innocent and enable criminals to get away free.
We have all grown up with the idea that nobody can possess someone else's fingerprints and that one's fingerprints cannot be altered. But in this digital age, even this is possible. Once a fingerprint is scanned and digitized for storage in a database, it becomes susceptible to theft, transport over phone lines, and manipulation by any number of people. Print out the fingerprint and you have a perfect image that can be transferred to a gun trigger, for example, or a knife handle, or the proverbial "blunt instrument". All that is needed is a soft gel to pick up the printed image and leave it somewhere else. If it happens to be your fingerprint that is pilfered from the database and found at the scene of a crime, you're toast!
A Sorry Track Record
There is ample evidence to suggest that government bureaucrats have a misguided trust in technology, that they are virtually blind to the potential abuses of privacy that occur in their own departments and agencies, and that the legitimate concerns of ordinary people about these potential abuses are of no real concern to them.
If recent developments are any indication, it is easy to obtain legitimate-looking documents through bribery, thereby sidestepping the sophisticated use of technology intended to prevent their unlawful production. Forcing us to reveal more personal information on such key documents as drivers licenses does not necessarily prevent true identity fraud; on the contrary, it can go a long way toward exposing us to new and more serious dangers. In the case of fingerprints stored in numerous databases, it can result in the planting of false evidence that can convict innocent people. Will these databases be used only for law enforcement and be protected against unauthorized access? Don't count on it.
Given the track record of government in implementing computer security technologies and policies designed to safeguard our privacy, the refrain of bureaucrats that only criminals need worry about being fingerprinted is an absurdity of the most dangerous kind. On the contrary, law abiding citizens have much to fear. They fear an all-powerful government that insists on exposing them in multiple ways to a new and growing breed of insidious criminals whose success is determined by how well they can acquire someone else's identity.
.........................
Nathan J. Muller is an independent technology marketing consultant in Potomac Falls, Virginia. In his 29 years of industry experience, he has published 17 books and over 1500 articles about computers and communications in over 50 publications worldwide. He has held technical and marketing positions with such companies as Control Data, Planning Research, Cable & Wireless Communications, ITT Telecom, and General DataComm.
(ps - yep, that's my husband!)
