Lesbos islanders dispute gay name

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian".

The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.

The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians.

Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.

He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos's inhabitants.

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Convicted 'DC Madam' found dead in Florida

The woman dubbed the DC Madam killed herself yesterday, police said, just weeks after she was convicted of running a prostitution ring that catered to highly placed US government officials.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 52, became a tabloid celebrity in the US after her escort ring led to criminal charges and she threatened to reveal the names of the men who patronised her "erotic fantasy" service.

Police yesterday said Palfrey hanged herself at her mother's home in the town of Tarpon Springs, Florida. Her mother, 76, discovered the body in a shed on the property and remained "very distraught", a police spokesman said. Police said there were a number of suicide notes, but did not disclose the contents.

"Handwritten notes were found on scene that describes the victim's intention to take her life, and foul play does not appear to be involved," said Captain Jeffrey Young in a statement.

A jury in Washington convicted Palfrey of money laundering and racketeering last month. Palfrey's lawyer, who represented Monica Lewinsky during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, argued that she marketed legal fantasies and was unaware that her employees sold sex. She was due for sentencing in July and faced a sentence of around five years.

Palfrey caused a storm in Washington when she claimed to have a client list of more than 10,000, including political officials, chief executive officers and other members of the Washington elite.

At one point, she sought to sell her list of telephone numbers to help pay for her looming legal costs. But a judge blocked her from doing so, and ultimately few big fish were caught in the net. Randall Tobias, an ally of George Bush and senior official in the state department, resigned immediately after he surfaced as a Palfrey client. Another, the conservative Republican senator David Vitter, held on to his career after apologising for the "serious sin" of associating with her.

The salacious chapter of US political history that Palfrey's case opened is likely to close after her death.

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Germany to Allow Video Surveillance of Private Homes

Changes proposed to the law governing Germany's federal criminal police operations would allow investigators to use wire taps and surveillance cameras in homes of innocent citizens to keep tabs on terror suspects.

Under the government proposals, federal police would be permitted to install "hidden technical equipment, that is to say bugs or cameras inside or outside apartments ... if there is a pressing danger for state security," interior ministry spokesman Stefan Paris said at a news conference on Friday, April 18.

 

"I would urgently like to stress that there are very, very strict conditions ... and it is not the case that everywhere in this country secret cameras or listening devices will be installed in living spaces," he said. "It is about terrorist threats that would be averted through preventative measures by the federal police."

 

He added that such methods were already allowed in several German states.

 

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National “DNA warehouse” bill passes

Passing the House of Representatives on a voice vote, S. 1858 has been sent to President Bush for signature. The Newborn Genetic Screening bill was passed by the Senate last December. The bill violates the U.S. Constitution and the Nuremberg Code, writes Twila Brase, president of the Citizen's Council on Health Care (CCHC). "The DNA taken at birth from every citizen is essentially owned by the government, and every citizen becomes a potential subject of government-sponsored genetic research," she states. "It does not require consent and there are no requirements to inform parents about the warehousing of their child's DNA for the purpose of genetic research. Already, in Minnesota, the state health department reports that 42,210 children of the 780,000 whose DNA is housed in the Minnesota 'DNA warehouse' have been subjected to genetic research without their parents' knowledge or consent."

 

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Microsoft Helps Law Enforcement Get Around Encryption

The growing use of encryption software -- like Microsoft's own BitLocker -- by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software, executives at the company said.

Microsoft first released the toolset, called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), to law enforcement last June and it's now being used by about 2,000 agents around the world, said Anthony Fung, senior regional manager for Asia Pacific in Microsoft's Internet Safety and Anti-Counterfeiting group. Microsoft gives the software to agents for free.

While Microsoft can point to wide usage of COFEE, some experts are skeptical about using that type of tool to recover data, and even the developer of the product at Microsoft acknowledges that it's not accepted by some users.

Fung, who initiated the creation of COFEE, spent 12 years as a police officer in Hong Kong, with the final seven dedicated to fighting cybercrime. When he joined Microsoft, he sought to devise a way that agents could do better at finding valuable information on computers used by cyber criminals.

When he was an officer, the protocol for handling computer crime was to remove a computer from the scene of the crime, taking it back to the lab where computer scientists would search it for information. In many regions of the world this is still the standard procedure. "At that time everybody followed that principle, but they knew that once they unplugged the computer, which was the guideline, a lot of potential information was lost," Fung said.

That's because data on an encrypted system is accessible to police so long as the criminal has logged on and the PC remains on. But if police shut the system down, they need to have the criminal's password to get past the encryption software when the computer boots back up. The release of Vista has accelerated the problem because BitLocker, a data encryption feature, comes with Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate versions, Fung said.

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