waste & abuse

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 6, 2000 | by Sean Paige

Feds Keeping Up With Dirty Downloaders

Federal employees traveling Al Gore's information superhighway from their government cubicles should be forewarned: From now on, taking detours through the back alleys of the Internet's red-light district could get you pulled over by internal agency cybercops.

Though the federal government thus far has declined to establish rigid rules on the use, or possible misuse, of Internet access via government computers (hoping employees could be trusted to their discretion and common sense in the matter), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is this month breaking with that practice by beginning to monitor employee explorations in cyberspace.

According to published reports, FAA will begin monitoring employees' Internet use by eavesdropping on computer traffic during one randomly selected 24-hour period each week -- which to some federal employees might smack of Big Brother, but which FAA officials say is as much about tracking productivity as it is about bagging porno-pirates.

FAA believed the change was necessary not just to respond to complaints that personnel were downloading smut from the World Wide Web -- which has been a problem elsewhere, including the White House, where some employees were busted downloading porn this summer. Also at NASA, where staff and contractors have been arrested for using government computers to download child porn, and in the U.S. Navy, too, which recently disciplined more than 500 employees at one facility for circulating explicit e-mails. They hope it also will help ensure that employees make the most productive use of their time on computers, as some private-sector companies do. "What we're doing is absolutely consistent with what is going on with the private sector and other agencies," FAA spokesman Les Dorr recently told one publication.

There are a number of programs available from the private sector that will allow federal agencies to monitor Internet use, including tracking of the most prolific users of the Net and the kinds of sites they most often visit. But FAA is the first, as far as waste & abuse knows, to put one to use.

"Understandably, the whole subject of monitoring scares people because it has a punitive flavor to it," agency officials conceded when announcing the shift in policy in an internal agency newsletter. But "one of the major concerns about Internet use is that the system is increasingly getting clogged with personal messages and attachments to messages," said the bulletin, "thereby reducing the capacity and speed of the system for official business."

Ruling Grants Snakes More Wiggle Room

Though they crawl on their bellies, are called "cold-blooded" and have had serious image problems ever since luring innocent Eve to taste forbidden fruit, serpent-Americans finally won a measure of respect last month and retribution for centuries of human oppression, with the assistance of a federal agency and a state appeals court.

First, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW), as waste & abuse predicted, designated more than 406,000 acres in California as critical habitat for the allegedly endangered Alameda whipsnake, potentially holding several major development projects in the San Francisco Bay area hostage to the critter. Then, a New York state court, upholding a ruling by the state's Department of Environmental Quality, demanded that a mining company in Fishkill, N.Y., remove a fence it had constructed to protect employees from a den of timber rattlesnakes living nearby, finding that the barrier inhibited the snakes' movements and migrations.

The California designation, coming in response to a lawsuit brought by the Berkeley-based environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) affects portions of Contra Costa, Alameda, San Joaquin and Santa Clara counties but was one of nine possible designations pending before USFW that could affect industry, development and housing across millions of acres of the state.

Several large construction projects are almost certain to be affected by the designation: the building of 12,500 new homes near Livermore, Calif., and 650 homes and a golf course and country club near Hayward, Calif. The second project reportedly already had won approval from the city, USFW and the state's Department offish and Game but likely will be sued by CBD either to block it or reduce its size.

"If we're serious about protecting endangered species, we have to designate habitat for them," said Jeff Miller, a spokesman for CBD. But developers say they already have made provisions for the snake, including the designation of 1,200 acres of open space as permanent snake habitat and another 180 acres of snake corridors throughout the golf course. "We're very comfortable with the science behind this project," said a spokesman for the project developer.

Meanwhile, in a 4-0 ruling the state appeals court in New York ordered the Sour Mountain Realty Co. to remove a 4-foot, "snakeproof" mesh fence-that it installed about 260 feet from a known nesting place of timber rattlers, which are listed as "threatened" under the state's Endangered Species Act. "The state's interest in protecting its wild animals is a venerable principle that can properly serve as a legitimate basis for the exercise of its police power," the court ruled in the first test ever of New York's endangered-species laws.