To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - FCC Reverses Religious Broadcasting Ruling
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 09:43:32 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Following "many communications" from the
public, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday reversed
new guidelines limiting religious content on noncommercial public
television. The guidelines had required noncommercial educational
licenses to devote at least one-half of their programming hours
to topics not "primarily devoted to religious exhortation,
proselytizing, or statements of personally-held religious views
and beliefs."
Full Story: http://www.mcjonline.com/news/00/20000129a.htm

_________________________
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To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Address of Sen. Helms before UN Security Council
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:57:41 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

Address by Senator Jesse Helms Chairman, U.S. Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations before The United Nations Security Council January 20,
2000

Mr. President, Distinguished Ambassadors, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I genuinely appreciate your welcoming me here this morning. You are
distinguished world leaders and it is my hope that there can begin, this day,
a pattern of understanding and friendship between you who serve your
respective countries in the United Nations and, those of us who serve not
only in the United States Government, but also the millions of Americans
whom we represent and serve.

Our Ambassador Holbrooke is an earnest gentleman whom I respect, and I
hope you will enjoy his friendship as I do. He has an enormous amount of
foreign service in his background. He is an able diplomat and a genuine
friend to whom I am most grateful for his role and that of the Honorable Irwin
Belk, my longtime friend, in arranging my visit with you today.

All that said, it may very well be that some of the things I feel obliged to say
will not meet with your immediate approval, if at all. It is not my intent to
offend you and I hope I will not.

It is my intent to extend to you my hand of friendship and convey the hope
that in the days to come, and in retrospect, we can join in a mutual respect
that will enable all of us to work together in an atmosphere of friendship and
hope - the hope to do everything we can to achieve peace in the world.

Having said all that, I am aware that you have interpreters who translate the
proceedings of this body into a half-dozen different languages.

They have an interesting challenge today. As some of you may have
detected, I don't have a Yankee accent. (I hope you have a translator here
who can speak Southern - someone who can translate words like "y'all" and
"I do declare.")

It may be that one other language barrier will need to be overcome this
morning. I am not a diplomat, and as such, I am not fully conversant with the
elegant and rarefied language of the diplomatic trade. I am an elected official,
with something of a reputation for saying what I mean and meaning what I
say. So I trust you will forgive me if I come across as a bit more blunt than
those you are accustomed to hearing in this chamber.

I am told that this is the first time that a United States Senator has
addressed the U.N. Security Council. I sincerely hope it will not be the last.
It is important that this body have greater contact with the elected
representatives of the American people, and that we have greater contact
with you.

In the spirit, tomorrow I will be joined here at the U.N. by several other
members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Together, we will meet
with U.N. officials and representatives of some of your governments, and will
hold a Committee "Field Hearing" to discuss U.N. reform and the prospects
for improved U.S.- U.N. relations.

This will mark another first. Never before has the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee ventured as a group from Washington to visit an international
institution. I hope it will be an enlightening experience for all of us, and
that you will accept this visit as a sign of our desire for a new beginning in
the U.S. - U.N. relationship.

I hope - I intend - that my presence here today will presage future annual
visits by the Security Council, who will come to Washington as official
guests of the United States Senate and the Senate's Foreign Relations
Committee which I chair.

I trust that your representatives will feel free to be as candid in Washington
as today so that there will be hands of friendship extended in an atmosphere
of understanding.

If we are to have such a new beginning, we must endeavor to understand
each other better. And that is why I will share with you some of what I am
hearing from the American people about the United Nations.

Now I am confident you have seen the public opinion polls, commissioned by
U.N. supporters, suggesting that the U.N. enjoys the support of the
American public. I would caution that you not put too much confidence in
those polls. Since I was first elected to the Senate in 1972, I have run for re-
election four times. Each time, the pollsters have confidently predicted my
defeat. Each time, I am happy to confide, they have been wrong. I am
pleased that, thus far, I have never won a poll, or lost an election.

So, as those of you who represent democratic nations well know, public
opinion polls can be constructed to tell you anything the poll takers want you
to hear.

Let me share with you what the American people tell me. Since I became
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee I have received literally
thousands of letters from Americans all across the country expressing their
deep frustration with this institution.

They know instinctively that the U.N. lives and breathes on the hard-earned
money of the American taxpayers. And yet they have heard comments here
in New York constantly calling the United States a "deadbeat."

They have heard U.N. officials declaring absurdly that countries like Fiji and
Bangladesh are carrying America's burden in peacekeeping.

They see the majority of the U.N. members routinely voting against America
in the General Assembly.

They have read reports of the raucous cheering of the U.N. delegates in
Rome, when U.S. efforts to amend the International Criminal Court treaty to
protect American soldiers were defeated.

They read in the newspapers that, despite all the human rights abuses
taking place in dictatorships across the globe, a U.N. "Special Rapporteur"
decided his most pressing task was to investigate human rights violations in
the U.S. - and found our human rights record wanting.

The American people hear all this; they resent it, and they have grown
increasingly frustrated with what they feel is a lack of gratitude.

Now I won't delve into every point of frustration, but let's touch for just a
moment on one - the "deadbeat" charge. Before coming here, I asked the
United States General Accounting Office to assess just how much the
American taxpayers contributed to the United Nations in 1999. Here is what
the GAO reported to me:

Last year, the American people contributed a total of more than $1.4 billion
dollars to the U.N. system in assessments and voluntary contributions.
That's pretty generous, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. The American
taxpayers also spent an additional EIGHT BILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED AND
SEVENTY NINE MILLION DOLLARS from the United States' military budget
to support various U.N. resolutions and peacekeeping operations around the
world. Let me repeat that figure: EIGHT BILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED AND
SEVENTY NINE MILLION DOLLARS.

That means that last year (1999) alone the American people have furnished
precisely TEN BILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY NINE MILLION
DOLLARS to support the work of the United Nations. No other nation on
earth comes even close to matching that singular investment.

So you can see why many Americans reject the suggestion that theirs is a
"deadbeat" nation. I resent it too.

Now, I grant you, the money we spend on the U.N. is not charity. To the
contrary, it is an investment - an investment from which the American people
rightly expect a return. They expect a reformed U.N. that works more
efficiently, and which respects the sovereignty of the United Sates.

That is why, in the 1980s, Congress began withholding a fraction of our
arrears as pressure for reform. And Congressional pressure resulted in some
worthwhile reforms, such as the creation of an independent U.N. Inspector
General and the adoption of consensus budgeting practices. But still, the
arrears accumulated as the U.N. resisted more comprehensive reforms.

When the distinguished Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was elected, some
of us in the Senate decided to try to establish a working relationship. The
result is the Helms-Biden law, which President Clinton finally signed into law
this past November. The product of three years of arduous negotiations and
hard-fought compromises, it was approved by the U.S. Senate by an
overwhelming 98 - 1 margin. You should read that vote as a virtually
unanimous mandate for a new relationship with a reformed United Nations.

Now I am aware that this law does not sit well with some here at the U.N.
Some do not like to have reforms dictated by the U.S. Congress. Some have
even suggested that the U.N. should reject these reforms.

But let me suggest a few things to consider: First, as the figures I have cited
clearly demonstrate, the United States is the single largest investor in the
United Nations. Under the U.S. Constitution, we in Congress are the sole
guardians of the American taxpayers' money. (It is our solemn duty to see
that it is wisely invested.) So as the representatives of the U.N.'s largest
investors - the American people - we have not only a right, but a
responsibility, to insist on specific reforms in exchange for their investment.

Second, I ask you to consider the alternative. The alternative would have
been to continue to let the U.S. - U.N. relationship spiral out of control. You
would have taken retaliatory measures, such as revoking America's vote in
the General Assembly. Congress would likely have responded with
retaliatory measures against the U.N. And the end result, I believe, would
have been a breach in the U.S. - U.N. relations that would have served the
interests of no one.

Now some here may contend that the Clinton Administration should have
fought to pay the arrears without conditions. I assure you, had they done so,
they would have lost.

Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson failed to secure Congressional supportfor
U.S. entry into the League of Nations. This administration obviouslylearned
from President Wilson's mistakes.

Wilson probably could have achieved ratification of the League of Nations if
he had worked with Congress. One of my predecessors, as Chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked for 14
conditions to the treaty establishing the League of Nations, few of which
would have raised an eyebrow today. These included language to insure that
the United States remain the sole judge of its own internal affairs; that the
League not restrict any individual rights of U.S. citizens; that the Congress
retain sole authority for the deployment of U.S. forces through the league,
and so on.

But President Wilson indignantly refused to compromise with Senator Lodge.
He shouted, "Never, never!" adding, "I'll never consent to adopting any policy
with which that impossible man is so prominently identified!" What
happened? President Wilson lost. The final vote in the Senate was 38 to 53,
and the League of Nations withered on the vine.

Fast forward 80 years. Ambassador Holbrooke and Secretary of State
Albright understood from the beginning that the United Nations could not long
survive without the support of the American people - and their elected
representatives in Congress. Thanks to the efforts of leaders like
Ambassador Holbrooke and Secretary Albright, the present Administration in
Washington did not repeat President Wilson's fatal mistakes.

In any event, Congress has written a check to the United Nations for
$926million, payable upon the implementation of previously agreed-
uponcommon-sense reforms. Now the choice is up to the U.N. I suggest that
if the U.N. were to reject this compromise, it would mark the beginning of the
end of U.S. support for the United Nations.

I don't want that to happen. I want the American people to value a United
Nations that recognizes and respects their interests, and for the United
Nations to value the significant contributions of the American people. Let's be
crystal clear and totally honest with each other: all of us want a more
effective United Nations. But if the United Nations is to be "effective" it must
be an institution that is needed by the great democratic powers of the world.

Most Americans do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself-
they see it as just one part of America's diplomatic arsenal. To the extent
that the U.N. is effective, the American people will support it. To the extent
that it becomes ineffective - or worse, a burden - the American people will
cast it aside.

The American people want the U.N. to serve the purpose for which it was
designed: they want it to help sovereign states coordinate collective action
by "coalitions of the willing," (where the political will for such action exists);
they want it to provide a forum where diplomats can meet and keep open
channels of communications in times of crisis; they want it to provide to the
peoples of the world important services, such as peacekeeping, weapons
inspections and humanitarian relief.

This is important work. It is the core of what the U.N. can offer to the United
States and the world. If, in the coming century, the U.N. focuses on doing
these core tasks well, it can thrive and will earn and deserve the support of
the American people. But if the U.N. seeks to move beyond these core
tasks, if it seeks to impose the U.N.'s power and authority over nation-
states, I guarantee that the United Nations will meet stiff resistance from the
American people.

As matters now stand, many Americans sense that the U.N. has greater
ambitions than simply being an efficient deliverer of humanitarian aid, a more
effective peacekeeper, a better weapons inspector, and a more effective tool
of great power diplomacy. They see the U.N. aspiring to establish itself as
the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global
governance. This is an international order the American people will not
countenance, I guarantee you.

The U.N. must respect national sovereignty. The U.N. serves nations-states,
not the other way around. This principle is central to the legitimacy and
ultimate survival of the United Nations, and it is a principle that must be
protected.

The Secretary General recently delivered an address on sovereignty to the
General Assembly, in which he declared that "the last right of states cannot
and must not be the right to enslave, persecute or torture their own citizens."
The peoples of the world, he said have "rights beyond borders."

I wholeheartedly agree.

What the Secretary General calls "rights beyond borders," we in America
call "inalienable rights." We are endowed with those "inalienable right," as
Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, not by
kings or despots, but by our Creator.

The sovereignty of nations must be respected. But nations derive their
sovereignty - their legitimacy - from the consent of the governed. Thus, it
follows, that nations can lose their legitimacy when they rule without the
consent of the governed; they deservedly discard their sovereignty by brutally
oppressing their people.

Slobodan Milosevic cannot claim sovereignty over Kosovo when he has
murdered Kosovars and piled their bodies into mass graves. Neither can
Fidel Castro claim that it is his sovereign right to oppress his people. Nor
can Saddam Hussein defend his oppression of the Iraqi people by hiding
behind phony claims of sovereignty.

And when the oppressed peoples of the world cry out for help, the free
peoples of the world have a fundamental right to respond.

As we watch the U.N. struggle with this question at the turn of the
millennium, many Americans are left exceedingly puzzled. Intervening in
cases of widespread oppression and massive human rights abuses is not a
new concept for the United States. The American people have a long history
of coming to the aid of those struggling for freedom. In the United States,
during the 1980s, we called this policy the "Reagan Doctrine."

In some cases, America has assisted freedom fighters around the world who
were seeking to overthrow corrupt regimes. We have provided weaponry,
training, and intelligence. In other cases, the United States has intervened
directly. In still other cases, such as in Central and Eastern Europe, we
supported peaceful opposition movements with moral, financial, and covert
forms of support. In each case, however, it was America's clear intention to
help bring down Communist regimes that were oppressing their peoples.,
and thereby replace dictators with democratic governments.

The dramatic expansion of freedom in the last decade of the 20th century is a
direct result of these policies.

In none of these cases, however, did the United States ask for, or receive, the
approval of the United Nations to "legitimize" its actions.

It is a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek the approval of an
international body (some of whose members are totalitarian dictatorships) to
lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny and claim
their inalienable, God-given rights.

The United Nations has no power to grant or decline legitimacy to such
actions. They are inherently legitimate.

What the United Nations can do is help. The Security Council can, where
appropriate, be an instrument to facilitate action by "coalitions of the
willing," implement sanctions regimes and provide logistical support to
states undertaking collective action.

But complete candor is imperative: The Security Council has an exceedingly
mixed record in being such a facilitator. In the case of Iraq's aggression
against Kuwait in the early 1990s, it performed admirably; in the more recent
case of Kosovo, it was paralyzed. The U.N. Peacekeeping mission in Bosnia
was a disaster, and its failure to protect the Bosnian people from Serb
genocide is well documented in a recent U.N. report.

And, despite its initial success in repelling Iraqi aggression, in the years
since the Gulf War, the Security Council has utterly failed to stop Saddam
Hussein's drive to build instruments of mass murder. It has allowed him to
play a repeated game of expelling UNSCOM inspection teams which
included Americans, and has left Saddam completely free for the past year
to fashion nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

I am here to plead that from now on we all must work together, to learn from
past mistakes, and to make the Security Council a more efficient and
effective tool for international peace and security. But candor compels that I
reiterate this warning: the American people will never accept the claims of
the United Nations to be the "sole source of legitimacy on the use of force"
in the world.

But, some may respond, the U.S. Senate ratified the U.N. Charter fifty years
ago. Yes, but in doing so we did not cede one syllable of American
sovereignty to the United Nations. Under our system, when international
treaties are ratified they, simply become domestic U.S. law. As such, they
carry no greater or lesser weight than any other domestic U.S. law. Treaty
obligations can be superceded by a simple act of Congress. This was the
intentional design of our founding fathers, who cautioned against entering into
"entangling alliances."

Thus, when the United States joins a treaty organization, it holds no legal
authority over us. We abide by our treaty obligations because they are the
domestic law of our land, and because our elected leaders have judged that
the agreement serves our national interest. But no treaty or law can ever
supercede the one document that all Americans hold sacred: the
Constitution of the United States of America.

The American people do not want the United Nations to become an
"entangling alliance." That is why Americans look with alarm at U.N. claims
to a monopoly on international moral legitimacy. They see this as a threat to
the God-given freedoms of the American people, a claim of political authority
over America and its elected leaders without their consent.

The effort to establish a United Nations International Criminal Court is a case-
in-point. Consider: the Rome Treaty purports to hold American citizens under
its jurisdiction - even when the United States has neither signed nor ratified
the treaty. In other words, it claims sovereign authority over American
citizens without their consent. How can the nations of the world imagine for
one instant that Americans will stand by and allow such a power-grab to take
place?

The Court's supporters argue that Americans should be willing to sacrifice
some of their sovereignty for the noble cause of international justice.
International law did not defeat Hitler, nor did it win the Cold War. What
stopped the Nazi march across Europe, and the Communist march across
the world, was the principled projection of power by the world's great
democracies. And the principled projection of force is the only thing that will
ensure the peace and security of the world in the future.

More often than not, "international law" has been used as a make-believe
justification for hindering the march of freedom. When Ronald Reagan sent
American service men into harm's way to liberate Grenada from the hands of
a communist dictatorship, the U.N. General Assembly responded by voting
to condemn the action of the elected President of the United States as a
violation of international law. And, I am obliged to add, they did so by a larger
majority than when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was condemned by the
same General Assembly.

Similarly, the U.S. effort to overthrow Nicaragua's Communist dictatorship (by
supporting Nicaragua's freedom fighters and mining Nicaragua's harbors) was
declared by the World Court as a violation of international law.

Most recently, we learn that the chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes
Tribunal has compiled a report on possible NATO war crimes during the
Kosovo campaign. At first, the prosecutor declared that it is fully within the
scope of her authority to indict NATO pilots and commanders. When news of
her report leaked, she backpedaled.

She realized, I am sure, that any attempt to indict NATO commanders would
be the death knell for the International Criminal Court. But the very fact that
she explored this possibility at all brings to light all that is wrong with this
brave new world of global justice, which proposes a system in which
independent prosecutors and judges, answerable to no state or institution,
have unfettered power to sit in judgement of the foreign policy decisions of
Western democracies.

No U.N. institution - not the Security Council, not the Yugoslav tribunal, not a
future ICC - is competent to judge the foreign policy and national security
decisions of the United States. American courts routinely refuse cases
where they are asked to sit in judgement of our government's national
security decisions, stating that they are not competent to judge such
decisions. If we do not submit our national security decisions to the
judgement of a Court of the United States, why would Americans submit
them to the judgement of an International Criminal Court, a continent away,
comprised of mostly foreign judges elected by an international body made up
of the membership of the U.N. General Assembly?

Americans distrust concepts like the International Criminal Court, and claims
by the U.N. to be the "sole source of legitimacy" for the use of force,
because Americans have a profound distrust of accumulated power. Our
founding fathers created a government founded on a system of checks and
balances, and dispersal of power.

In his 1962 classic, Capitalism and Freedom, the Nobel-prize winning
economist Milton Friedman rightly declared: "[G]overnment power must be
dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in
the state, better in the state than in Washington. [Because] if I do not like
what my local community does, I can move to another local
community...[and] if I do not like what my state does, I can move to another.
[But] if I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this
world of jealous nations."

Forty years later, as the U.N. seeks to impose its utopian vision of
"international law" on Americans, we can add this question: Where do we go
when we don't like the "laws" of the world?

Today, while our friends in Europe concede more and more power upwards to
supra-national institutions like the European Union, Americans are heading in
precisely the opposite direction.

America is in a process of reducing centralized power by taking more and
more authority that had been amassed by the Federal government in
Washington and referring it to the individual states where it rightly belongs.

This is why Americans reject the idea of a sovereign United Nations that
presumes to be the source of legitimacy for the United States Government's
policies, foreign or domestic. There is only one source of legitimacy of the
American government's policies - and that is the consent of the American
people.

If the United Nations is to survive into the 21st century, it must recognize its
limitations. The demands of the United States have not changed much since
Henry Cabot Lodge laid out his conditions for joining the League of Nations
80 years ago: Americans want to ensure that the United States of America
remains the sole judge of its own internal affairs, that the United Nations is
not allowed to restrict the individual rights of U.S. citizens, and that the
United States retains sole authority over the deployment of United States
forces around the world.

This is what Americans ask of the United Nations; it is what Americans
expect of the United Nations. A United Nations that focuses on helping
sovereign states work together is worth keeping; a United Nations that
insists on trying to impose a utopian vision on America and the world will
collapse under its own weight.

If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people,
and serves them as an effective tool of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve
their respect and support. But a United Nations that seeks to impose its
presumed authority on the American people without their consent begs for
confrontation and, I want to be candid, eventual U.S. withdrawal.

Thank you very much.

_________________________
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To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Infobeat News items
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:57:41 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

*** NYC provides psychic training

NEW YORK (AP) - So you want to be a psychic? No problem. New York
City is recruiting welfare recipients to work from home as telephone
clairvoyants. And for those who aren't gifted with prophetic powers,
the city offers job training. The effort began last April and has led
to 15 people on welfare being hired by a company called Psychic
Network, said a spokeswoman for the city's Human Resources
Administration. What does it take to be a telephone soothsayer? A
recruitment flier says qualified applicants must be on public
assistance, have "a caring and compassionate personality" and the
ability "to read, write and speak English." Self-described psychics
were unhappy by the city's effort. See
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2563704663-bc8

*** Rare snowstorm paralyzes Mideast

JERUSALEM (AP) - A city in Israel's Negev Desert woke up blanketed in
snow today and Muslim clerics in Jordan told worshippers to say their
prayers at home after a rare snowstorm dumped up to 3 feet of snow
over the region. In Jerusalem, which was covered in at least 15
inches of snow, a house in the Arab eastern sector collapsed, killing
one Palestinian man and trapping his grandfather in the wreckage. In
neighboring Jordan, the storm dumped two feet of snow on the capital
Amman and nearly three feet in other regions, including the usually
arid south and east. Ski operators at Mount Hermon, Israel's only ski
resort, were happy about the storm. See
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2563706408-e21

_________________________
To subscribe to BPR send a message to bpr-list@philologos.org
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message to the same address with the word "unsubscribe" in the
subject.

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========
To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Edupage items (1/28/00)
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:57:41 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

BRITISH ISPS CRACK DOWN ON HATE
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a self-regulating agency
funded by British ISPs, has announced that it will begin rooting
out illegal hate speech on the Internet. The IWF was initially
created in 1996 as part of a deal between the Internet industry
and the government to battle child pornography online. The new
focus on hate speech expands the agency's watchdog role, and
although companies are not legally required to acquiesce to its
requests, those that do will be immune from governmental
prosecution. The IWF has set up a hotline, and will investigate
all complaints it receives to gauge whether the offending speech
is actually illegal under British law. The agency's expanded
role is seen by many as part of the British government's attempt
to make the country more attractive for e-commerce. However,
civil liberties groups say the IWF is essentially a censorship
organization enforcing politically correct speech in an area
where the law is extremely fuzzy. Even the IWF admits that there
is a lot of gray area and confusion surrounding British hate
speech law, and it plans to lobby the government to create clear,
concise regulations governing such speech.
(Wired News, 25 Jan 2000)

CLINTON TOUCHES ON "DIGITAL DIVIDE" IN ADDRESS
The "digital economy" figured prominently in President Clinton's
State of the Union address last night. With the technology
industry helping to fuel economic prosperity, Clinton last night
urged technology companies to help close the digital divide
separating those who have access to the Internet and those who do
not. Those technology companies that participate in such efforts
will receive tax incentives, Clinton said. Clinton also urged
lawmakers to allocate more funding to the e-rate program that
wires schools and libraries with Internet access. Clinton said
that although roughly 90 percent of schools now have Internet
access, many facilities need to be upgraded in that regard.
(CNet, 27 Jan 2000)

EDUPAGE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU

_________________________
To subscribe to BPR send a message to bpr-list@philologos.org
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========
To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Britain and US monitoring all global messages
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:57:41 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

Britain and US monitoring all global messages

By Stephen Castle in Brussels

28 January 2000

Almost every modern form of communication, from satellites to the internet, is
being intercepted by a multi-billion pound global surveillance operation
dominated by the US and Britain, according to a report for the European
Parliament.

The scale of communications monitoring in the cyber age is laid out in a
document, due to be debated next month, which puts the price-tag of the
global snooping operation at 15 to 20bn euros annually.

The report sparked claims yesterday that the UK is aiding American
economic and commercial espionage at the expense of its European partners by assisting
it in surveillance work through a long-standing arrangement. According to the
document, written by the researcher Duncan Campbell, more than 120
satellite-based systems are working simultaneously to collect intelligence.

International telephone calls can be monitored with a speaker recognition
system - effectively a voiceprint - which can recognise the speech of a
targeted individual making a call. However, effective "word-spotting"
systems which are activated when key words are spoken are not available
despite 30 years of research.

The document also argues that a previously unknown international
organisation called "Ilets" has "put in place contentious plans to require
manufacturers and operators of new communications systems to build in
monitoring capacity for use by national-security or law-enforcement
organisations." In addition, it says that industrial or economic espionage
is common because there is "wide-ranging evidence indicating that major
governments are routinely utilising communications intelligence to provide
commercial advantage to companies and trade." The paper is one of a series
which has been commissioned by the European Parliament ahead of a set of
public hearings in Brussels next month, against a backdrop of mounting
concern over the erosion of civil liberties.

An earlier document prepared for MEPs in 1997 gave details of a highly
automated Anglo-American system for processing intelligence known as
Echelon, which collates communications, collected at interception points
around the globe, and sends them for evaluation at spy stations. UK-US
cooperation dates back to 1947 but Echelon's monitoring is now routine and
indiscriminate and is now designed for non-military targets such
governments, businesses and other organisations.

The intelligence services seem so far to have kept pace with the explosion
in the quantity of electronic communications through the internet,
something which was thought at one time to pose a significant challenge to
the agencies. Much of the globe's internet capacity is located in the US or
passes through it and, the document argues, "communications from Europe
to and from Asia, Oceania, Africa or South America normally travel via the United
States".

That means that "a large proportion of international communications on the
internet will by the nature of the system pass through the US and thus be
readily accessible to NSA [National Security Agency]" and can be sifted
relatively easily from their origin and destination. The document points
out, however, that the costs and technical difficulties of surveillance are
growing.

The London Independent,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Update/2000-
01/monitoring280100.shtml

via: isml@onelist.com

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To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Environmental News Service items (1/28/00)
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:57:41 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

CELL TOWERS SNEAK INTO NATIONAL PARK - WITH A SENATOR'S
HELP

By Cat Lazaroff

WASHINGTON, DC, January 28, 2000 (ENS) - After taking an end run
around the opposition, a telecommunications giant erected a 130 foot tall cellular
telephone antenna in Rock Creek National Park in Washington, D.C. last
Saturday. The tower stands as an example of how powerful lobbyists and lawmakers
can push through projects that pose definite hazards to wildlife and wilderness - even
on lands owned by the American public. Copyright Environment News Service
(ENS) 2000 For full text and graphics visit:
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan2000/2000L-01-28-06.html

AUSTRALIA SELLS TONS OF OZONE-DEPLETING HALON TO U.S.
DEFENSE DEPT.

By Andrew Darby

CANBERRA, Australia, January 28, 2000 - Despite calling on the rest of the
world to stop using halon gas, Australia is selling 250 tons of what it
describes as the most aggressive ozone depleting chemical to the U.S.
Defense Department.
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2000
For full text and graphics visit:
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan2000/2000L-01-28-02.html

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To: bpr-list@philologos.org (BPR Mailing List)
Subject: [BPR] - Furor develops over homosexuality in British schools
From: bpr-list@philologos.org(BPR)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:03:00 -0500

From: "Moza" <moza7@netzero.net>

Furor Develops Over Homosexuality In British Schools

LONDON, England (CNS) -- British schools will receive guidelines forbidding
them from promoting homosexuality in the classroom, as part of a
government attempt to quell public discontent over plans to scrap a law that
does the same thing.

Education Department officials said Friday they were drawing up rules
making it clear that pupils are to be taught the "importance and nature of
marriage and family life in bringing up children."

The guidelines would not deliberately promote a particular sexual orientation,
the department said in a statement. They would instead "ensure that
teachers are in a position to offer information and support to all young people
as they develop into adults."

The concession is unlikely to satisfy staunch supporters of the existing law -
Section 28 of the Local Government Act - who will continue their fight inside
and outside parliament against the Blair government's plans to abolish
Section 28.

Introduced by a Conservative government in 1988, Section 28 outlaws the
promotion of homosexuality and "the teaching in any maintained school of
the acceptability of homosexuality as pretended family relationship."

Supporters of Section 28, including most of Britain's religious leaders, say it
has achieved its purpose and should not be tampered with. But opponents in
the political, education and homosexuality advocacy fields call it
discriminatory and say it encourages "homophobic bullying."

Until this week, the debate was mostly confined to Scotland, whose devolved
government planned to repeal Section 28 in advance of a House of Commons
vote covering England and Wales.

But the argument quickly moved to London, where the major political parties
are jockeying for position ahead of a parliamentary vote on the matter, still
two months away.

All Conservative lawmakers are expected to toe the party line on the matter,
said leader William Hague, who last month saw a senior front-bench member
defect to the governing Labor Party over the issue.

With its large majority in the House of Commons, however, Labor is set to
push through its proposal repealing the clause, thus keeping a promise
made during the 1997 election campaign.

But Labor support for scrapping the clause is not universal, as it turns out.
Stuart Bell, a Labor MP whose responsibility covers Church Estates, on
Tuesday publicly called for lawmakers to be allowed a free vote. He said
doing away with the Section 28 "goes against the Christian view that
marriage and family should be at the heart of society."

Bell claimed about 30 of his Labor colleagues felt the same way, although
others did not come forward.

The dissent prompted Blair's official spokesman to announce that a free vote
may be allowed, but that a decision would be made closer to the time.

That apparent reversal triggered a backlash from other Labor MPs, and Blair
finally tried to calm the furor by confirming that party discipline would be
enforced; Labor MPs would be expected to vote with the government.

Blair said Section 28 supporters misunderstood the implications of scrapping
the ban. He insisted the move would not lead to children being taught
homosexuality at school.

"I'm a parent, with kids at school, I'm not going to allow something bad to be
done to them. The reason for [repealing the clause] is that many of the
organisations that deal with children said to us that this law is inhibiting ...
teachers from doing their jobs properly in explaining to children the facts of
life."

If Blair's concession pulls Labor dissenters back into line in the House of
Commons, he still faces a challenge in the House of Lords, where Labor
does not enjoy a majority.

Baroness Young of the Conservative Party has tabled an amendment to
block the proposals in the upper chamber, and plans to display an exhibition
of the type of "unsavory material" she says Section 28 has kept out of
schools.

The baroness last year spearheaded challenges to an attempt by the
government to equalize the age of consent for homosexuals and
heterosexuals at 16. Although the House of Lords held up the Sexual
Offences Amendment Bill, the government is using a rarely-invoked power to
push it through, and it will have its second Commons reading on February
10.

Section 28 is not the only morality-related headache facing the government.
Two senior military officers announced this week they were resigning
because the ban on homosexuals in the military had been lifted.

A commander who led a naval air squadron in Bosnia and a brigadier from
the Joint Helicopter Command resigned independently of each other. Both
said the decision to rescind the ban had been taken for political and legal
reasons, not sound military or moral ones.

Britain lifted the prohibition on January 12, accepting a European Court of
Justice ruling that excluding homosexuals was unlawful.

The Conservatives have promised to review the policy when next in
government, to see whether the armed forces believe it has worked.

 (© 2000, Conservative News Service)

http://www.mcjonline.com/news/00/20000128b.htm

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