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Cato Daily Dispatch for June 12, 2003

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Violence Continues in Israel despite Roadmap
Defense Department: Bombing North Korean Reactor Is Still an Option
FTC Asks Congress for Spam Regulation Power

Violence Continues in Israel despite Roadmap

"An Israeli helicopter missile attack on a car in Gaza City on Thursday killed a senior Hamas militant and four other Palestinians, including a toddler," according to Reuters.

"Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed at an emergency cabinet meeting to press ahead with attacks against militants from Hamas, an Islamic group dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the Jerusalem bus blast, pledged to continue its bombings in Israel and warned foreigners to leave the country for their own safety."

In "Roadmap to Nowhere," Cato Vice President Ted Galen Carpenter writes: "The main obstacle to peace is the inability of Israeli and Palestinian moderates to rein in the extremists. At some point, an Israeli government will have to compel the militant settlers on the West Bank to leave. Without that concession, there is no hope of a durable accord with the Palestinians. For their part, the Palestinians must renounce terrorism and treat the tactic of suicide bombing as the anathema it is. Until the members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other extremist organizations become pariahs, the confrontation with Israel will never abate.

"Israelis and Palestinians will end their bloody struggle when, and only when, they conclude that they can gain more from negotiations and compromise than they can from confrontation and violence. At that point, they can achieve peace without a high-profile U.S. role. Until then, no amount of creative diplomacy, prodding, or bribery by the United States will produce a breakthrough."

Defense Department: Bombing North Korean Reactor Is Still an Option

"The United States should be prepared to destroy North Korea's Yongbyon reactor if necessary to keep Pyongyang from trafficking in nuclear weapons, an influential member of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's advisory panel said on Wednesday," as reported by Reuters.

"On Monday, North Korea said it wanted nuclear weapons so it could cut its huge conventional forces and divert funds into an economy foreign analysts say is close to collapse."

In "Options for Dealing with North Korea," Cato Vice President Ted Galen Carpenter argues that military action against North Korea would be "profoundly dangerous."

He writes: "Military coercion could trigger a general war on the Korean peninsula. Indeed, if U.S. and Chinese intelligence sources are correct, North Korea may already possess a small number of nuclear weapons, which would make a U.S. preemptive strike especially risky.

"Washington should consider another approach. It should inform North Korea that, unless it abandons its nuclear program, the United States will encourage South Korea and Japan to make their own decisions about also going nuclear. That prospect might well cause the North to reconsider and keep the region nonnuclear. Even if it does not do so, a nuclear balance of power in northeast Asia might emerge instead of a North Korean nuclear monopoly."

FTC Asks Congress for Spam Regulation Power

"The Federal Trade Commission asked Congress yesterday for broader powers to attack the rapidly growing problem of spam, which new studies show accounts for half of all e-mail traffic," reports The Washington Post. Five FTC witnesses, including Commissioner Orson Swindle, who will be speaking tomorrow at a Cato Hill Briefing, "told House and Senate committees that the FTC needs more authority to track spammers across borders and to do so in secrecy for limited periods so that spammers do not shut down operations before investigations bear fruit."

"The FTC witnesses called on Congress to outlaw tactics frequently used by spammers, such as disguising the origin of junk e-mail, using deceptive subject lines and refusing to honor requests from computer users to stop getting unsolicited e-mail."

In "Spam Ban Not Just Superficial - It's Ominous," Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Cato's director of technology studies writes: "Legal bans on false e-mail return addresses, as well as bans on software capable of hiding such information, have worrisome implications for free speech and anonymity for individuals - and will be ignored by spammers anyway. Well-meaning individuals can use spamware to create the contemporary version of the anonymous flyers that have played such an important role in our history. Individuals should retain the ability to safeguard their anonymity even with (or perhaps especially with) a mass communications tool like e-mail. In an era in which so many people are concerned about online privacy, a law that impedes a technology that can protect such privacy would be curious indeed.

"Smarter approaches to the spam epidemic include better e-mail filtering, such as setting the owner's screen to receive only from recognized and approved e-mail addresses. That's particularly appropriate for children's e-mail accounts. Emerging "handshake" or "challenge and response" systems capable of totally blocking spam show promise: Because the most offensive spam is sent by automatic bulk-mailing programs that aren't capable of receiving a reply, spam no longer appears in the inbox."

Tomorrow, Cato is hosting "Canning Spam: Can We Shift the Cost of Unsolicited E-mail Back to Spammers?" a briefing on Capitol Hill. Crews, Swindle, and Dave Baker, vice president of Earthlink, will discuss the impact and consequences of new legislative spam fixes and highlight private sector alternatives.

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org