newsmakers Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft?

If so, consider yourself right. Thanks to the expertise of sociologist Marc Smith, Microsoft is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, which it has identified as the Internet's undervalued "knowledge management application."

In Microsoft's research and development labs, Smith has spent the past several years slicing and dicing data about messages and message authors in an ambitious effort to help people make sense of the newsgroup manifold--the hordes of know-it-alls, flame warriors, spammers and neophytes who, by Smith's estimate, last year numbered more than 100 million in the Usenet network of e-mail threads, or newsgroups.

Smith's idea is that you can tell a lot about the quality of data by tracking its newsgroup contributors' social habits--a notion that holds promise for sorting through millions of messages, and peril for a online world increasingly skittish about invasions of privacy.

Following the launch of Microsoft's NetScan application for analyzing newsgroups and the people who post to them, Smith spoke to CNET News.com about NetScan, about Microsoft's interest in e-mail lists and about an application under development that would link objects in the real world to an array of online information

theodp writes "Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." Those concerned that it's not a good idea for computers to track their belongings and whereabouts are advised that they may ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses."

TAMPA, Fla. -- Civil-rights advocates celebrated a decision by Tampa police to scrap a highly touted facial-recognition software system that was designed to scan the city's entertainment district for wanted criminals.

But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests.

"It was of no benefit to us, and it served no real purpose," Capt. Bob Guidara said Wednesday, emphasizing the decision to drop the software was based on its ineffectiveness rather than privacy issues.

Tampa became the first city in the United States to install the software in June 2001 to scan faces in Ybor City nightlife district and check them against a database of more than 24,000 felons, sexual predators and runaway children.

Saint Aardvark writes "The city of Tampa has given up on their face-recognition system attached to street surveillance cameras."

Congressional members sympathetic to the Justice Department may once again try to expand the feds' investigative powers. A proposed bill also would link low-level, nonviolent drug dealers with terrorists. Critics say it's Patriot II reborn.

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Congress may consider a bill that not only expands the government's wiretapping and investigative powers but also would link low-level drug dealing to terrorism and ban a traditional form of Middle Eastern banking.

The draft legislation -- titled the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or Victory Act -- includes significant portions of the so-called Patriot Act II, which faced broad opposition from conservatives and liberals alike and embarrassed the Justice Department when it was leaked to the press in February.

The Victory Act also seems to be an attempt to merge the war on terrorism and the war on drugs into a single campaign. It includes a raft of provisions increasing the government's ability to investigate, wiretap, prosecute and incarcerate money launderers, fugitives, "narco-terrorists" and nonviolent drug dealers. The bill also outlaws hawalas, the informal and documentless money transferring systems widely used in the Middle East, India and parts of Asia.

A June 27 draft of the bill, authored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and co-sponsored by four fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, has been circulating in Washington, D.C.

Critics say the bill is an opportunistic attempt to link the fight against drugs to the fight against terrorism by creating a new crime called "narco-terrorism." According to the draft, narco-terrorism is the crime of selling, distributing or manufacturing a controlled substance with the intent of helping a terrorist group.

While this draft legislation's focus differs significantly from the much-criticized Patriot II draft leaked to the press in February, Hatch's bill contains several passages from that draft.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants local governments to track lots of data about the homeless -- including their whereabouts and medical histories. Critics charge the mandate would lead to abuse.

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A mandate which will force local agencies that receive federal funds to register and track homeless people has been called too invasive by privacy and community activists.

In an attempt to grasp the scope of the United States' homeless problem, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is requiring local government and nonprofit organizations receiving grants for homeless programs to keep detailed files on their clientele. Data to be tracked ranges from Social Security numbers to HIV statuses to mental health histories.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on an unusual nationwide tour to drum up support for the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Enacted six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the law permits police to monitor e-mail and Web activity without a judge's approval in some circumstances, to obtain court orders in order to conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices and to browse medical and financial records without showing evidence of a crime.

Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act tour began on Wednesday morning with a speech to police at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and a scheduled speech in Cleveland in the afternoon. On Thursday, he'll speak to police in Des Moines, Iowa, and Detroit.

The U.S. Department of Justice also has created a Web site that is designed to reassure Americans that the law is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks.

On Tuesday, in a kind of warm-up speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Ashcroft stressed that the USA Patriot Act helped federal and local police deal with newer technologies. "For example, where before, investigators were forced to get a different wiretap order every time a suspect changed cell phones, now, investigators can get a single wiretap that applies to the suspect and various phones he uses."

Microsoft alerted PC users to three critical security flaws in Internet Explorer and Windows on Wednesday, as the MSBlast worm and its variants used a previous vulnerability in Windows to spread across the Net for a second week.

The software giant released a cumulative patch for Internet Explorer that fixes several vulnerabilities previously disclosed by the company, and it re-released an advisory for Microsoft's SQL Server software, warning that a flaw in that program actually affects most Windows users.

Users who don't patch their systems could leave the computers open to attack through a fake Web page or an HTML e-mail that contains the specific exploit code, said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for Microsoft's security response center.

"The Internet Explorer bulletin is rated as 'critical' across all platforms except Windows 2003," Toulouse said. A critical rating is the highest grade that Microsoft assigns to its alerts. The flaws were rated 'moderate'--the second-lowest grade--for Windows 2003, the latest version of the operating system.