Records/Archives in the News r990405b There are 6 stories in this posting. Washington Post 4/4/99 Shots Seen 'Round the World South China Morning Post 4/5/99 Blaze fear for Gandhi documents Contra Costa Times 4/5/99 Amazon.com, Wal-Mart Settle Lawsuit ST. Louis Post-Dispatch 4/5/99 WHEN PRIVACY IS MORE PERILOUS THAN THE LACK OF IT National Post (Canada) 4/5/99 Ottawa withholding legal information in Airbus probe MSNBC.COM 4/5/99 Quorum hospitals subpoenaed nationwide ________________________________________________________________ Washington Post 4/4/99 Shots Seen 'Round the World At Troyer, News Photos of the Horrors of War Make Compelling Art By Paul Richard <SNIP> Time does odd things to objects. It distances, and softens, and sometimes resurrects them. Not so very long ago the hundred hellish photographs in "War's Alarms" were as dead as the old newspapers for which they were made. Pristine they are not. They're crinkled, retouched, tape-scarred things, which once were news, and then were trash, but now are works of art, or close enough, at any rate, to hang on the white walls of the Troyer Gallery in Northwest Washington. They've been retrieved from the morgue. Library is a word too posh for those corners of the newsroom where, after publication, such black-and-whites were stashed. "Morgue" is more suggestive of the squeaking metal file drawers, the brittle yellow clippings, the rising dust, the slow decay, the overflowing mess. Lots of newspapers have died. Who knows how many cartons of images like these--of war in the Pacific, war in Finland and in China and in Russia and Vietnam--have been rudely hauled away and burnt? A handful have been saved. Among the saviors is Jo Tartt Jr. Tartt, 57, is an Episcopal priest. Once he was the rector of Grace Church, Georgetown, but then, about 20 years ago, he felt a call to art collecting. He's now a dealer in photography. He has a clear, forgiving eye. His images aren't pretty. Cruelty is their subject, and fierce interrogation, and sweat-stink, and exhaustion. Many smell of death. He knows that the condition of the news shots he has gathered, most of them anonymous, could not be called "archival." If you turn these old prints over you will find that they are littered with taped-on newsprint captions, dates of publication, picture agency stamp marks ("Wide World Photos," "Acme News," "Public Relations Division U.S. Coast Guard: Please Mention Coast Guard") and grease-pencil notations, some now politically incorrect. Tartt collects them anyway. He seeks them out in auctions, and in rural junk shops. "Whether this is art or not is a question of total unimportance to me," he announces in a flier accompanying his show. "My interest is in the indelible power to be found in a really good photograph, and in the sensation of proximity. . . . Some of these pictures will stick to your bones for a long time." <SNIP> <SNIP> This is not, of course, the first collection of war photographs to be seen in an art gallery. When the best of such exhibits--Frances Fralin's "The Indelible Image: Photographs of War--1846 to the Present"--was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art 15 years ago, the idea was far from new. Both Mathew Brady (1823-1896) and Timothy O'Sullivan (1840-1882) are nowadays regarded as important American artists largely on account of their photographs of the Civil War. Carl Mydans, Lee Miller, Constance Stuart Larrabee, David Douglas Duncan and W. Eugene Smith built similarly strong reputations shooting conflict during World War II. <SNIP> <SNIP> The Troyer Gallery, 1710 Connecticut Ave. NW, is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 12 to 5 p.m. Tartt's photographs are for sale. They cost between $200 and $600 each. "War's Alarms" at Troyer's closes May 1. <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ South China Morning Post 4/5/99 Blaze fear for Gandhi documents ASSOCIATED PRESS in Chandigarh, India <SNIP> A fire that gutted the records room in the High Court of northern India's Punjab and Haryana states may have destroyed papers of the trial of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin. Judge G. S. Singhvi said an inquiry had been ordered into the cause of the fire, which destroyed files of thousands of old cases. He did not rule out sabotage. Last month, the federal Government had indicated it might reopen the Gandhi assassination case after Gopal Godse, the brother of Gandhi's assassin, filed an appeal in the Supreme Court for a fresh investigation. Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist who believed that Gandhi had favoured the minority Muslims during India's partition to create the Muslim majority state of Pakistan. Godse and accomplice N. D. Triapte were hanged in Punjab in November 1949. The men belonged to the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of today's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party Government. Court officials were still not sure if the Gandhi assassination trial documents were lost in the fire, Judge Singhvi said. A night watchman who was missing when the fire started has been suspended. <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ Contra Costa Times 4/5/99 Amazon.com, Wal-Mart Settle Lawsuit <SNIP> NEW YORK (AP) -- Amazon.com and Wal-Mart Stores are settling a lawsuit charging that the online bookseller hired computer system managers away from Wal-Mart to steal the retailer's trade secrets. The suit, filed last fall, had charged that Amazon.com targeted the employees as well as Wal-Mart's software vendors to learn more about the retailer's information systems, which include data on sales, inventory and consumer buying habits. In the settlement announced today, Amazon.com agreed to reassign some of the former Wal-Mart employees to jobs that don't mirror the positions they held at Wal-Mart. Amazon.com also said it would return Wal-Mart information brought by the former employees. An Amazon.com spokesman, Bill Curry, said the information referred to ``old papers'' brought by Richard Dalzell, hired by Amazon.com as chief technology officer. He declined to be more specific. But Wal-Mart spokeswoman Betsy Reithemeyer said ``thousands of Wal-Mart confidential documents'' already had been returned. Amazon.com already returned thousands of documents to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Betsy Reithemeyer said. No damages are to be paid in the settlement, which does not call for Amazon.com to admit any wrongdoing. Amazon.com settled the case to avoid costly and prolonged litigation, Curry said. Amazon.com is free to continue to hire Wal-Mart workers without the threat of litigation for two years, he added. Some analysts say Wal-Mart's database is only second in size to the U.S. government. Besides tracking raw sales, profit margin and inventory data, the system also documents what products consumers tend to buy together. A database that extensive could help Amazon.com know which products and services would be most attractive to different customers, facilitating the online retailer's plant to expand into other areas. Amazon.com, however, maintains it wasn't trying to copy Wal-Mart's strategy. <SNIP> ________________________________________________________________ ST. Louis Post-Dispatch 4/5/99 WHEN PRIVACY IS MORE PERILOUS THAN THE LACK OF IT Apr. 5, 1999 | 7:55 a.m. <SNIP> SAN FRANCISCO -- Hidden in the Microsoft Word document that carried the Melissa virus around the world last week was an innocuous serial number that helped federal agents identify the computer responsible for the program. The incident dramatically illustrated technology's growing power for promoting both good and evil. The serial number itself -- known in computer parlance as a global unique identifier -- lies at the heart of a continuing controversy over tradeoffs between individual privacy rights and the common good. The incident involving the Microsoft numbering system came just weeks after the company's partner, Intel Corp., announced that it was building serial numbers into each copy of its newest microprocessor, the Pentium III. The announcement touched off protests from privacy activists, who argue that such numbering spells the end of anonymity in cyberspace. But computer engineers say that as computer networks become pervasive, similar numbering schemes are necessary for the networks themselves and for the functioning of increasingly sophisticated software systems. In response, privacy rights experts say that society has always found ways to balance its needs with the right to individual privacy. Published telephone numbers, for example, were later offset by the option of unlisted numbers. Today the Web has seen an explosion of ambitious marketing organizations that have used the infrastructure in unforeseen ways to build remarkably invasive profiles of Internet surfers. By combining vast data bases with data-mining software to form something resembling a vast vacuum cleaner, these new automated systems are rapidly tracking as well as predicting human behavior. What advertisers have been doing on a mass scale for decades is now done one on one. ``The No. 1 threat today to privacy is not Big Brother, it's big bucks,'' said Amitai Etzioni, a social scientist at George Washington University, who is the author of the newly published ``Limits of Privacy'' (Basic Books). The invasiveness of such Internet data miners is balanced by the power of the technology to help track criminals, as Richard Smith showed last week by helping to identify the New Jersey man who was arrested and charged with spreading the Melissa virus. In March, Smith, who is president of Phar Lap Software in Cambridge, Mass., publicized the existence of the serial number in Microsoft's Office documents. He raised ethical questions about the company's intention in automatically recording such numbers in its data base. After his announcement, Microsoft immediately said it would stop the practice and erase the numbers -- which it said were being collected in error -- from its data base. Last week the company issued a software utility program enabling computer users to delete the numbers from their documents. Smith, a computer hacker in the constructive sense of the word and an amateur sleuth, was able to compare the document's number with those in other documents posted on the Web. His research paid off quickly when late Thursday state and federal officials arrested David L. Smith, a 30-year-old software programmer who lives in Aberdeen, N.J. Smith was charged with three second-degree offenses, including interference with a public service and conspiracy, together carrying a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and $480,000 in fines. Smith's name had appeared in one of the documents found on a Web site maintained by a virus author who called himself VicodinES. Electronic identity is both useful and increasingly necessary in cyberspace, say technologists. ``I think the psychology surrounding this debate is very interesting,'' said Jim Waldo, a Sun Microsystems software engineer, who helped design an early predecessor to Microsoft's software numbering system. ``People want anonymity, but at the same time they want to track everyone else.'' The technology tradeoffs won't necessarily become simpler as technology becomes more sophisticated. For example, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that the nation's cellular phones be able to provide location information to within 400 feet by 2001. Because most 911 calls are now made from mobile phones, such information is vital for emergency response teams. Privacy activists, however, are concerned that such information will be misused by law enforcement. There is a simple solution, they argue. ``The general approach is to collect the minimum of personally identifiable information possible and to explore new techniques that permit authentication without identification, said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Privacy rights must be balanced against the common good, says Etzioni, who worries about the growing computing powers of Internet marketing companies. ``Their data bases have more information about people than the Stasi secret police ever had about the East Germans,'' he said. At the same time, he says, the dangers of allowing criminals and terrorists access to unbreakable encryption software are particularly high. The answer lies in striking a balance. ``The Internet is becoming a world city,'' he said. ``Everything happens in it from commerce to crime. To leave the role of government out is foolish.'' <SNIP> ______________________________________________________________ National Post (Canada) 4/5/99 Ottawa withholding legal information in Airbus probe Search and seizure law: Canada-Swiss relations and trust in Swiss bank secrecy in jeopardy: expert Philip Mathias <SNIP> The Canadian government has refused to give the Swiss government a key piece of information that could rapidly bring the Airbus affair to a close. The government's foot-dragging could also harm Canada-Swiss relations, and damage trust in Swiss bank secrecy around the world, according to a Swiss banking expert. What's being withheld is that the Canadian government does not have the power to authorize a search warrant in Canada. Only a judge can do that. To help the Airbus investigation, the Swiss have already seized bank documents belonging to Karlheinz Schreiber, a German businessman, and Frank Moores, the former Newfoundland premier. Mr. Moores has allowed his documents to be sent to Canada. Mr. Schreiber has not. Under Swiss law, the Swiss cannot deliver these documents to Canada if the Canadian government doesn't have search-warrant powers. In the courts, Mr. Schreiber is trying to force the Justice Department to tell the Swiss it does not have search and seizure powers. But David Frankel, a lawyer acting for the Justice Department, has told Mr. Schreiber, "I have been instructed to advise that the attorney-general of Canada is not prepared to do so." <SNIP> <SNIP> Swiss-Canada relations could be harmed, he said. "The Swiss do not usually second-guess Canadian requests," Mr. Ritter said. "They take them at face value, because they have always extended goodwill to Canada." If Canada continues to withhold the information, and the Swiss deliver the Schreiber bank documents to Canadian authorities, the Swiss will have broken their own laws, Mr. Ritter said. And that will damage international trust in the whole concept of Swiss banking secrecy, he said. The Swiss won't like that. Mr. Ritter is a member of the Swiss Bankers Association. He works out of Edmonton, but his firm is based in Geneva and connects Canadian clients with Swiss banks. In the Airbus matter, the Schreiber documents are key to the continuing investigation. Without them, the investigation would likely fizzle. The Airbus affair turns on a Sept. 29, 1995, Canadian government letter to the Swiss government containing the false allegation that Mr. Schreiber bribed Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister, through Mr. Moores, to cause Air Canada to buy $1.8-billion of Airbus aircraft in 1988. The letter asked to see the Swiss bank documents of Messrs. Schreiber and Moores. When the controversy broke, Mr. Moores immediately released bank-account information that proves the allegation was false. The Canadian government apologized to Mr. Mulroney. But even though its core allegation has collapsed, the Justice Department has refused to withdraw the letter of request, or even modify it. The issue now turns on an interpretation of what the Swiss can and cannot do in law, and what they have and have not been told. In his lawsuit, Mr. Schreiber's lawyers cited a Swiss Federal Court ruling that it could not grant powers of investigation in Switzerland that a body in France would not have under the same conditions in French law. <SNIP> <SNIP> Under pressure of Mr. Schreiber's lawsuit, a justice official wrote to a Swiss official on Oct. 28, 1988, explaining that Canadian bureaucrats and police don't have search and seizure powers in Canada. He then asked the Swiss official to confirm that "the Swiss Competent Legal Authority has not been misled [by the Canadian Justice Department.]" The Swiss official sent back an ambiguous reply: "The mere possibility to order compulsory measures in executing a foreign request is sufficient," he wrote, "whichever authority is entitled to do so in the requesting state." The National Post has since learned that this Swiss official is a close friend of a Canadian justice official and may be in a conflict of interest, because he helped draft the disputed Canadian letter of request. Jacques Jeansonne, a Montreal-based lawyer, said, "A Canadian official informing a Swiss official does not carry the same authority as the Canadian minister of justice informing the Swiss attorney-general." <SNIP> _________________________________________________________________ MSNBC.COM 4/5/99 Quorum hospitals subpoenaed nationwide Angelica Thornton Associated Press <SNIP> BRISTOL, TN, Apr. 4– Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas to 200 hospitals in what started as a Montana whistleblower’s lawsuit. The Justice Department accuses Quorum Health Group Incorporated of Medicare fraud. The subpoenas were mailed last week to hospitals currently or formerly managed by Quorum Health Group Incorporated or its subsidiary, Quorum Health Resources Incorporated. The subpoenas call for Medicare cost reports and related documents. The investigation started in 1993 when James Alderson, a former employee of a Quorum-managed hospital in Whitefish, filed suit against the company. The Justice Department decided last year to join the suit. The Justice Department charges that from 1985 to 1995, Quorum kept two sets of books as part of its Medicare reimbursement accounting system and over-billed the government by more than $70 million. <SNIP> PETER A.KURILECZ CRM, CA [log in to unmask] A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List! To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>