Business Week's Keith Epstein on 4/11/08 C-SPAN Washington Journal

This is about some of the internet stuff that goes on that probably isn't advancing the cause of well and good on our planet.

E-spionage.

"The New E-spionage Threat," that's the Business Week cover story this week. Mostly it's about an e-mail that arrived at Booz Allen, supposedly about fighter aircraft for India. But that e-mail was probably really from mainland China. It contained a program that does keystroke logging and sends the results to a host in 3322.org, a China domain. And another program that subverts passwords in the recipient's Microsoft Access databases. As the article goes on to expose other anecdotes, the emphasis remains on China. I think maybe China is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider what's going on between US companies doing industrial espionage on each other. Also consider the botnets that at a minimum harvest addresses to use as targets for spam. All those are facts of life on the internet, but then again they present puzzles to be solved, too. I'm sure many in Los Alamos are thinking about those puzzles and solutions.

Links:
C-SPAN
Epstein appearance video
Business Week
Business Week E-spionage article
Business Week podcast (mp3) about the E-spionage story, beginning with the theme from the Dr. No James Bond movie

I noticed as I watched the C-SPAN appearance over the web (I saw it live over satellite, too) that one caller mentioned something he called "the minnow and barksdale" incident. That second time, I thought, "what did he mean by minnow?" Well, I think he meant Minot, which I think is pronounced my-not, not me-know, the North Dakota city and Air Force base. I guess he had read about it, and hadn't heard someone talk about the story. Barksdale is an Air Force base in Arkansas, and the incident was about nuclear weapons in a B-52 that were not the usual empty shells and were armed, unbeknownst to the B-52's crew and I guess a very serious violation of Air Force policies.

There are lots of links in the Business Week article, too, plus reader comments.

Isn't it amazing how well C-SPAN has packaged the video of Epstein's appearance? The Business Week mp3 is pretty amazing, too, compared to what we had pre-internet.