Could record and music executives who take advantage of the hacking provisions of a proposed U.S. bill face stiff penalties if they travel to countries that outlaw computer break-ins? Possibly.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., has pushed a measure that would allow intellectual property owners to use technical measures to prevent copyright infringement. These measures include spoofing--the seeding of file-swapping networks with false versions of songs--and hacking into sharing systems. The proposal has already come under fire from critics, who fear it would encourage corporate vigilantism. It may also put some entertainment industry folks squarely in the crosshairs of a complex web of inconsistent international and local laws that has already entangled executives, including former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle.

For example, Australia's legal code contains a provision allowing a sentence of up to six months in jail if a person breaks into a computer system without legal authority. On Tuesday, Melbourne's The Age newspaper ran a story saying American executives could be banned from entering the country or face jail time if they employ the bill's hacking provisions.

Political News from Wired News - Fed Lax With Laptops.

The Justice Department has lost track of nearly 800 firearms and 400 laptop computers, more than half of which may have contained national security or sensitive law enforcement information, an internal investigation found.

Some of the weapons were recovered after they were used in armed robberies, the department's inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, said in a report released Monday.

Most of the 775 weapons reported missing belonged to the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Before last year, the FBI had not taken a complete inventory of laptops and weapons in almost a decade, despite an agency policy requiring one every two years, the investigation found. Last year's inventory was prompted when other agencies, including the INS, reported large numbers of missing weapons.

"The FBI showed serious deficiencies in management in keeping track of weapons and laptops," Fine said Monday.

School News from Wired News - College Seeks Security in Thumbs.

While the plan to use thumbprint scanners by the West Des Moines campus of the Des Moines Area Community College might sound like Big Brother to some, students seem unfazed by the idea. Even students at the University of California at Berkeley, with its reputation for protest, shrugged at the thought of logging into a school computer with their thumb.

Of course, it's not happening on their campus.

Problems with students and staff forgetting their passwords and general security concerns prompted officials at the Iowa college to implement computer mice with thumbprint scanners.

New York Times - free registration required Japan in an Uproar as 'Big Brother' Computer File Kicks In.

Japan put into operation a national computerized registry of its citizens today, provoking two un-Japanese responses: civil disobedience and a widespread feeling that privacy should take priority over efficiency.

Yokohama, Japan's second largest city, made the national government's registry voluntary, and half a dozen other cities refused to be included in the computerized system connecting local registries, effectively leaving four million people out of the system.

But a much larger mass of angry public opinion was behind this visible resistance. Critics noted that the government had labored for three years to produce the system on time, but had been unable to produce a privacy law that was to accompany it.

In a survey of 1,948 people conducted two weeks ago by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, 86 percent of respondents said they were concerned about misuse or leakage of information, and 76 percent said the posting of the database should be postponed.

At a "disconnecting ceremony" this morning, Nobuo Hoshino, mayor of Kokubunji, one of the cities that refused to take part, said to television cameras, "Residents are sending us their views by e-mail, fax and various other ways, and almost all of them support us."

Under the system, all citizens, from babies in hospital nurseries to elderly in nursing homes, have been assigned individual 11-digit numbers. For now, the number allows retrieval of only basic information: name, address, sex and birth date.

New York Times - Editorial Op-Ed: free registration required Ending Secret Detentions.

One of the most disturbing elements of the Bush administration's post-Sept.-11 policies has been its detention of hundreds of people whose identities have not been revealed. Judge Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court in Washington was right to declare last week that such secret arrests are "odious to a democratic society," and to order the government to release the names of those it has detained since the terrorist attacks.

The hundreds detained -- the government has never given an exact number -- fall into three categories: those charged with federal crimes, those facing immigration charges and those being held as material witnesses. The government has released the names of almost all the detainees charged with federal crimes, but has refused to identify those in the two other groups.

There are two main flaws in the government's position. First, many of the detainees probably have no connection to terrorism. The government would like the public to think of the detainees as a group as linked to terrorism, but the documents filed in court do not make the case. The affidavits from key officials avoid saying that all, or even a significant number, of those detained are involved with terrorism. Nor has the government explained how it decided to detain the particular people it did.