The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 107

The Beacon Journal Sunday, August 21, 1994, Page 113 Wiretaps should die a technological death fifiVPrnmonf cf'OTlllMrf in tiro? rP hoa rP vi vrvl1 J4-i-w vv.viuuuiv ouuiiuiii III VVaj Ul UOC Ul ilJrti Jill Lira that would stop effectiveness of telephone surveillance which was introduced in the House and Senate the other day after months of negotiations with law enforcement agencies and others. Its aim is to ensure that new technical developments will leave the government's power to wiretap unimpaired It even budgets $500 million to pay for changes in telephone systems so they can be efficiently tapped. (Some of the worst features of earlier versions of the bill have been dropped Berman says. For example, it does not ban tap-proof technology.) For once, the technical tides are in favor of liberty. But our government resists.

It is straining to prevent an infamous practice from dying its natural death. use. Real or perceived opponents of the government, including, for example, the Rev. Martin Luther King were tapped as part of FBI and CIA programs of surveillance and, in many cases, harassment The Watergate affair was triggered, of course, by a White House attempt to install taps at Democratic Party headquarters. Journalists were tapped.

Government officials also tapped one another. Henry Kissinger's tapping of members of his own staff is the most notorious instance. In and around political circles, a climate of low-grade but ubiquitous anxiety that someone might be listening in created what lawyers call a "chilling effect" on free speech. It has never quite lifted. During most of the 20th centu the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "to go around centralized communications media." He adds, "Consider the Internet No one is in control.

You can't go to a central office and say, Stop doing that" Berman hopes to a Jeffersonian blossoming of online freedom. The government's response has been to try to recover lost ground. One of its efforts has been to promote the so-called Clipper Chip, which has built into it a capacity to be tapped by the government This notion of forcing consumers to buy wiretaps with their phones, as a sort of compulsory accessory, has run into stiff resistance and may be defeated Another response has been the so-called "digital telephony" bill, BY JONATHAN SCHELL Honda! Washington: It's rare that evils made possible by technical discovery (for example, instruments of biological warfare) are nullified or mitigated by further technical discovery. And yet this is what promises to occur to one of the most diabolical technical inventions of the 20th century the wiretap if only our government will let it It's no accident that the definitive account of life in a society under total surveillance, Alek-sandr Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, opens with a scene of a man whose fate is being sealed by a wiretap. Innokenty Volodin, a Propaganda's role in Tutsi genocide M71ME MP ra.

WUY JWstf FROM Ml state counselor, goes to a public phone to seek to warn an old friend of impending trouble from the KGB. "The floor was burning beneath Innokenty's feet," Solzhe-nitsyn writes, "and the black receiver on its heavy chain was swimming in his hand" There is a click on the line, cutting off the call, and Innokenty knows that the tappers have been on the line. His doom and his friend's have been announced. The Soviet Union was a state founded on surveillance as an adjunct to terror. Yet in democratic countries, too, tapping made inroads.

Here in the United States, tapping was soon put to political spoke in front of a banner reading "Jobs for America Thanks Mr. President" Not to be outdone, Bill Clinton approved of the move. He then went one better, trumpeting another huge sale, 72 F-15s to Saudi Arabia for $9 billion, almost three weeks before Bush did. Some people expected the new Democratic administration to restrain the arms trade. There was an early hint of that when the Defense Department failed to send a delegation to the 1993 Paris air show, a big international arms bazaar.

William Perry, the secretary of defense, has warned the aerospace industry that arms sales are "a faint hope," and the commerce secretary is working on ideas for converting parts of the arms industry to nonlethal alternatives. A review of the whole arms-transfer business was ordered when Clinton took office. Fine, thought the anti-arms-sales people. Not so. No policy review has appeared Although Pentagon representatives did not go to Paris, the commerce secretary did; and in February, the Defense Department took part in the Singapore air show.

America has kept all its best 70s. Americans opposed have been changed REDNKKS FBCM VDU LEFT RjOBIDA! Cold War thaws but arms ry, technical developments favored the tappers. (The plot of The First Circle revolves around the state's attempt to use scientists in a privileged concentration camp to develop a device that can identify a caller by his speech patterns.) In our day, the computer records generated by new communications services offer rich new targets of opportunity for government investigation and surveillance. In recent years, however, the technical tables may have turned in important areas. One reason is the rise of new methods of encryption that render telephone conversations indecipherable to eavesdroppers.

Another is the sheer proliferation of the devices of communication "the ability of decentralized systems," in the words of Jerry Berman, policy director of sales hot But the soldiers also have qualms. They do not want to fight enemies who have American-made arms or technology, as they did in Iraq, Panama and Somalia; the "boomerang effect." And it is not just exported tanks and aircraft that they fear as the war in ex-Yugoslavia shows, hand-held weapons can be hugely murderous too. Some liberals, disappointed in Clinton, are pushing for restrictions on sales to regimes that oppress their own people. Brown will not comment on a proposed code of conduct for recipients of American weapons, known as McKinney-Hatfield after its congressional co-sponsors. Others are less diplomatic.

Joel Johnson, spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association, asks: "There's something wrong with the whole policy because of a couple of strafing runs over Turkish villages?" The sales can sometimes be foreign-policy headaches. Taiwan's new F-16s so infuriated China that it dropped out of post-Gulf War talks about arms-transfer controls. Some sales can set off regional arms races. And the boom undermines America's credibility when it asks other arms-exporting countries France, Britain, Russia, Germany, China to practice restraint. What if, instead they follow America's example? them up.

Some day that may change. The need for the full force of international law on the current uses of the oceans is immediate and undiminished Third World ideology has receded from 1970s fantasies to 1990s realism. Sixty-one nations have ratified this treaty, which comes into force in November, with or without the United States. Christopher told senators that the United States has negotiated with 50 nations to amend the mining section of the treaty, removing the punitive features and increasing developed nations' clout on the International Seabed Authority. It will be healthy for the world and the United States if Christopher's claims are borne out Pentagon buying fewer weapons, but U.S.

firms now provide 70 of armament needs of foreign nations Schdl is a Sew York Sewsday coiumnisL trate in a given zone." It said RPF soldiers "change their clothing appearance most of the time, trying to be confused with ordinary people who till the soil and go to the market" Hutus were urged to "guard seriously the roadblock," a reference to the checkpoints where Tutsis were selected for slaughter. On June 1, Radio Milles Collines described the rebels as "criminals" responsible for a series of harrowing massacres, a fact it claimed had been "confirmed by international sources." The station said the rebels were "gathering people in a village and killing them with bullets, gathering people in a mosque and killing them with machete, throwing people tied up into the Aka-gera River, killing a (pregnant) woman and taking out the fetus, which is ground and given to the family to eat before they are killed." There has been no credible evidence to support charges of such widespread abuses by the RPF. The impact of such a message on an overwhelmingly peasant population cannot be overstated Take the case of Emmanuel Kamuhanda, an 18-year-old Interahamwe militiaman who has admitted to killing 15 people from his home village. "The government told us that the RPF is Tutsi and if it wins the war all the Hutus will be killed" he says. "As of now, I don't believe this is true." And as he was killing? "At the time, I believed that the government was telling the truth." Even Tutsis whose families were attacked blame the radio broadcasts for exploiting Hutu ignorance.

"The popular masses in Rwanda are poorly educated" says a Tutsi businessman whose wife and children are presumed dead "Every time the powers that be say something, it's an order. They believe someone in political authority. Whatever this person demands, it's as if God was demanding it" Even if that person is calling for genocide? "All the Westerners who come here ask us this question," says Sixbert Musangamfura, a Hutu journalist "They forget the evil of Hitler's propaganda. The propaganda heard here resembles the propaganda made by Joseph Goebbels. People received this propaganda all day long.

It is the propaganda that is at the base of this tragedy." Says Bona venture Ubalijoro, a former Rwandan ambassador to the United States and France: "In America, you understand the effect of propaganda on people. If there was a very influential person with a well-financed propaganda machine saying, "You have to kill all the rich do you think there would not be people who would respond?" Particularly, he added if that influential person also controlled the apparatus of the state, including the police and the army? In early July, the RPF was poised to capture Kigali, and the huge exodus of Hutus into Zaire was beginning. Aid workers there reported that virulent radio broadcasts warned Hutus that the Tutsis were coming to kill them. There had been unconfirmed reports of summarv executions of Hutus by the RPF but no evidence of large-scale killings of civilians since April. Meanwhile, according to Jean-Luc Bodin, the head of Paris-based International Action Against Hunger, the deposed Rwandan government had taken a mobile radio transmitter into Zaire and was "scaring people out of their wits." J1 Berkeley is on an Alicia Patterson Fellowship reporting from Africa.

Rwandan killers blame manipulative broadcasts for inciting the slaughter By Bill Berkeley Hoc Rppulix "I did not believe the Tutsis were coming to kill us," says Alfred Kiruhura, "but when the government radio continued to broadcast that they were coming to take our land were coming to kill the Hutus I began to feel some kind of fear." Kiruhura, 29, is an illiterate peasant who has spent most of his life cultivating sorghum and sweet potatoes on the steep mountain slopes of Kibungu Prefecture in eastern Rwanda. He is now in captivity an admitted member of the Interahamwe, the death squads that have stabbed clubbed and hacked to death up to half a million Rwandans, mostly ethnic Tutsis and opposition Hutus, since the beginning of April. Human-rights groups, the United Nations and even, reluctantly, the U.S. State Department, have described this systematic slaughter as "genocide." Yet no one has explained how thousands of peasants who say they had never killed before could have been lured incited or coerced into participating in mass murder on par with this century's worst massacres. One answer, according to captive killers like Kiruhura and other moderate Hutus who were targeted by death squads but managed to escape, lies in the sinister propaganda broadcast by radio stations affiliated with the now-deposed Rwandan government This was the match that started the fire, they say.

Their actions were motivated not by hatred but by fear fear of their leaders and fear of those they sought to exterminate. The stations "were alwavs telling people that if the RPF (the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front) comes, it will return Rwanda to feudalism, that it would bring oppression," Kiruhura says. "We didn't know the RPF. We believed what the government told us." Long before the still-unexplained April 6 plane crash of President Juvenal Habyarimana, Radio Rwanda and a station owned by members of Habyari-mana's inner circle. Radio Milles Collines, had been terrorizing the Hutus with warnings about the evil Tutsi-led RPF and Hutu members of the opposition, who were labeled "enemies" or "traitors" and who "deserved to die." Endless speeches, songs and slogans demonized the Tutsis.

On March 31, for example, according to transcripts compiled by the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda. Radio Rwanda attributed to the RPF an ideology of "ethnic purification," which the Habyarimana regime itself was preparing to carry out The station reported that the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic an avowedly racist offshoot of Habyarimana's National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development, was "pacifist and realistic because it recognizes the ethnic problem which has been eating away at our country for centuries." The CDR "denounced the ideology of ethnic purification preached by many extremist RPF members," and "urged the RPF to renounce once and for all its ideology of power struggle based on vengeance and revenge." Throughout the terror, Radio Rwanda and Radio Milles Collines have systematically blurred the distinction between rebel soldiers and Tutsi civilians. On May 23, for example. Radio Rwanda warned its listeners of what it called the "means and dues that the Inyenzi ue to infil arms customers: Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, South Korea, Greece and Turkey.

The administration remains keen on jobs, even in arms-making. Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, did not entirely misspeak when she told the Senate that the B-2 bomber "can deliver a large payroll." A vigorous lobby lauds the benefits of such sales. American embassies help with overseas deals. Commerce Department officials talk of Brown's "cooperative partnership" with the arms industry, Brown himself intervened to push a sale of eight attack jets to Malaysia. According to McDonnell Douglas, a big maker of military aircraft the Saudi sale kept the F-15 production line open for three years, saving 11,000 jobs.

The point is not lost on Congress. Nor on the armed forces. Once production lines are shut down, it is expensive to start them up again, if America needs new arms of its own. Tanks, Apache helicopters, Patriot missiles and many types of fighter aircraft are among the weapons whose lines are kept open by foreign sales, according to the Aerospace Industries Association. The military men also like "interoperability" fighting easily alongside allies armed with the same makes of weapons.

Reprinted from the Economist magazine of London. Washington: "You can't allow your whole defense industry to evaporate," says Ron Brown, the secretary of commerce. No fear. The Defense Department may be buying far less military equipment than it did during the Cold War, the 1994 allocation of $44 billion was about half the 1988 figure, after allowing for inflation. But in the fiscal year ending last October, the United States closed deals for the sale of $32 billion worth of arms abroad: more than twice the 1992 total, and an all-time high.

This comes at a time when worldwide arms transfers are falling fast Russia's share of deals in a shrinking market has dropped from 32 percent in 1989 to 9 percent in 1993. But the American share has climbed spectacularly since the end of the Cold War: 21 percent of the market in 1989, 70 percent last year. The American arms boom started in the 1992 presidential campaign. At a General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, Texas, George Bush announced a $6 billion sale of 150 F-16 fighter aircraft to Taiwan. Lest the point be missed, Bush U.S.

signing of sea treaty good news through international straits, vital to the interest of the U.S. Navy. The sticking point was commercial exploitation of the deep sea bed beyond the economic zone. With Third World ideology and Socialist premises ascendant the original draft penalized companies and sought to transfer wealth and technology to the poorest countries. The treaty provided for a panel to accomplish these aims.

Everyone agreed the oceans are the "common heritage of mankind" to be shared equitably. They disagreed on what that meant The trouble is that riches in the deep are, so far, pie in the sky. World prices of the minerals abundant on the deep sea floor have not economically justified scooping Most of pact ironed out in some points that supposedly The following editorial was published recently by the Baltimore Sun: This country's decision to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty is welcome. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, explaining the move, said that objectionable features had been amended out after a year of negotiating. (President Reagan had refused to sign because of these unpalatable features in 1982.) This assertion deserves tough Senate scrutiny, which Republicans and conservatives ensure it will get before ratification.

The world needs a modern law of the sea regime. U.S. interest requires the right of navigation through international straits and world agreement on territorial waters and exclusive economic zones and on commercial exploitation. Most of the treaty provisions, argued out through the 1970s, address these needs, serve the U.S. national interest and have come into general acceptance.

These include the 12-mile territorial waters; the 200-mile economic zone, a band 188 miles beyond territorial waters in which the adjoining nation governs fishery, oil and other sexploitation; the right of passage.