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Feinstein told civil libertarians and an official of America Online "I think you're engaging in the promotion of an ultra-hazardous pursuit. I have a hard time with people using our First Amendment rights to teach others to go out and kill. You really have my dander up," she said. "This is not what this country is about."
That remark drew a sharp response from Jerry Berman, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. "Excuse me, Senator, but that is what this nation is all about."
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and government information, said "a variety of hate groups and militias use the Internet to gain adherents, organize and rally support."
"People who distribute information of this sort are contemptible in their callous disregard for the safety of their fellow citizens. The implications of their actions are frightening," Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Litt said at the Senate hearing prompted by the April 19 Oklahoma City bombing.
Showing how to make an explosive that will be used in an act of violence is illegal -- but it must be proven that the information in question actually incited a specific crime or was intended to. Otherwise, Litt said, the information disseminated over the Internet enjoys the free speech protections provided by the U.S. Constitution.
Litt said passage of an anti-terrorist bill proposed by President Clinton, which is pending and seems sure to be amended by various congressional proposals, would help by providing federal surveillance authority.
Senators were not unanimous in their support of Internet restrictions at the hearing. There is "little to be gained in the way of safety by banning" access to so-called terrorist information "over electronic media," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). "Especially when it's so readily available in paper form... even from the Agriculture Department. Hell, there's probably even an government sponsored 800 number you can call to order the 'Blaster's Handbook,'" referring to a Government-produced document that describes the fuel oil and fertilizer formula used to produce the Oklahoma City bomb.
Earlier in the week Feinstein also decried the Internet as an instrument of domestic terrorism. "[The Internet] is used to spread conspiracy theories across our land. Even a terrorist handbook is run on the Internet on how to build a bomb. I read this handbook, and they tell you how to break into university chemical labs, how to find the chemicals you need, and how to steal those chemicals," said Sen. Feinstein according to remarks entered into the Congressional Record.
The question if actual terrorists have used information on the Internet to build bombs remains open. To date no federal law enforcement agency has prosecuted any criminal act linked to any information now residing on the Internet.
Separately, Sen. Leahy introduced a bill in the Senate earlier this week dubbed the "Child Protection, User Empowerment, and Free Expression in Interactive Media Study Act" where the Congress will call for the Justice Department to study the feasibility of putting the breaks on the Internet. "Heavy-handed efforts by the Government to regulate obscenity on interactive information services will only stifle the free flow of information, discourage the robust development of new information services, and make users avoid using the system," said Leahy when the bill was introduced.
The free Nautilus program is intended to circumvent the Clipper chip and other measures that law enforcement says it needs to catch criminals as more and more communication takes place through digital technology.
"I think the government has gone way over the edge in invading privacy and trying to enforce wartime security on a peacetime population. We're trying to give the general public the idea they can do something about it," said Pat Mullarky, a Bellevue, Wash. hardware engineer and one of Nautilus' developers.
Nautilus can be used by any two people with IBM-type PCs having high-speed modems, Sound Blaster cards and Internet access. The software allows the computers to be used like telephones.
With Nautilus, the participants decide on a secret phrase used to encode their conversation over standard phone lines, making it virtually impossible for anyone without the key to decode it.
The program would thwart the Clipper chip, which the Clinton administration advocates as a standard for computers and telecommunications equipment. The chip encodes communications, making them secure. But the government would have the key to the code to allow court-allowed government surveillance.
Civil libertarians and most of the computer industry oppose the Clipper chip. Many also oppose a bill Congress passed last fall to spend $500 million over three years to install equipment in telephone and cellular networks to permit legal wiretaps.
Spokesmen for the FBI in Washington and San Francisco said Friday they weren't familiar with the Nautilus program and had no immediate comment.
But the bureau has said that measures like Clipper and the telephone bill are necessary for effective law enforcement.
"The FBI had been thwarted in important cases by sophisticated digital technologies already installed on some telephone networks," FBI Director Louis Freeh said when the Senate passed the telephone bill last fall.
"We would have been completely prevented in a very short time from carrying out any court-approved wiretapping" without the bill, Freeh said.
Mullarky developed Nautilus with two software engineers, Paul Rubin of Milpitas, Calif., and Bill Dorsey of Los Altos, Calif. It is now available on the Internet at the URL ftp://ripem.msu.edu/pub/crypt/ and ftp://ftp.cs.org/mpj/. Both of these computers have been set up so that the program cannot be downloaded by people located outside the United States.
There are some programs previously available that provide security for voice or data over standard phone lines and for communications over the Internet, the global mesh of computer networks.
But its developers said they believe Nautilus is the first program available for free that comes with the source code, which lets users know how the program works and confirms its security.
Nautilus' name is a tribute to the submarine of Captain Nemo, the anti-hero of Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," which destroyed Clipper warships, the high technology of the 19th century.
"This sinks Clipper chips," Mullarky said.
Dorsey said Friday he was concerned that criminals could use Nautilus to conceal illegal activities. But he believed that concern was outweighed by the privacy rights of the vast majority of people who don't break the law.
TCI officials say the new cable modem method will give users access to computer data up to 1,000 times faster than traditional telephone modems, and will enhance the quality of audio and video data downloaded from on-line services.
The new company, @Home, is a joint venture between TCI and venture capitalist William Randolph Hearst III, who recently resigned as publisher of the San Francisco Examiner.
A number of cable companies have been experimenting with using existing linkages to provide access to computer networks, but TCI is the first to launch such a venture. TCI is the nation's largest cable operator with 11.7 million subscribers in 49 states, although the new service will eventually be available to all cable-ready homes and business.
"We believe the time is right for a new company to be very successful in developing and deploying services that use the technologies of the Internet and the broadband network capabilities of cable companies," said Hearst, @Home's chief executive officer.
The new service is expected to debut in a few major U.S. cities early next year. TCI's ambitious plans for @Home include building a network of "headends," or local offices, to relay the modem calls into the Internet, America Online, CompuServe and other on-line services including the fledgling Microsoft Network, which TCI owns 20 percent of.
Subscribers will pay a monthly fee, about $20 to $30, for the @Home service and will still have pay for the use of commercial on-line services, but TCI officials claim the faster data transmission rate should result in overall savings.
Eventually, each of the network offices will operate a regional on-line service offering local news, a calendar of community events, telephone directories and other information, Hearst said.
Industry analysts praised TCI's move, saying cable operators need to expand into other areas at a time when regional telephone giants are starting to deliver movies and other home entertainment services.
Observers have sometimes debunked Microsoft's efforts at establishing a new on-line service because of the difficulty in establishing value-added services that are offered exclusively on an on-line service. Other analysts have predicted that Microsoft will run over the Internet because MSN will come installed on millions of new computers that will be purchased after August. On-line service leaders America Online and CompuServe each have less than 2 million subscribers.
Shopping giants such as QVC and the Home Shopping Network will offer their wares using an interface much like the Internet's World Wide Web. C-Span will provide texts of pending federal legislation. Computer publishing giant Ziff-Davis will sell its publications. Other publishers including Books That Work and U.S. News & World Report have also signed up.
In a move to entice more providers Microsoft says they will allow content providers to keep 70 percent of the connect charges paid by consumers when they visit the provider's forums. Other on-line services pay as little as 15 percent of the revenues generated by providers.
The survey, released by Matrix Information and Directory Services, provides a general indication that women have become more comfortable with electronic communication.
The survey, which did not include commercial on-line services, found the ratio of men to women with Internet accounts was 64 percent to 36 percent. MIDS conducted the survey in December.
Until now, many people have judged the Internet as a boy's club.
For businesses that wish to use the Internet for marketing of products, the survey's results are likely to provide encouragement that there is a more diverse audience in cyberspace than previously believed.
"Decisions makers who base their Internet marketing programs on reliable facts rather than on myths like a 9-to-1 gender gap will be successful while others will fail," said Smoot Carl-Mitchell, president of Matrix Information & Directory Services, based in Austin, Texas.
The figures, part of a yearly Internet survey conducted by MIDS, have a 3 percent margin of error, he said. Survey results were based on responses from 1,463 organizations representing over 10 percent of the 13.5 million Internet users.
When the company just looked at the Internet accounts at universities and schools, gender parity was even closer Ñ 59 percent men to 41 percent women.
"But even when we left out the educational institutions, the figures were still 70 percent men to 30 percent women. Which means indeed that there are more men than women on the Internet, but it doesn't mean anything near the 9-to-1 we keep hearing," said John Quarterman, a demographer at MIDS.
The higher-than-expected number of women makes sense, he said, because a large portion of Internet usage remains in academic settings, where the giant computer network has its roots.
MIDS looked at what Quarterman terms the "consumer Internet," which includes universities, businesses and individual Internet domains. It didn't include large commercial networks such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy.
"They're so different that it's impossible to tell what's going on inside them," Quarterman said. "But if I had to guess, I would guess they're not so incredibly by gender skewed either."
Men on the Internet do tend to be more vocal, concedes Quarterman, though there's no measure for how many messages, file transfers and other data exchanges men make compared to women.
Any Internet user can quickly search for legislation related to a given topic, find out who serves on which committees, review legislators' biographies and send them electronic mail.
The Assembly's web address is http://www.assembly.ca.gov/. The Senate's is http://www.sen.ca.gov/.
Murdoch described the new partnership as a grand marriage between MCI's telecommunications prowess and his own company's worldwide media empire, which includes television stations, newspapers, the Delphi on-line system, a movie studio and the Fox TV network.
"Until today, no one has put together the right building blocks -- programming, network intelligence, distribution and merchandising -- to offer new media services on a global scale," said Murdoch, News Corp.'s chairman and chief executive.
So far no telecommunications or media companies have achieved the establishment of a truly viable "convergence" of telecommunications, entertainment and computer-enhanced entertainment. The marriage of the two companies is hoped to help MCI and News Corp. make that beachhead.
Under the new agreement, MCI initially will invest $1 billion in News Corp. MCI has committed itself to investing another $1 billion if News Corp. decides to make additional media acquisitions. If both billion-dollar investments are carried out, MCI would own 13.5 percent of News Corp.
The two companies also said they would form a joint venture to produce and distribute diverse communications offerings that might include pay movies "on demand" to consumers' television sets and high-speed information services to business customers' computers.
"Internet publishing is a natural extension of Apple's traditional strengths in the publishing market," said Jim Groff, vice president and general manager for Apple Business Systems. "With the Apple Internet Server Solution for the World Wide Web, Apple is leveraging those strengths with a rich set of content creation and networking tools."
The Apple Internet Server Solution is designed for individuals or groups, including marketing professionals, customer service organizations, educational institutions and IS managers in large corporations, who are interested in building a presence on the World-Wide Web. It comes with a range of software, including content development tools that allow Web server managers to develop home pages and other pages quickly and easily on the InternetÑwithout having to know UNIX.
Apple's new server comes with WebStar, a World Wide Web server system, from StarNine Technologies, the Netscape browser from Netscape Communications Corp., Apple's own AppleSearch, an information search and retrieval tool and Adobe's Acrobat Pro, which permits server administrators to publish their documents in the exact format in which they were developed (see Cyberspace Today April 7). The server will cost from $6,000 to $12,000.
While Apple may offer an easier to use solution for Internet administrators, it still falls short as a stand-alone solution for small networks connected directly to the Internet. Notably, it does not support the Internet's Domain Name Service (DNS) which translates domain names into Internet addresses. Also, Apple's operating system, MacOS, while it is easier to use, does not support the many advanced multitasking and multiprocessor features of Sun's Solaris or Silicon Graphics IRIX. Apple officials said MacDNS will be available by early summer.
Separately, Apple announced the Personal Internet Solution Bundle as part of it's educational offerings. Available for qualified education institutions the Personal Internet Solution Bundle consists of a Global Village 14.4 modem, a set of informational CD-ROMs, Netscape and QUALCOMM's Eudora Internet e-mail package, three free months of Internet service from Portal Communications and supporting documentation.
The bundle is available to qualified purchasers with a Macintosh LC 580 for $1549 or a Power Macintosh 5200/75 LC for $1899. The bundle is available without hardware for $299.
The color-coded maps, covering the streets and neighborhoods of 82 communities, were created by scientists at ABAG and the U.S. Geological Survey, and were made available by the regional agency both in printed form and electronically on the Internet. The agency's Internet address is: http://www.abag.ca.gov/.
The damage forecasts are based on updated analysis of the destruction resulting from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1984 Morgan Hill quake and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake.
For the new maps, scientists estimated where and how heavy the damage would be if a quake on any of the 10 major faults that lace the region reached its maximum magnitude, including the San Andreas and the northern and southern segments of the East Bay's Hayward fault.
In a joint project, Jeanne Perkins of the Association of Bay Area Governments and John Boatwright of the U.S. Geological Survey developed more than 300 detailed maps, which are available on ABAG's online service, and also prepared a printed report entitled "On Shaky Ground" with 16 color pages of regional maps.
"We hope that people will use these maps to see just what kind of damage their neighborhoods may expect if a large earthquake hits on any of the region's faults Ñ and that they will get prepared by strengthening their homes," Perkins said. "It's foolish to think a house can't slip off its foundation in a quake."
The maps, both printed and electronic, display areas in every city where quake damage could range from "extreme" to "heavy" to "moderate" to so minimal that even a large temblor would do no more than disturb pictures hanging on walls. The ratings are based on estimates of the intensity of ground shaking caused by a quake on any of the region's faults and are measured by what seismologists call the Modified Mercalli scale.