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... GLOBAL NEWS ... NEWS ASIO'S NEW POWERS THREATEN OUR PRIVACY ARE PHOTOCOPIERS DESIGNED TO KEEP TABS ON US? compared with 17.58 in Holland. But he had included the Dutch "attempted mur- ders" figure when the true figure was 1.8 per 100,000—less than a quarter of the American murder rate. McCaffrey didn't mention the fact that the US heroin addiction rate is about eight times the Dutch rate, thus disproving that cannabis is a "gateway drug" to heroin addiction. When he last visited the Netherlands, his figures on Dutch drug use were publicly corrected in his presence. During that reception, he mentioned (off the record): "Your heroin addicts sure look in good shape." It could be that the Dutch are doing something right, and 60,000 young people aren't being "warehoused" in prisons for marijuana offences—as in the US where prisons have now become America's sec- ond-largest industry. On 4 November 1999, in an unexpected open letter, prominent leaders from the Americas declared the costly US-led drug war an unmitigated failure and urged the anti-drug officials to call a halt to the so- called "war on drugs". The letter to delegates at the Washington anti-drugs conference was signed by politi- cians, jurists, doctors, ar and religious leaders, and stated that the approach of "prohibition enforced by a militarized drug war is fundamentally flawed" and that "It is time to admit that, after two decades, the US war on drugs is a failure". (Source: Intelligence, no. 106, 8 November 1999, pp. I, 8) n 29 November 1999, ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) received approval to hack personal computers and bug online com- munications under the new ASIO Amendment Bill, which is a technology update based on the recommendations of the Walsh Report—a secret review of security arrangements, made by former ASIO Deputy Director Gerard Walsh. The Bill goes even further, by: enabling ASIO to access money-laundering records compiled by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC); allowing the organisation to share data with foreign criminal-intelligence bodies; limiting ASIO's requirement to disclose information to the Minister; and permitting ASIO to charge fees for providing intelli- gence services. (Source: Intelligence, no. 108, 13 December 1999, p. 31) Recently we were forwarded the following item from one J. J. Johnson. We hope to publish updates as they come to hand. Ed. I started off innocently enough. Due an identification problem with my local phone company, I went out to get color copies of both my driver's licence and my social security card. The day was Saturday, November 20, 1999. I went to the local Kinko's Copies. It was a simple request. The supervisor took my ID and made a black and white copy, then handed it to me. "Excuse me," I said. "I asked for color copies.” He responded that he could not do that. "It's illegal," he replied. I asked him to explain his statement and he told me it had to do with people who might engage in counterfeiting. He was not accusing me, since it was obvious the photo on the Nevada driver's licence matched my face. I offered a compromise. "What if you just copied them and ran a red line through them so they could not be copied again?" His response is what makes this story so hot. "Sir, all these machines place invisible codes on the copies. If the Secret Service tracked this back to this store and me, I would be in big trouble." If this last statement raises your eye- brows, you are not alone. It also caught the attention of at least seven other people at Kinko's that morning who were copying USA LOSING THE DRUGS WAR ate last October, retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey, 56, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and better known as the US "drug tsar", arrived in Western Europe to "read the gospel" to the pagans and was met with equally fervent public opposition. McCaffrey was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and is now in charge of a $17.8-billion federal drug control bud- get. He had been an adviser to President Clinton on Latin American internal securi- ty policy. McCaffrey's somewhat categorical state- ments concerning drugs have often been contradicted by US and other international officials. One of his more controversial claims concerns the Netherlands and its liberal drug policies of providing needle exchanges for addicts and sanctioning the sale of cannabis in regulated cannabis cafés. "The murder rate in Holland is dou- ble that in the United States, and the per capita crime rates are much higher than the United States," he said last year. "That's drugs." The Dutch Ambassador to the US responded that McCaffrey's claims had "no basis in fact". The figures quoted by McCaffrey showed that the US had a rate of 8.2 murders per 100,000 population, Wyre q J pas a ee Sy Tf S S a On i. —