MOrning - football, race, and baseball overload yesterday . . .

took a trip yesterday ere all that to beth's farmstand . . . dowm pleasant street to rte 1, the prius slupped behind a red pathfinder bought at Kelly's . .. dirty greel inked plate from MA - 516 KTT (see previous entries): with UNH bumberstiker and also a NESL (new england school of law - or, as Ken Cowhey once said, not exacctly school of law: see previous entries) . . . oy - too much choreography there . . .

like the walk by - ushering to thde pool hall now? had some ofthat last week, too . . .

Oy . . .

boston.com:

Retired judge is called Bush's choice for AG
Some Democrats supportive
By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press | September 17, 2007

WASHINGTON - President Bush has settled on Michael B. Mukasey, a retired federal judge from New York, to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and will announce his selection today, a person familiar with the president's decision said yesterday evening.

Mukasey, who has handled terrorist cases in the US legal system for more than a decade, would become the nation's top law enforcement officer if confirmed by the Senate. Mukasey has the support of some key Democrats, and it appeared Bush was trying to avoid a bruising confirmation battle.

The 66-year-old New York native, who is a judicial adviser to GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, would take charge of a Justice Department where morale is low after months of investigations into the firings of nine US attorneys and Gonzales's sworn testimony on the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program.

Key lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, had questioned Gonzales's credibility and competency after he repeatedly testified that he could not recall key events.

The White House refused to comment yesterday. The person familiar with Bush's decision refused to be identified by name because the nomination had not been officially announced.

Bush supporters say Mukasey, who was chief judge of the high-profile courthouse in Manhattan for six years, has impeccable credentials, is a strong law-and-order jurist, especially on national security issues, and will restore confidence in the Justice Department.

Bush critics see the Mukasey nomination as evidence of Bush's weakened political clout as he heads into the final 15 months of his presidency.

It's unclear how Senate Democrats will view Mukasey's credentials, but early indications are that he will face less opposition than a more hardline, partisan candidate like Ted Olson, who was believed to have been a finalist.

Mukasey has received past endorsements from Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who is from Mukasey's home state. And in 2005, the liberal Alliance for Justice put Mukasey on a list of four judges who, if chosen for the Supreme Court, would show the president's commitment to nominating people who could be supported by Democrats and Republicans.

Last week, some Senate Democrats threatened to block the confirmation of Olson, who represented Bush before the Supreme Court in the contested 2000 election. Democratic senators have theorized that Bush might nominate Mukasey, in part because he wanted to avoid a confirmation battle.

The possibility that Bush would pick Mukasey, however, angered some supporters on the GOP's right flank, who have given Mukasey less-than-enthusiastic reviews.

Some legal conservatives and Republican activists have expressed reservations about Mukasey's legal record and past endorsements from liberals, and were drafting a strategy to oppose his confirmation even before it became known that Bush had chosen him.

Mukasey was nominated to the federal bench in 1987 by President Reagan. He was chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York before he rejoined the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler as a partner in September 2006.

He first joined Patterson Belknap in 1976 after serving as assistant US attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District, where he rose to become chief of its official corruption unit. During his 18 years as a judge, Mukasey presided over thousands of cases, including the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was accused of plotting to destroy New York City landmarks.

In the 1996 sentencing of coconspirators in the case, Mukasey accused the sheik of trying to spread death "in a scale unseen in this country since the Civil War." He then sentenced the blind sheik to life.

The Mukasey nomination could be Bush's last major Cabinet appointment.

Friday was the last day of Gonzales's 2 1/2 years at Justice. Solicitor General Paul Clement will serve as acting attorney general until the Senate confirms Gonzales's replacement.

Gonzales's conflicting public statements about the firings of the US prosecutors led Democrats and Republicans alike to question his honesty. Their charges were compounded by his later sworn testimony about the terrorist surveillance program, which was contradicted by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and former senior Justice Department officials.

A congressional investigation into the firings recently shifted its focus onto whether the attorney general lied to Congress. Justice also opened an internal investigation into the matters.

At first, the president backed his embattled attorney general. A little more than two weeks later, Bush announced that he had "reluctantly" accepted the resignation of Gonzales.

Bush said opposition lawmakers treated Gonzales unfairly for political reasons. "It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud," Bush said.
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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
European Court Rejects Microsoft Antitrust Appeal
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
LUXEMBOURG, Sept. 17 — In a stinging rebuke to the world’s largest software maker, the second-highest European court rejected today a request by Microsoft to overturn a 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling that the company had abused its dominance in computer operating systems.

The European Court of First Instance, in a starkly worded summary read to a courtroom of about 150 journalists and lawyers here, ordered Microsoft to obey a March 2004 commission order and upheld the €497.2 million, or $689.4 million, fine against the company.

The court’s presiding judge, Bo Vesterdorf, reading a summary of the decision on his final day in office, said, “The court finds the commission did not err in assessing the gravity and duration of the infringement and did not err in setting the amount of the fine. Since the abuse of a dominant position is confirmed by the court, the amount of the fine remains unchanged.”

“The court said the commission wins on virtually everything,” said Thomas Vinje, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance and part of the legal team for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a coalition that includes Microsoft opponents like I.B.M. “The court has spoken. The commission was right.”

In a statement this morning, the European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said: “The court has upheld a landmark commission decision to give consumers more choice in software markets. Microsoft must now comply fully with its legal obligations to desist from engaging in anti competitive conduct. The commission will do its utmost to ensure that Microsoft complies swiftly.”

Brad Smith, the general counsel for Microsoft, who was present for the reading, said the company would follow the ruling but did not say specifically whether the company would appeal it.

“It’s clearly very important to us as a company that we comply with our obligations under European law. We will study this decision carefully and if there are additional steps that we need to take, we will take them,” Mr. Smith said.

Robert Kramer, a vice president of public policy for CompTIA, a Microsoft ally that represents 3,000 technology companies, predicted the court’s ruling would have a chilling effect on investment both within the European Union and beyond.

“What this ruling will do is send a message to companies that if they establish a good market position with a successful product, they will be forced in Europe to essentially give up that product to their competitors,” Mr. Kramer said.

But Carlo Piana, a lawyer representing the Free Software Foundation Europe, hailed the court’s decision as a victory for small software developers around the world who may have lived in fear of Microsoft or other large platform operators. “This is an incredibly huge victory. The doors are kept open now for competition,” Mr. Piana said.

The decision followed a five-day hearing on the issues in April. Microsoft has indicated in the past that it would appeal any negative ruling to the European Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe, but Mr. Smith would not say today whether the company would take that step in the two months and 10 days it has to. An appeal by the company, a process likely to take at least two years, would focus only on whether the appellate court erred in procedure in reaching its decision, not on the facts in the case.

Microsoft has already been forced to pay nearly €1 billion in fines in the nine-year-old legal case, which has pitted the software maker based in Redmond, Wash., against the commission and a host of competitors, including I.B.M., Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks and Novell.

In its ruling, the 13-member panel of judges said Microsoft had violated European antitrust law by exploiting its near dominance in operating systems to shut out competitors like RealNetworks in digital media players and Sun Microsystems in workgroup exchange servers.

The ruling validated the pursuit of Microsoft by Mario Monti, former competition commissioner for the European Union, and his successor, Ms. Kroes. The case began in 1998 when Sun Microsystems filed a complaint over Microsoft’s refusal to disclose its confidential server protocols — computer code that competitors need to make their servers or desktop computers work with Microsoft products.

Microsoft has been repeatedly fined by the commission since the 2004 antitrust ruling for inadequately supplying the protocols. “I think this means it’s about time for Microsoft to comply,” Mr. Vinje said.

The commission later expanded its inquiry to include Microsoft’s practice of bundling its Windows Media Player into its dominant Windows operating system. After Microsoft began bundling its media player into Windows, it overtook the market leader, RealNetworks, and as of January it had a 50 percent share of the global market, according to the researcher Nielsen/NetRatings.

“There has obviously been a lot of work that has gone into our efforts to comply with the commission’s terms with respect to communications protocols,” Mr. Smith said in Luxembourg today. “We have made a lot of progress in that regard and yet we all have to acknowledge that there are some issues that do remain open.”
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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
Blackwater License Being Pulled in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:21 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The Interior Ministry said Monday that it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad.

The ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday incident.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight people were killed and 13 were wounded when security contractors working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad.

''We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities,'' Khalaf said.

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, provides security for many U.S. civilian operations in the country. Phone messages left early Monday at Blackwater's office in North Carolina and with a company spokeswoman were not immediately returned.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman said witness reports pointed to Blackwater involvement but said the incident was still under investigation. It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater was intended to be temporary or permanent.

U.S. troops are immune from prosecution in Iraq under the U.N. resolution that authorizes their presence, but Khalaf said the exemption does not apply to private security companies.

The U.S. Embassy said a State Department motorcade came under small-arms fire that disabled one of the vehicles, which had to be towed from the scene near Nisoor Square in the Mansour district.

An embassy official provided no information about Iraqi casualties but said no State Department personnel were wounded or killed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

He said the shooting was being investigated by the State Department's diplomatic security service, and law enforcement officials working with the Iraqi government and the U.S. military.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki late Sunday condemned the shooting by a ''foreign security company'' and called it a ''crime.''

Tens of thousands of private security contractors operate in Iraq -- some with automatic weapons, body armor, helicopters and bulletproof vehicles.

The contractors, including many Americans and Britons, provide protection for Westerners and dignitaries in Iraq as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war.

Many have been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys, but none has faced charges or prosecution.

Iraqi police said the contractors were in a convoy of six sport utility vehicles and left the scene after the shooting. A witness said the gunfire broke out following an explosion.

''We saw a convoy of SUVs passing in the street nearby. One minute later, we heard the sound of a bomb explosion followed by gunfire that lasted for 20 minutes between gunmen and the convoy people who were foreigners and dressed in civilian clothes. Everybody in the street started to flee immediately,'' said Hussein Abdul-Abbas, who owns a mobile phone store in the area.

The wartime numbers of private guards are unprecedented -- as are their duties, many of which have traditionally been done by soldiers. They protect U.S. military operations and have guarded high-ranking officials including Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Baghdad.

They also protect journalists, visiting foreign officials and thousands of construction projects.

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3d Party contracteds . . .

nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
Editorial
Restoring American Justice
In 2006, acting in reckless haste before an election, 65 senators and 250 members of the House defied the Constitution, endangered the safety of American soldiers and hurt the nation’s global reputation by passing the Military Commissions Act. The law created a separate, substandard and clearly unconstitutional system of trial and punishment for foreigners. This week Congress has a chance to begin fixing that grievous mistake.

The Senate is expected to consider a measure that would reverse one of the worst aspects of the 2006 law — the suspension of the right of habeas corpus, the ancient principle that no governing power may lock people up without the chance for a hearing in a court of law.

The protection from arbitrary arrest, embedded in the Magna Carta and in the Constitution of the United States, is one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny in democracy’s arsenal. Before President Bush, only one American president suspended habeas corpus — Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War — and the Supreme Court duly struck down that arrogation of power.

In 2004, the Supreme Court again affirmed habeas corpus, declaring that Mr. Bush had no right to revoke the rules of civilized justice at his whim for hundreds of foreigners he declared “illegal enemy combatants.” But Mr. Bush was determined to avoid judicial scrutiny of the extralegal system of prisons he created after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the help of his allies on Capitol Hill, he railroaded the habeas corpus suspension through the Republican-controlled Congress.

The administration’s disinformation machine portrayed the debate as a fight between tough-minded conservatives who wanted to defeat terrorism and addled liberals who would coddle the worst kinds of criminals. It was nothing of the kind.

There is nothing conservative about expressing contempt for the Constitution by denying judicial procedure to prisoners who happen not to be Americans. A long list of conservatives, including Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman; David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; and William Sessions, a former federal judge and F.B.I. director under the first President Bush, support the reinstatement of habeas corpus for the prisoners of the so-called war on terror.

This issue has nothing to do, either, with coddling criminals. Many, perhaps a majority, of the men subjected to indefinite summary detention at Guantánamo Bay were not guilty of any crime. Beyond that, American justice rests on the principle that the only way to protect the innocent is to treat everyone equally under the law. The argument by Mr. Bush’s supporters that Guantánamo prisoners would clog the courts with appeals is specious.

There are many other things deeply wrong with the Military Commissions Act, which established military tribunals to try any foreigner that Mr. Bush labels an illegal combatant. It also allowed the introduction of evidence tainted by coercion and endorsed “combatant status review tribunals,” kangaroo courts in Guantánamo Bay that declare prisoners enemy combatants without a real hearing or reliable evidence.

All of those issues must be addressed, speedily, by Congress, but restoring habeas corpus would be a good first step. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, must ensure a vote on the habeas corpus restoration measure sponsored by Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter, its ranking Republican.

It is good to see the effort led by Mr. Specter, who as chairman of the committee before the 2006 election shepherded the military tribunal law through Congress at the behest of the White House. We hope similar principle will be on display by the other Republican and Democratic senators and representatives who betrayed the Constitution and the democracy they were sworn to defend by voting for that law.

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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
This Is Your (Father’s) Brain on Drugs
By MIKE MALES
Santa Cruz, Calif.

A SPATE of news reports have breathlessly announced that science can explain why adults have such trouble dealing with teenagers: adolescents possess “immature,” “undeveloped” brains that drive them to risky, obnoxious, parent-vexing behaviors. The latest example is a study out of Temple University that found that the “temporal gap between puberty, which impels adolescents toward thrill seeking, and the slow maturation of the cognitive-control system, which regulates these impulses, makes adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability for risky behavior.”

We know the rest of the script: Commentators brand teenagers as stupid, crazy, reckless, immature, irrational and even alien, then advocate tough curbs on youthful freedoms. Jay Giedd, who heads the brain imaging project at the National Institutes of Health, argues that the voting and drinking ages should be raised to 25. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, asks whether we should allow teenagers to be lifeguards or to enlist in the military. And state legislators around the country have proposed raising driving ages.

But the handful of experts and officials making these claims are themselves guilty of reckless overstatement. More responsible brain researchers — like Daniel Siegel of the University of California at Los Angeles and Kurt Fischer at Harvard’s Mind, Brain and Education Program — caution that scientists are just beginning to identify how systems in the brain work.

“People naturally want to use brain science to inform policy and practice, but our limited knowledge of the brain places extreme limits on that effort,” Dr. Siegel told me. “There can be no ‘brain-based education’ or ‘brain-based parenting’ at this early point in the history of neuroscience.”

Why, then, do many pundits and policy makers rush to denigrate adolescents as brainless? One troubling possibility: youths are being maligned to draw attention from the reality that it’s actually middle-aged adults — the parents — whose behavior has worsened.

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises:

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18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

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46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today’s middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19, according to the national center.

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More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.

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630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.

•

370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.

•

More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

What experts label “adolescent risk taking” is really baby boomer risk taking. It’s true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Strangely, the experts never mention even more damning new “discoveries” about the middle-aged brain, like the 2004 study of scans by Harvard researchers revealing declines in key memory and learning genes that become significant by age 40. In reality, human brains are highly adaptive. Both teenagers and adults display a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors derived from individual conditions and choices, not harsh biological determinism. There’s no “typical teenager” any more than there’s a “typical” 45-year-old.

Commentators slandering teenagers, scientists misrepresenting shaky claims about the brain as hard facts, 47-year-olds displaying far riskier behaviors than 17-year-olds, politicians refusing to face growing middle-aged crises ... if grown-ups really have superior brains, why don’t we act as if we do?

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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
U.S. Accused of Pressing Alaskan for Plea
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Sept. 16 (AP) — The Justice Department inappropriately put pressure on a former state representative to consider pleading guilty in a corruption case, said his lawyer, who wants a federal judge to review the department’s actions.

The case has reached into Washington, where a senator and a member of the House have come under scrutiny.

A lawyer for the former representative, Victor Kohring, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently used another state lawmaker, who was cooperating with investigators, to press Mr. Kohring to make a deal with prosecutors. Investigators are usually prohibited from contacting a defendant once the defendant hires a lawyer.

Mr. Kohring has pleaded not guilty to bribery and extortion charges. His lawyer, John Henry Browne, contends that Mr. Kohring was under persistent pressure from the Justice Department to change his plea.

Mr. Browne said a former aide to Mr. Kohring recently received a call from an aide in the office of a state senator, Fred Dyson. The message, Mr. Browne said, was to take a plea deal.

Last week, Mr. Browne learned that Mr. Dyson had been working with investigators since 2006. Details about the cooperation emerged in a related trial and showed that Mr. Dyson had helped prosecutors persuade the founder of an oil services company, Bill Allen, to cooperate in the investigation. Mr. Allen, the founder of the VECO Corporation, became a witness against Mr. Kohring and other lawmakers.

Mr. Allen, a longtime friend and political supporter of Senator Ted Stevens, testified last week that his employees helped renovate the senator’s home in 2000. Mr. Stevens has said that he paid every bill he received for the work.

VECO helped organize fund-raisers for Senator Don Young, who has also come under scrutiny in the investigation.

Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Browne’s assertions.

Mr. Browne said he planned to raise the issue on Monday at a pretrial hearing.

Convincing a judge that Mr. Dyson had initiated the contact at the government’s behest could sink the government’s case against Mr. Kohring.

A telephone message left Sunday at Mr. Dyson’s home was not returned.

When Mr. Kohring’s lawyers questioned Mr. Dyson about his F.B.I. contacts in an e-mail message last month, Mr. Dyson denied making the overture at the government’s prompting. But he again encouraged Mr. Kohring to consider a deal.

“My sense of the F.B.I. investigations is that it is not a witch hunt and that they mostly want to nail the really bad guys,” Mr. Dyson wrote in an e-mail message to Mr. Kohring’s lawyers, who provided the message to The Associated Press.

Mr. Dyson wrote that Mr. Kohring could “avoid a good deal of stress and bad press at trial by at least sitting down with the Feds” to consider “an attractive alternative.”

Prosecutors asked whether Mr. Kohring had any information about Mr. Stevens, Mr. Browne said, but he said Mr. Kohring did not.

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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
Gates Plans Speech to Detail the Roots of Security Policy
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday will offer a detailed analysis of the philosophical roots of national security policy that aims to reconcile the pragmatic and ideological wings of a Republican Party he has served at the White House, Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon.

Mr. Gates’s address comes as the Bush administration has been harshly criticized by the pragmatic foreign policy wing of its own party — including some who served with Mr. Gates under the first President Bush, like Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser. Those Republican Party elders say the White House has undermined national security needs with a more ideological foreign policy that includes trying to fulfill the president’s desire to spread democratic values, especially in the Muslim world.

Mr. Gates, in a speech prepared for delivery at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., places a foot in the camps of both the hard-edged pragmatists and the lofty idealists — in fact, he describes the address as “a realist’s view of promoting democracy abroad.”

It is his first major address as defense secretary that steps beyond his strict portfolio as Pentagon chief, with its inevitable focus on Iraq. Mr. Gates argues that in weighing the “competing impulses in U.S. foreign policy — realism versus idealism, freedom versus security, values versus interests” — the country must incorporate both.

“The most successful leaders, starting with Washington, have steadfastly encouraged the spread of liberty, democracy and human rights,” Mr. Gates said in the prepared text. “At the same time, however, they have fashioned policies blending different approaches with different emphasis in different places and at different times.”

Casting his eye over two centuries of American policy, he said that the United States had “allied with tyrants to defeat other tyrants,” adding: “We have sustained diplomatic relations with governments even as we supported those attempting their overthrow. We have at times made human rights the centerpiece of our national strategy even as we did business with some of the worst violators of human rights. We have worked with authoritarian governments to advance our own security interests even while urging them to reform.”

Mr. Gates’s analysis, as might be expected, leads him to the conclusion on Iraq that was laid out by Mr. Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday night.

“For America to leave Iraq and the Middle East in chaos would betray and demoralize our allies there and in the region, while emboldening our most dangerous adversaries,” he said in the speech. An advance text was provided to The New York Times by a Pentagon official.

“It is our country’s tragedy, and our glory, that the tender shoots of freedom around the world for so many decades have been so often nourished with American blood,” he said. “The spread of liberty both manifests our ideals and protects our interests — in making the world ‘safe for democracy,’ we are also the ‘champion and vindicator’ of our own.” Advocates of pragmatism and advocates of idealism “must coexist,” he said.

“Throughout more than two centuries, the United States has made its share of mistakes,” he concluded. “From time to time, we have strayed from our ideals and have been arrogant in dealing with others. Yet, what has brought us together with our democratic allies is a shared belief that the future of democracy and its spread is worth our enduring labors and sacrifices — reflecting both our interests and our ideals.”

Regarding Iran, Mr. Gates said on “Fox News Sunday” that he thought “the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach.”

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nytimes.com:

September 17, 2007
Stolen Tape Had Data on Agencies for Hartford
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Calling it an “unfathomable” breach of security, Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut said yesterday that a computer backup tape stolen in June from a car in Ohio contained bank account and other sensitive financial data for nearly all Connecticut state agencies.

The governor criticized Connecticut’s attorney general and comptroller for not telling her about the situation earlier. But the comptroller’s office said it only recently learned of the breach, and notified the governor’s office a week ago. The attorney general said he had not known the extent of the problem.

The tape was stolen from the car of an intern working on a computer project for the State of Ohio. Besides the Connecticut state data, the tape contained the names and Social Security numbers of 57 Connecticut residents. The tape held similar data for about 1.3 million Ohio residents. It was unclear if it contained information from other states.

Connecticut and Ohio hired the same consulting firm, Accenture, to develop computer systems integrating payroll, accounting, personnel and other fiscal functions. Rich Harris, a spokesman for Governor Rell, said yesterday that Accenture seemed to have used the program it created for Connecticut as a template for its project in Ohio, “and it’s our understanding that this is how the data got mixed up” on the tape.

A spokesman for Accenture did not respond to e-mail and telephone messages yesterday.

A report in July by the Ohio inspector general, Thomas P. Charles, said the data on the tape was not encrypted. There is no indication, however, that the information has been misused, according to officials in Connecticut and Ohio.

“This tape is not like a CD-ROM or floppy disk that you can plop into a laptop or desktop computer and the information will just appear on the screen,” said Connecticut’s deputy comptroller, Mark E. Ojakian. “This is a lot more sophisticated than that.” Still, Mr. Harris cautioned, “It’s never a good idea to have this information out there.”

In a statement yesterday, Mrs. Rell said a review of the tape’s contents over the weekend revealed an “unfathomable violation of information security,” as the tape lists names and numbers of 440 checking, money market, treasury, savings and other types of accounts held by the state. It also holds memorandums, instructions and files related to Connecticut’s new computer system, Mr. Harris said.

“The depth and breadth of the bank account data breach is shocking,” the governor said in the statement. “In essence, the state’s banking information has been laid bare.”

Mr. Ojakian, the Connecticut deputy comptroller, said the state’s contract with Accenture does not allow the firm to use state data in any of its other projects.

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, said he had ordered an investigation into this breach and a separate one last month, after a laptop computer containing personal information for 106,000 Connecticut taxpayers was stolen from a Connecticut employee’s car on Long Island.

“We are ready to hold anyone and everyone accountable, within state government or outside, for any illegal or improper action,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

The state is providing free credit protection for people whose information was on the laptop, and Accenture is paying for protection for the 57 whose information was lost in Ohio.

The backup tape lost in Ohio was stolen on June 10 from the car of a 22-year-old intern with Ohio’s Office of Budget and Management. The intern had been assigned to take the tape home for safekeeping, according to the Ohio inspector general’s report.

Officials in Ohio said that it was not until the first week of September, when a consultant concluded a review of the original tape, that they knew it had information from Connecticut. Mr. Ojakian said that he was notified of the tape’s theft and contents on Sept. 5 and that two days later, his office received a copy of the data and began its analysis.

In her statement, Mrs. Rell, a Republican, said that she was “perplexed” that the comptroller’s office had not informed her of the full scope of the breach early on, and that she learned of it only after her office requested its own copy of the stolen information from Accenture late last week. The copy was received on Friday, technicians analyzed it on Saturday and the governor released her findings yesterday.

On Friday, the comptroller, Nancy Wyman, a Democrat, issued a news release that discussed the 57 residents, and also mentioned at the end that state agency bank information had been lost, Mr. Ojakian said yesterday.

In her statement, Governor Rell said, “While I appreciate that the comptroller and the attorney general acted quickly to protect the 57 individual taxpayers whose Social Security information was contained on the tape, at least as much concern should have been shown for the more than 1.6 million individual and corporate taxpayers who pay the costs of state government and who would have been shortchanged if state agency bank accounts were illegally accessed.”

But Mr. Ojakian said his office sent a letter a week ago to Mrs. Rell, apprising her of “what had happened, how it had happened, what information was on the tape and what we would do to address the situation.” The state’s treasurer was also notified, as were bank officials, who worked to assign new numbers to accounts listed on the tape, he said. The tape held bank account information from four years ago, but most of those accounts remained active, according to the governor’s office.

“We planned to hand-deliver the file to the governor’s office Monday morning because we wanted to make sure the transfer of the data was secure,” Mr. Ojakian added. “But there’s no question that the information they discovered on their own had already been disclosed to them.”

Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat, said he was “never specifically consulted as to any broader security breach,” adding that he knew only about the several dozen taxpayers whose data was on the tape.

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thecrimson.com:

Hanzich ’06 Leaves a Legacy of Leadership

Yale law student, recent Harvard grad found dead in New Haven

Published On 9/17/2007 3:26:05 AM

By ADITI BALAKRISHNA

Crimson Staff Writer


His friends knew Joseph M. Hanzich ’06 as POTUS—President of the United States. “He had the whole world ahead of him,” said a freshman-year roommate, James C. Lee ’08.

The vibrant and accomplished first-year at Yale Law School was found dead in his New Haven, Conn., apartment on Thursday. He was 23.

Yale and New Haven police officials have said Hanzich died of natural causes, but have not released details on the circumstances surrounding his death. Yale Law School Dean Harold H. Koh ’75 told students and faculty on Friday that there are “many more questions than we have answers” about the case, the Yale Daily News reported.

Hanzich, a native of Orange County, Calif., earned a slew of academic honors at Harvard while studying government, and served as a leader of several campus groups. He graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and attended the University of Cambridge on a prestigious scholarship to earn a master’s degree in public health. He was a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship.

“Joey was a person that made others around him better people,” said Eric M. Hanzich ’11, Hanzich’s younger brother. “He was that person that people wanted to be around who exuded joy throughout his life. There was never an unhappy moment with him.”

Hanzich made his mark on Harvard with his participation in a number of student organizations. He was vice president of the College Democrats, the secretary of intramural sports for Leverett House, and the director of Harvard’s Relay for Life cancer fundraiser.

Hanzich joined the American Cancer Society after a friend was diagnosed with cancer, Koh wrote in a letter to the law school community. Hanzich also volunteered in nursing homes and provided Spanish translation services to the poor in a Harvard Law School legal services clinic, Koh wrote.

“Joey Hanzich did so much with his life; he would have done so much more,” Koh said in the letter. “He was a gifted and wonderful young man. How privileged we were to have him with us, even for such a short time.”

Leverett House Master Howard Georgi ’68 said Saturday night that it was Hanzich’s “love of his community and its people”—not his impressive academic honors—that “radiated through his smile.”

“His enthusiasm for everything he did infected many of us in the House and his smile is something that we will never forget,” Georgi wrote in an e-mail to Leverett House.

Kirstin Woody, a fellow competitor for the Rhodes, first met Hanzich when both were in San Francisco for final interviews. Woody and Hanzich studied in England the next year and grew to be close friends.

“He’s one of those individuals that when anybody meets him, they just know that it’s something incredibly special,” she said.

Hanzich was very athletic and loved sports, especially tennis, Woody said. The two traveled to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open together this year.

Hanzich told Woody last weekend that he was excited to be at Yale and was eager to use his education to change the world.

“He said ‘You know, one thing I just appreciate so much is that they’re teaching us not how the world is, but how it can be,’” she said. “That’s everything he stood for—what we can do to challenge the status quo.”

Hanzich’s roommate throughout his time at Harvard, John W. Scott ’06, wrote in an e-mail that his roommate encouraged Scott, “a boy from a small town in South Carolina,” to “dream on a global scale,” in hopes of changing the world for the better.

Scott wrote that Hanzich was such a source of inspiration to all those around him that “as long as we live on, his influence will live within us.”

To many, Hanzich seemed to be a perfect candidate to be president of the United States one day, Eric Hanzich said.

“[Joey] decided to pursue a life of public service because he truly believed that he could effect the most positive change for the largest amount of people,” he said. “He wanted to learn how to change America for the better for mankind. He loved this nation more than anyone I’ve known.”

Memorial services will be held at Yale Law School on September 30, according to Koh. Official services have not yet been scheduled for Harvard, said Ann Georgi, co-master of Leverett House. Brigit M. Helgen ’08, president of the Harvard College Democrats, wrote in an e-mail to the Institute of Politics community that the Dems would likely be planning a service later this week.

In a speech at the Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy’s Certificate’s awards ceremony in June 2006, Hanzich, in his last days as an undergraduate, called on his peers to translate lessons learned at Harvard into changes worldwide.

“Now is our time to make a difference,” Hanzich said.
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hmmmm . ..

thecrimson.com:

In Currier, Security Sparks a Debate

New masters hire a security guard; for some in the Quad, that’s not quite a good thing

Published On 9/17/2007 3:27:58 AM

By VICTORIA B. KABAK

Crimson Staff Writer


Currier House residents are decrying fresh security measures, including a new guard, implemented by the dorm’s interim masters.

Currier had been the only House without a security guard assigned to it. Newly appointed Interim House Masters Shahram and Laura Khoshbin have also moved the door buzzer, which lets in people without a student ID, from the “bell’s desk” near Currier’s front door to a less accessible spot in the guard’s office.

In the past, the bell’s desk has been manned by students. Currier residents will still work there, but for fewer hours and with less responsibility.

Some Currier residents argue that the new measures are stripping the Quad House of its character. But Shahram Khoshbin, who served as a resident tutor and chair of the House’s pre-medical advisory committee before becoming interim master, insists that real safety issues justify the changes.

“Having been here for such a long time, we obviously had a long institutional memory,” Khoshbin said. “The problem with institutional memories is of course you remember all the wonderful things but you also remember all the things that were scary. We are an urban campus. We are not a closed campus.”

Still, many Currierites have not taken kindly to the new security protocol, which now requires a guard to be present from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. every day.

“The fear is that these changes aren’t just the end of it, that they’re indicative of the House masters’ position in general, that they’re going to try to change a lot about what makes Currier Currier,” said Bradley D. Attaway ’08, who works at the bell’s desk and has been one of the most outspoken students oppposed to the measures.

In interviews, students expressed concerns about the added cost of the guard and the inability of students who forgot their IDs to get into the House without a Currier resident to recognize them. They also spoke of the negligible help offered by an unarmed, older guard and the lack of a full explanation from the House’s leadership.

“What we’re all hoping for is a direct address from the House masters... where they explain exactly their vision for Currier and sort of the reasons why they changed these security measures because that would be treating us like adults and not just imposing things as though we’re kindergartners,” Cleo D. M. Leung ’08 said.

Though the Khoshbins did send a response over the House’s open list after students began voicing their concerns, Leung and others felt it was not adequate and took particular offense at their explanation, which partly invoked the shooting at Virginia Tech last spring.

“We all know that you do not pull out random terror events to justify drastic measures in other areas that really aren’t related,” Leung said. “Virginia Tech was perpetrated by a student who had swipe access.”

The Khoshbins defended their decision and expressed consternation at some students’ reactions.

“Our reaction is completely that of what parents would do,” said Shahram Khoshbin, also an associate professor of neurology at the Medical School. “I am hurt that when I spent an inordinate amount of time that I didn’t have to... for something that is purely for them, I haven’t had anything other than headache because of it.”

The Khoshbins were also emphatic that the time was right for increased security, that they were not trying to patronize or condescend to their residents, and that the bell’s desk would remain a center of social life in the House.

“Things nationwide seem to be intensifying. Fitting that together with what we know about the neighborhood...it seemed like the right time,” Laura Khoshbin said.

Not all residents of Currier were dismayed at the changes that have taken place. Students who defended the new system over the House’s open list argued that the new regulations made Currier’s security comparable to that in the rest of the Houses. They also said security at some other schools is significantly more elaborate and difficult to navigate.

“Anybody who knows about the weekend situation in Currier House kind of knows that people just sort of pour out of the shuttle and come floating into the House,” said Lauren M. Freid ’08.
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thecrimson.com:

Summers’ Words Still Sting

U. of California rescinds speaking invitation for former Harvard president

Published On 9/17/2007 3:29:34 AM

By CLAIRE M. GUEHENNO and LAURENCE H. M. HOLLAND

Crimson Staff Writers


Under pressure from a group of female professors concerned about gender and racial prejudice, the University of California has rescinded a speaking invitation to former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers.

The decision drew criticism from allies of Summers as well as some of his onetime opponents in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Summers had been invited to speak at a dinner hosted on Wednesday by the University of California board of regents, prompting a group of female University of California at Davis professors to draft an online petition, eventually signed by more than 350 people, protesting the choice.

“Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the people of California,” the women wrote in the petition.

In a statement, Summers called the University of California system a “national treasure.”

“I regret missing the chance to discuss issues facing universities with the regents,” he said. “I often participate in discussions of this kind, and find that I always learn a great deal from the exchange of views and am sorry that the regents do not feel the same way.”

The petition’s authors pointed to two controversial incidents of Summers’ tenure as Harvard president, including a 2005 speech in which Summers suggested that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might partially account for the lack of females in the upper echelons of science and engineering fields.

They also cited Summers’ dispute with former African American studies professor Cornel R. West ’74. West, who is black, left for Princeton after Summers reportedly asked him to focus more on traditional scholarship rather than producing rap CDs.

Richard C. Blum, chairman of the University of California board of regents, spoke with Summers, now the Eliot University professor, last Thursday and rescinded the invitation, according to University of California spokesman Trey Davis.

Susan Kennedy, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, will replace Summers at the event.

Several Harvard professors, including some critics of Summers’ presidency, came to his defense over the weekend after the decision to rescind the invitation was reported.

Judith L. Ryan, who called for a vote of no confidence against Summers in 2006, said that the authors of the petition “have fallen prey to a simplification that became widespread in media reports.”

“It’s not necessary for [Summers] to be able to speak anywhere and everywhere,” Ryan, the Weary professor of German and comparative literature, wrote in an e-mailed statement. “Still, when all is said and done, we should be able to listen to views with which we don’t agree, and to debate them in a civil way.”

Beren Professor of Economics N. Gregory Mankiw, a Summers supporter, called the decision to rescind the invitation “truly despicable.”

“To deny him the opportunity to speak is...academia at its worst,” Mankiw said. “The university should stand for open debate and be willing to listen to differing points of view, especially from someone as prominent as Larry Summers who has reached the pinnacles of academia.”

Maureen Stanton, one of the petition’s organizers and an ecology professor at Davis, did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.