Moneyed interests can always make themselves heard, and often in Albany and other capitals, they get their way. But in New York, where top legislators, the governor and administration officials do much of their most important work in virtual secrecy, the system amplifies the private voices of the few who have the lawmakers' ears.

Like every state, New York has rules and agencies governing areas like campaign financing, lobbying and gifts to public officials -- all intended to curb the influence of special interests. But New York's rules are more lax than those in most other states and in the federal government, and the enforcement is lax, as well.

Guardian Unlimited | Netnews | Internet providers say no to Blunkett . Plans to monitor personal emails and web page visits in doubt

The internet industry has refused to sign up to plans to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the records of British web and email users, throwing David Blunkett's post-September 11 data surveillance regime into fresh disarray.

[ ... ]

Mr Lansman said that service providers were "rightly concerned" that retaining communications data beyond normal business practices may be unlawful. A paper produced by law enforcement agencies had failed to address these concerns or make a "compelling case" for data retention.

[ ... ]

Industry representatives and Whitehall officials have been struggling to agree terms of a voluntary code of practice introduced under the anti-terrorism legislation rushed through parliament last No vember in the aftermath of the attacks on the US. The apparent collapse of the negotiations may leave Mr Blunkett facing a choice between using his reserved powers under the legislation to force internet prov-iders to comply or dropping the measure in response to public and political opposition.

The data to be retained includes customers' names and addresses, source and destination of emails and addresses of websites visited, all of which would be available to the authorities without need for a judicial or executive warrant.

Telephone providers are also being asked to retain records of calls made and received as well as mobile phone location data.

Slashdot | UK ISPs Refuse to Monitor Users.

An anonymous reader writes "The internet industry has refused to sign up to plans to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the records of British web and email users, throwing David Blunkett's post-September 11 data surveillance regime into fresh disarray. In the latest of a long line of setbacks for the home secretary's data retention campaign, the Guardian has learned that internet service providers have told the Home Office that they will not voluntarily stockpile the personal records of their customers for long periods so that they can be accessed by police or intelligence officers."

Botan. (formerly OpenCL) is a C++ library of cryptographic primitives.

Botan currently supports the following algorithms:

• Public Key Algorithms: Diffie-Hellman, DSA, ElGamal, Nyberg-Rueppel, Rabin-Williams, RSA
• Block Ciphers: Blowfish, CAST-128, CAST-256, CS-Cipher, DES/DESX/TripleDES, GOST, IDEA, Lion, Luby-Rackoff, MISTY1, RC2, RC5, RC6, Rijndael, SAFER-SK, Serpent, SHARK, Skipjack, Square, TEA, Threeway, Twofish, XTEA
• Stream Ciphers: ARC4, ISAAC, SEAL
• Hash Functions: HAS-160, HAVAL, MD2, MD4, MD5, RIPEMD-128, RIPEMD-160, SHA-160, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, Tiger, Whirlpool
• Checksums: Adler32, CRC24, CRC32
• MACs: ANSI X9.19 MAC, EMAC, HMAC, MD5-MAC
• Block Cipher Modes: CBC, CTS, CFB, OFB, CTR
• PK Signature Encoding: EMSA1, EMSA2, EMSA3, EMSA4
• PK Encryption Encoding: EME1, PKCS#1 v1.5 EME
• RNGs: Randpool, X9.17 RNG

Additionally there are many utility classes and a high-level interface with a filter/pipe style interface. System dependent modules add support for such things as high resolution timers, entropy gathering, and compression.