Tech Temps, Unite!

[an error occurred while processing this directive] When employers in Washington state stopped paying overtime, temporary Microserf Mike Blain decided to throw off his chains. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

When it rains, it pours. Even as Microsoft's lawyers prepare for their showdown with the Feds in antitrust court, a rabble-rousing group of temporary workers are starting to organize in Bill Gates's own backyard.

"We have to organize," says Mike Blain, a cofounder of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, better known as WashTech. "The industry can get whatever it wants because there's no voice for workers."

Blain, a technical editor pulling down US$30 an hour, says tech temps are treated as second-class citizens and need an organization to lobby for their interests. While most temps are happy to give up stock options and health insurance for flexibility and higher pay, Blain describes temp agencies as "parasitic."

"Bloodsucking," he seethes for emphasis. "They add no value whatsoever."

Blain and more than a dozen other temps – half of them from a pool of about 5,000 on the Redmond campus – founded WashTech after the state's labor department allowed employers to eliminate mandatory overtime pay for high tech workers who make more than $27.63 per hour. "My first reaction was, 'They can't get away with that,'" says Blain. "My second reaction was, 'They just gave us an amazing organizing hook.'"

So far, 900 people have joined the WashTech mailing list. The group is on the hunt for funds, with a long-term goal of establishing a worker-owned cooperative for high tech free agents in the Puget Sound area. WashTech is also setting up meetings with other Microsoft temps, pejoratively known as "A-dashes" – a reference to a temp-status code that prefaces their email addresses. Microsoft doesn't seem too concerned. "We've read about WashTech," says company spokesperson Jim Cullinan. "We don't know much about them."

FUND-RAISING

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| Dial In for Dollars

New technology has come to democracy's oldest profession – political fund-raising. Supporters of Jim Graham, a candidate for the Washington, DC, city council, can contribute to the cause over the Net and the charge will appear on their phone bill. The technology behind the transaction, eCharge, developed by a Seattle start-up of the same name, enables online consumers and contributors to click on an icon and have charges billed automatically to the line used to dial in. Though aimed primarily at retail businesses, eCharge could have widespread political applications, says Barbara Bode, a consultant to Graham. "This," she says, "is populist fund-raising!"

CYBERTERRORISM

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| He Wants You

| Copper Wiring

| Keyword: Obsolete

| Sim Gotham

Ask not what your country can do to defend you, says White House adviser Richard Clarke, but what you can do to defend your country. Clarke, the new national coordinator of security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism, is out to protect the US from cyberterror and biowarfare.

To safeguard the cornerstones of the civilian economy – telephone networks, power grids, airports, water supplies, banks, and other elements of society the president has designated as critical infrastructure – Clarke has been given three years to develop a comprehensive defense plan in collaboration with dozens of agencies. FBI and Secret Service agents will analyze potential attacks alongside Pentagon representatives at the new, US$30 million National Infrastructure Protection Center, housed at FBI Headquarters. Representatives from private-sector telecom, banking, finance, and utilities groups may also be on hand to contribute expertise.

For the rest of us, Clarke will be prescribing new lessons in civil defense. "We were trained to anticipate missile or bomber attacks during the 1950s and 1960s, but the idea that someone might attack the US has seemed unthinkable for 20 years," warns Clarke, a career official from the hazy regions of the State Department where public policy meets national defense. "Such attacks are quite possible now."

ILLEGAL WIRETAPS

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| He Wants You

| Copper Wiring

| Keyword: Obsolete

| Sim Gotham

The Los Angeles Police Department has a secret weapon in the war on crime – illegal wiretapping. According to a lawsuit filed by the LA County Public Defenders Office, the LAPD and the county District Attorney's Office have been covertly wiretapping crime suspects since 1989. If the lawsuit is successful, hundreds of criminal cases could be overturned, and prison gates may swing wide open for some convicts.

In courtroom proceedings, LA police officers have admitted employing court-approved wiretaps to gather dirt on people who were not the subject of a proper wiretap authorization. Investigators would tip off other officers, who purportedly did not know that the information came from wiretaps. These tips often led to arrests, but neither judges nor defense attorneys were ever told that evidence was collected through electronic surveillance.

The LAPD may have violated state and federal laws requiring notice and disclosure of interceptions, while defendants were deprived of the right to challenge the constitutionality of the searches. The DA's office acknowledges that it had failed to notify defendants in at least 58 cases since 1993. Some of those people are serving prison terms as a result of the taps.

LA deputy public defender Kathy Quant, lead counsel in the suit, believes she can prove hundreds of other instances of illegal wiretapping. But, she adds, "the number of convictions that may be overturned is minimal compared to the number of innocent people in California who are entitled to know that police were listening to their phone calls."

[an error occurred while processing this directive] While the experts meet to sort out the domain name mess, a Web-browser upgrade could make any new governance plan irrelevant. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Rallied by the US government's announcement that it will anoint a new nonprofit domain name czar by the end of September, various organizations have stepped forward as candidates for the coronation. Conventional wisdom says this pageant is a watershed – proof of the Net's capacity to govern itself equitably. But with a simple browser upgrade, Netscape and Microsoft are poised to absorb the most valuable part of the current domain name system into privately run directories. If the browser giants succeed, the struggle to fairly distribute and administer names will be moot, and today's domain name jewels will be tomorrow's glass marbles.

To understand how this shift will happen, consider how domain names work. Point your browser to www.ual.com/ and your request is routed through domain name servers that locate the numerical IP address of the computer hosting the United Airlines Web site. Soon, however, you won't have to key some arcane combination of abbreviations, dots, and slashes. Instead, you will type in "United Airlines" and be whisked directly to the site. This convenience will come thanks to Internet Keywords, which Netscape plans to integrate into the Navigator 4.5 browser. By diverting words or phrases in the browser location bar to Netscape's Netcenter for translation, Netcenter will decide which destination most closely matches the word or phrase, then route the browser accordingly.

Netscape plans to link trademarked keywords to the trademark holders' sites. The company is also mining domain name databases to create keyword links to company, product, institutional, or service names. More generic keywords – bicycles, sex, or travel, for example – will be sorted through a manually created database containing the destinations of Netscape's choice. Whenever feasible, company representatives say, these generic keywords will direct traffic toward content partners within the Netcenter portal. But for now, the browser firm insists, it has no plans to sell prime keyword real estate outright to the highest bidder.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is keeping mum about its plans, although limited keyword functionality is already available in Internet Explorer. Mike Nichols, product manager for Windows, won't comment specifically on Microsoft's next-generation browser except to say that it will be "the fastest way for people to get what they want on the Internet and on their PC."

If keyword navigation systems take hold – and building them into browsers gives them a shot at success – technical aspects of Internet addressing will be detached from the economic value of URLs as mnemonic devices. Domain names will still exist, but their value as landmarks will plunge if consumers rarely use them.

Jon Postel, the beneficent wizard of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, who helped create the present system, sees this outcome as a plausible scenario. "When there are powerful directory systems, of which keywords are a simple first step, users won't care about domain names or URLs," he says. "This could make the current controversy over expanding the domain name system look silly in retrospect."

Few will mourn the passing of the old régime. But businesspeople, politicians, and lawyers will want to pay close attention to the private systems now in the wings.

Proprietary keyword systems will confront many of the same problems that have plagued domain names: They won't by themselves settle trademark disputes, nor will they alleviate the scarcity of name space. Keyword databases could become a new source of power, but in return, browser makers will become the focus of debates over resource allocation, dispute resolution, and adherence to intellectual-property laws. That may be a small price to pay for Netscape and Microsoft, who are poised to become the new domain name czars – with no formal coronation required.

URBAN PLANNING

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| He Wants You

| Copper Wiring

| Keyword: Obsolete

| Sim Gotham

Geographic information systems are revolutionizing the way cities plan for the future – marrying data and space to simulate how changes in critical systems affect one another. Build a new housing development, for example, and the system projects the resulting increase in traffic fatalities. New York City is now the largest municipality using GIS, having turned to Cambridge, England-based Smallworld for its platforms. "It has incredible possibilities," says Andrew Eristoff, a young gun on New York's city council and chair of the local Task Force on Technology in Government. Like a real-life SimCity, GIS presents limitless opportunities to plunge into the data. But, Eristoff points out, "running a city of 7.2 million people is not a game."

TECHNOLOGY TRADE

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| Merchants of Menace

According to a new report by the watchdog group Privacy International, several American information-technology companies are peddling surveillance and intelligence equipment to unsavory régimes throughout the world. This multibillion-dollar business is unlikely to slow down anytime soon – Western nations have placed few restrictions on the high tech trade.

IBM Advanced Identification Solutions Automated fingerprint-identification system: Establishes citizen entitlement to vote and access to government services. Police and other authorities can also use the system to identify individuals. Widespread deployment of such systems can create substantial risk for people under scrutiny by the state. In use in Peru; IBM is targeting the system for sale to all developing countries

Raytheon Systems Company Passport and Federal Police Identification System: A comprehensive cross-referencing and matching system used to establish identity. Operates using a nationwide network of 80 identification centers linked to various government agencies and databases. System purchased by Argentina

SWS Security Beeper Buster pager-interception system: Captures, displays, and records all messages sent to any type of digital pager. SWS gear is used for high-level operations against criminals and insurgents. Its technical reliability is particularly useful for long-range, long-term tracking of "persons of interest." Used in South Korea and at least 30 developing nations – Simon Davies

UNITED KINGDOM

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| The Bulldog of Cyberwonks