USA Today - Terror groups hide behind Web encryption

U.S. officials say bin Laden's organization, al-Qaida, uses money from Muslim sympathizers to purchase computers from stores or by mail. Bin Laden's followers download easy-to-use encryption programs from the Web, officials say, and have used the programs to help plan or carry out three of their most recent plots:

• Wadih El Hage, one of the suspects in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, sent encrypted e-mails under various names, including "Norman" and "Abdus Sabbur," to "associates in al Qaida," according to the Oct. 25, 1998, U.S. indictment against him. Hage went on trial Monday in federal court in New York.
• Khalil Deek, an alleged terrorist arrested in Pakistan in 1999, used encrypted computer files to plot bombings in Jordan at the turn of the millennium, U.S. officials say. Authorities found Deek's computer at his Peshawar, Pakistan, home and flew it to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md. Mathematicians, using supercomputers, decoded the files, enabling the FBI to foil the plot.
• Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, used encrypted files to hide details of a plot to destroy 11 U.S. airliners. Philippines officials found the computer in Yousef's Manila apartment in 1995. U.S. officials broke the encryption and foiled the plot. Two of the files, FBI officials say, took more than a year to decrypt.

ICANN Cannot, Say Critics 

In Search of a Global Identity : Just How International Is ICANN?

Germany Denies Microsoft Ban

Advanced Encryption Standard process

On October 2, 2000, NIST announced that Rijndael had been selected as the proposed AES and started the process of making it the official standard by publishing an announcement in the Federal Register on February 28, 2001 for the draft FIPS to solicit comments. On November 26, 2001, NIST announced that AES was approved as FIPS PUB 197.

WIRED - German Hate Law: No Denying It

CNN - Interview: The hacker who'll help steer the Internet

You see ICANN as a very U.S.-centric organization, don't you?

The whole structure is very U.S.-based. The staff is in Marina del Rey [in California], and ICANN is an institution more or less formed around the root server file, and that is still owned by the U.S. government.

What would you like to change?

I think it's very important to have different name spaces where different rules apply. The idea of trademark rules is an idea that belongs to a commercial environment, and the Internet is not such a commercial environment, it's a public space.

Mueller-Maguhn On Internet Governance

minna writes"In a recent article for the major German daily FAZ, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, newly elected ICANN board member for Europe, declares"What lawyers call "intellectual property" is -- as every Latin student knows -- no more than theft from the public domain. And because we, the netizens, now have no intention of letting these thieves destroy the public domain, we had to take a little corrective action; everybody goes their own way and we're all linked to the network. Through the public domain, through the collective unconscious and through Eris, the goddess of conflict, of discord, of argument. ... I intend to keep the public domain free of commercial rules, to guard the free flow of information and to give the bits their own domain. We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. Those are the cultural aspects of my government policy."The English version of his program for ICANN was distributed on the nettime list."

NETTIME - 'Just Do Whatever You Want'

ZDNET - An outsider looks in on Icann

Mueller-Maguhn will take his seat during one of Icann's busiest and most controversial times. Icann is in the middle of choosing registrars for new top-level domains names in the first web expansion since .com was created.

There are about 44 applications so far, which Icann is expected to narrow down by the end of the year. But why just 44? Mueller-Maguhn thinks all users should be able to create their own top-level domains (TLDs). "There is no natural or technical reason to [limit] TLDs. Why shouldn't there be a possibility of smaller business to run their own TLDs," he said. "Icann always says: 'There is a reason, this a very complicated, blah-blah-blah.' But most of the time it sounds like 'We would lose control.'"