PACT- 6A
Hackers snatched world
economic forum attendees'
credit-card numbers
by William Drozdiak
The Washington Post
February 5, 2001
BRUSSELS, Belgium - A week
after its annual conclave of glo
bal political and economic lumi
naries at the Alpine resort of
Davos, the World Economic Fo
rum announced Monday that un
precedented security precautions
failed to prevent computer hack
ers from tapping into a database
and stealing credit-card numbers
of about 1,400 prominent people.
The computer break-in came to
light when the Swiss weekly
Sonntags Zeitung revealed its re
porters had been shown data on a
CD-ROM containing 80,000
pages of information, including
credit-card numbers, passport in
formation and personal cell-phone
contacts of some of the forum’s
participants, who are among the
world’s most famous, rich and
powerful people. The victims in
cluded former president Bill
Clinton, former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, South Afri
can President Thabo Mbeki,
Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill
Gates and other prominent corpo
rate executives, the weekly said.
“We are treating this matter as
a serious crime and not as a
prank,” said Charles McLean, the
WEF’s director of communica
tions. “We have filed a legal com
plaint and asked the Swiss au
thorities to launch a full investi
gation that we hope will lead to
the prosecution of the perpetra-
McLean said the cyber-attack
was carried out by unknown hack
ers who broke into a “remnant da
tabase” that contained information
about participants who attended
some of the forum’s regional
meetings held last year. He said
the stolen material appeared to
consist mainly of biographical
data readily available to the pub
lic, but for about 1,400 people
there was the loss of more private
information.
During this year’s conference,
which focused mainly on the frag
ile nature of the American
economy and the global impact of
the digital revolution, some of the
most heated debate among par
ticipants involved questions of
personal privacy in the Internet
age. This cyber-attack on the
Davos database seems likely to
elevate that theme on the forum's
“We have notified all of the par- agenda.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Signs of
Antarctica
melting
The Washington Post
February 5, 2001
There’s new evidence that an im
portant part of the Antarctic might
be melting.
Andrew Shepherd of the British
Antarctic Survey and colleagues
studied satellite data collected from
1992 to 1999 about the Pine Island
Glacier, a 20-mile-wide river of ice
that is thought to be especially vul
nerable to changes in climate.
The glacier is thinning faster than
had been thought, the data showed.
If the current rate continues, the gla
cier will be floating within 600
years, which would sharply increase
sea levels around the world, the re
searchers report in the Feb. 2 issue
of Science.
It remains unclear whether global
warming is playing a role in the
glacier's thinning, the researchers
said.
ticipants affected by this security
breach and advised them to reach
their credit-card companies to en
sure the security of their ac
counts,” McLean said. “The fo
rum has also initiated legal pro
ceedings to block any use or dis
semination of the illegally ob
tained information and created a
telephone hot line for participants
who have specific queries about
this incident.”
During the recent conference,
thousands of Swiss police set up
an elaborate array of roadblocks
and barbed-wire barricades that
transformed the Davos confer
ence center into an impregnable
fortress. The security measures
were taken to thwart any mayhem
by anti-globalization protesters,
who had threatened to disrupt
what they call an elitist con
spiracy to promote the interests of
big business to the detriment of
the world’s poor.
Although McLean insists the
identity of the hackers and their
political affiliation has not been
established, the Swiss newspaper
said the material had been col
lected by anti-globalization pro
testers. Swiss authorities said they
would pursue a preliminary in
quiry to determine whether the
government should prosecute the
hackers on grounds of invasion of
privacy.
McLean said none of those par
ticipants whose credit-card num
bers had been exposed reported
any bogus charges on their ac
counts. He said the forum was
confident the hackers did not pen
etrate the primary Davos data
base.
A spacecraft gamble in a quest for knowledge
by Kathy Sawyer
The Washington Post
February 5, 2001
WASHINGTON - Imagine an old
shoe thrown into the air, tumbling end
over end. A spunky little dragonfly is
flying rings around it, circling closer
and closer and finally trying to settle
on a certain spot without getting
smashed flat.
Next Monday, as a grand finale to
its year-long mission, NASA’s Near
Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Shoe
maker spacecraft (NEAR; will at
tempt a feat not unlike the hypotheti
cal shoe-fly act: the first landing ever
on the surface of an asteroid.
It’s worth the effort, mission man
agers have decided, because these
space rocks harbor specimens of the
primordial rubble out of which Earth
and the other inner planets formed
more than 4.5 billion years ago If that
isn’t enough, some of the larger
chunks have helped shape the evolu
tion of Earth and its life-forms by
slamming into it - and one of those
still out there just may have to be de
flected someday in order to save civi
lization.
Since last Valentine’s Day, NEAR
has been dancing gingerly around the
21-mile-long asteroid Eros 433 as it
spins at a rate of one revolution every
5 hours and 17 minutes. Named for
the Greek god of sexual love, Eros is
one of the largest and most accessible
space rocks known to travel near
Earth. Evidence suggests that the im
pact of a smaller object wiped out the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago and,
scientists say, there is a slight possi
bility that Eros will collide with Earth
- in perhaps 1.5 million years.
Launched in 1996 on a 2 billion-mile
chase and currently 196 million miles
from Earth, the NEAR spacecraft is
already in the record books as the first
WORLD & NATION
Police use new tool to
find fake IDs
by Petula Dvorak
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Bouncers in the
nation’s capital, who have only their
experience and keen eyes to fight the
increasingly sophisticated fake IDs
that college towns seem to spawn, at
last have technology on their side.
The Washington D.C. police de
partment is the first in the nation to
introduce an army of small scanners
to weed out bogus IDs.
“There are over 500 Internet sites
that sell fake IDs, and they all look
amazing,” said Lt. Pat Burke, the
department’s traffic coordinator.
“They are getting so good that the
naked eye can’t tell if they’re fake.
Now we have something that can.”
Undercover officers began working
the city’s bars Friday night, posing as
bouncers using the new machines.
Rush-hour bombing
nine on subway platform
by Maura Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
February 5, 2001
MOSCOW - A small bomb exploded
on a subway platform during rush
hour here Monday, injuring nine
people and reviving fears that terror
ists are targeting the Russian capi
tal.
Prosecutors said they were inves
tigating the bombing at the
Belorusskaya metro station in cen
tral Moscow as a terrorist act.
“ The most important thing is that
everyone is alive,” said Vasily
Kuptsov, a spokesman for the city
police force.
No one immediately claimed re
sponsibility for the blast, and police
did not identify any suspects.
Kirill Kumakov, 14, had just got
ten on the escalator to exit the sta
tion when he heard a bang.
“ It wasn’t too loud,” he said. “ I
turned around and saw a little black
smoke coming from under a bench.
A woman and a boy were lying on
the ground. There was a smell like
burning rubber.
“ Then everything was a panic,
with people running up the escala
tor,” he added. “They pushed me up
and out.”
The explosion damaged marble
ever to go into orbit around any small
solar system body (asteroid or comet),
the first to operate on solar power so
far from the sun, and the first ever to
conduct an in-depth study of an aster
oid. Circling the rock at distances typi
cally ranging from 22 to 124 miles,
by mission’s end NEAR will have
transmitted more than 160,000 images
and taken millions of measurements.
It has answered many questions, re
searchers say, and raised new ones.
But in recent days, spacecraft han
dlers have focused on the final “first.”
The 1,100-pound spacecraft was not
designed to land, and the decision to
try it has been mildly controversial
within the team.
“It's turned out to be more compli
cated than we thought,” said mission
director Robert Farquhar, of the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
i'APL; in Howard County, Md. APL
built the spacecraft and is managing
the mission for NASA. The antenna
has to point toward Earth with the so
lar wings oriented toward the sun,
while the camera aims at the asteroid.
“This means the thrusters aren’t lined
up,” he said, “and that will take some
fancy footwork that uses 25 percent
more fuel.” Oh, and the spacecraft is
running out of gas.
“The mission has been such a suc
cess, a lot of people are asking why
risk failure now,” said Farquhar, who
conceived the landing idea. “But it’s
all bonus science. To me, the only real
risk is in not taking one.”
Around him, the NEAR team in
APL’s spacecraft operations center
was executing a thruster firing to lower
the craft’s orbit. They watched for a
change in the NEAR telemetry num
bers on a big wall screen as they
teleconferenced with spacecraft navi
gators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, Calif. (Instructions sent
between Earth and the spacecraft
Police say the high-tech approach is
effective and more genteel than the
usual raids, which were often impre
cise, time-consuming and decried by
the business community.
“Some of the bars thought that we
were overly pernicious in targeting
them rather than targeting the individu
als who use the fake IDs,” Burke said.
This weekend is the start of the
department's new effort to curb under
age drinking after a string of alcohol
related injuries and deaths near Wash
ington college campuses in the last two
years.
Seven machines were used by un
dercover officers at bars from Thurs
day through Saturday in the neighbor
hoods of Georgetown, Adams-Morgan
and 14th and U streets, and near Catho
lic, Howard, American and George
Washington universities.
injures
tile and lighting fixtures on the ornate
subway platform, but the damage was
minor enough that the station re
opened less than three hours after the
bombing.
Among the nine people hospitalized
were two children.
The incident recalled last summer’s
bombing in an underground passage
at Moscow's Pushkin Square, which
killed 13 people. Many officials ini
tially blamed Chechen terrorists for
that blast, as they had for a series of
apartment house bombs in 1999 that
killed about 300 people.
But while investigators claimed to
have circumstantial evidence linking
Chechen warlords to the apartment
blasts, the cases have not been solved.
And investigators eventually ac
knowledged that the Pushkin Square
blast was unconnected to the apart
ment bombings; instead, it was the
result of a dispute between kiosk op
erators.
But 27-year-old Dmitri Ivanov, who
was higher up on the escalator when
the Belorusskaya bomb went off, said
he doesn't believe those explanations
and has no doubts about who was to
blame.
“ Of course (all the bombs) are con
nected to each other and to the
Chechens," he said. “ We’re not chil-
dren.”
across 196 million miles take 17.5 min
utes one way, at the speed of light.)
“We’re seeing a response,” someone
said.
Maneuvering around an asteroid is
much trickier than circling a nice round
planet. The asteroid’s shape has been
compared to a peanut and a potato, but
Farquhar personally favors a shoe. “It’s
almost like a Dutch clog,” he said.
The force of gravity on Eros’ surface
averages about one-thousandth that on
Earth. A person who weighs 150
pounds on Earth would vary from 0.56
to 1.3 ounces on a tour of Eros.
Its irregular shape similarly gives
NEAR a “rough ride” on close passes,
mission managers said. NEAR’s orbital
direction (opposite that of the rock's
spin) was designed to minimize the
gravitational kicks. (The gravity that
holds NEAR in orbit is related to the
asteroid's mass - the quantity and dis
tribution of its matter - as well as to the
distance between them.) On Jan. 28,
NEAR brushed over Eros’ “toe” at a
record close distance of less than two
miles.
On Feb. 12, beginning at about 10:30
a.m. EST, the controllers will begin a
final series of engine bums designed to
move the craft out of orbit, brake its
velocity and - just after 3 p.m. - settle it
on the rock’s sunlit southern side at a
survivable speed of two to seven mph.
“I’d say there’s about an 85 percent
chance that everything will go right,”
Farquhar said. “But if one of these
bums doesn’t go off, it could get ugly.”
The craft could smack down at up to
20 mph and end up looking like a card
board model of NEAR that sits taunt
ingly on the desk of mission operations
manager Bob Nelson - crumpled flat.
If all goes well, Farquhar said, the
descending craft will snap dozens of
images 10 times as detailed as any ever
before taken of an asteroid, its camera
staying in focus to within about 1,650
Bush-wackin’ the taxes
President George W. Bush announces his proposal for a tax cut at
an event in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, Monday.
Behind him are members of three families that participated in the
event.
Phil on job shadowing
Punxsutawney Phil checks out the crowd after being pulled from his
tree stump by Bill Deeley, the president of the Groundhog Club and
Phil's handler, during Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney,
Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1998. The National Oceanic and At
mospheric Administration charges that Punxsutawney Phil is a quack.
On Friday Phil appeared once again and saw his shadow.
The Quagga question
PHOTO BY JOHN MURPHY THE BALTIMORE SUN
feet above the surface and capturing
objects as small as 4 inches across. Its
destination is on the verge of an in
triguing six-mile-wide, saddle-shaped
depression peppered with boulders.
After touchdown, Farquhar said,
“the most we can hope for is a beacon
from NEAR Shoemaker that says it’s
still operating.” Or the craft could tip
into what he called “ostrich mode” -
head down, its antenna in the dirt.
NEAR’s lead scientist, Andrew
Cheng of APL, said NEAR’s wealth
of data has already confirmed, among
other things, that Eros is a sample of
material largely unchanged since the
birth of the solar system (and a rela
tive of the most common type of me
teorite - the space debris that falls to
Earth). The pristine primordial stuff is
impossible to study on our own planet
or others where geological activity and
heat have cooked and pounded it into
something else.
NEAR has also shown that Eros is
a solid whole rather than a “rubble
pile” of loosely bound pieces like, for
example, the asteroid Mathilde, which
the craft visited earlier.
“This is the first time we’ve gotten
up close and personal... with one of
these objects that could be like the one
that eliminated the dinosaurs,” said Ed
Weiler, NASA’s head of space science,
pronouncing the relatively low-cost
($223 million) mission “a total suc
cess story.”
NEAR has also posed new riddles.
“On the tiny fraction of the surface
we've seen at high resolution, we no
ticed strange processes we haven’t
seen on the moon or anywhere else,”
including unexplained landslides of
surface material, said Joseph Veverka
of Cornell University, NEAR imaging
team leader. “We need to get a better
look.”
Next Monday is their one chance.
I HI:: BUSKIN, > SBN\( > 'N
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9,2001
ixidermist Reinhold
,au explains his ex
ibit on the quagga
(breeding project at
le South Africa Mu
ium in Cape Town,
subspecies of the
ains zebra, the
lagga was hunted
extinction in the
'th century.