Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei told visiting Iraqi President Jalal Talabani that US-led forces had to leave Iraq if security was to be restored in the violence-riven country.

“The first step to solve the security issue in Iraq is the exit of the occupiers from this country and leaving the security issues to the people-based Iraqi government,” Khamenei was quoted as saying by state television.

“Americans will absolutely not succeed in Iraq and the continuation of Iraq’s occupation is not a mouthful that Americans can swallow,” Khamenei said Tuesday during a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

“The main reason for the current situation in Iraq is the US policies that are being carried out by some intermediaries,” the Iranian leader said.

He put the blame for Iraq’s insecurity on “some US agents in the region who are mediators of these policies”.

“Reinforcing terrorist groups and inflaming the wave of insecurity and killings in Iraq will be very dangerous for the US agents and the region,” Khamenei said.

He also pledged that the Islamic republic would come to Iraq’s assistance if requested.

“If the Iraqi government asks, Iran will not refrain from any action to establish stability and security in this country.”

“Americans will absolutely not succeed in Iraq and the continuation of Iraq’s occupation is not a mouthful that Americans can swallow,” Khamenei told him.

Talabani, paying a three-day official visit to the Shiite-dominated neighbouring country, has acknowledged he came to seek Tehran’s help in curbing bloodshed which is increasingly being perceived as civil war.

During his trip to Tehran, Talabani also received fresh vows of assistance from his counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stem the violence in war-torn Iraq.

Washington and London, whose forces are battling insurgents in Iraq, accuse Tehran of fomenting the sectarian conflict.

Iran has strongly denied meddling in Iraq, insisting repeatedly that the Iraqi conflict will be resolved if the occupation forces pull out of Iraq.

At a meeting with Talabani on Monday, Ahmadinejad promised to do all his country could. “We will help our Iraqi brothers with all that we can to implement and reinforce security in Iraq,” the Iranian president said.

Talabani told reporters as he arrived in Tehran: “We need Iran’s comprehensive help to fight terrorism, restore security and stabilize Iraq.”

The Iraqi president, whose Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has in the past been backed by Iran, made a landmark visit to Tehran in November 2005. He said at the time he had won Iran’s promise of support for his government’s battle with insurgents.

His latest plea for help came as a fresh outbreak of violence left dozens dead across Iraq. The bodies of at least 40 people bearing torture marks were recovered after being dumped in various parts of the capital.

The Iran visit coincides with a flurry of diplomatic activity to try to resolve the worsening situation in Iraq, with US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki set to meet Wednesday in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Washington’s staunch ally Britain on Monday condemned what it called Iran’s behaviour in inciting violence in Iraq.

British Defence Secretary Des Browne warned the Islamic republic against seeing Iraq as a “tool in a wider confrontation” — a reference to US-led efforts to force Tehran to curb its nuclear plans which the West suspects hide ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Tehran insists its atomic plans are only for civilian use.

Who says battery-powered airplanes have to be outdoor toys?

Not aeronautics professor Jonathan How of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , who along with a team of students this fall has turned an MIT lab into a first-of-its-kind US test bed for “unmanned aerial vehicles” that, with the help of computers, fly themselves.

It’s undeniably fun, How admits, to get away with flying a model helicopter inside. But his team’s work, sponsored by aircraft giant Boeing Co.’s Phantom Works research unit, could one day help revolutionize one of the fastest-growing sectors of the aviation industry, remote-controlled flying devices that are increasingly being used for everything from warfare and border surveillance to battling forest fires and doing seismic testing for oil deposits.

Teal Group , an aerospace and defense market-analysis firm in Fairfax, Va., recently projected that worldwide spending on unmanned aerial vehicles and related systems will represent a $55 billion worldwide market over the next 10 years. Annual spending on flying drone systems could triple, to $8.3 billion in 2016 from $2.7 billion now.

The new MIT indoor flying lab is helping to simplify one of the biggest challenges to wider deployment of unmanned vehicles: developing the very complex, perfectly reliable software and telecommunications systems to manage a fleet of flying devices and keep them from crashing into each other.

“Ultimately, when you are taking these devices out into real-world applications, you want people to perform a task like surveillance of the border. You don’t want them spending a lot of time figuring out how to fly the vehicle,” How said.

To test and debug a multiple-vehicle flying system outdoors normally requires four people monitoring every vehicle, How said, or potentially over three dozen people to run a test of 10 flying drones. “That is logistically hard, and very costly,” he said.

With the MIT system, not only can one person handle several flying devices at once, “You can have a student essentially operate this from their bedroom,” through a high-speed Internet connection.

How’s air force consists of a half-dozen four-rotor helicopters, each about the size of a chicken and costing around $700. Their actual moment-to-moment flying is controlled by a network of computers.

So far, researchers have been able to complete tasks like landing a mini-chopper on a motorized toy truck, a good simulation of landing a drone on a Humvee in the desert or a battleship at sea.

Their next milestone is to keep a fleet flying for seven straight days, which requires helicopters flying back to a landing pad to recharge their batteries. Several graduate students in electrical engineering and aeronautics, including Brett Bethke, Daniel Dale, and Mario Valenti, handle much of the nuts-and-bolts work of keeping the fleet flying.

To create the equivalent of an indoor satellite positioning system, How’s lab uses the same motion-monitoring systems from Vicon , a British technology company, that Hollywood studios have used for animated films. For a cartoon movie, the systems track an actual moving human to generate realistic-looking animated character movement. At MIT, they perform toy-helicopter air traffic control by tracking their position to within one-tenth of a millimeter in any direction.

The work directly addresses some of the major obstacles to wider use of unmanned aerial vehicles, said John Vian , a technical fellow with Boeing Phantom Works. “Enabling complex and coupled systems to operate reliably is really the biggest challenge we’re facing,” he said. “We need smart systems, and Jon How and the folks at MIT have the capability to make them work.”

Boeing currently has “a stretch goal,” Vian said, of coming up with a system that can enable one operator to control 100 vehicles. That will mean solving all kinds of nitty-gritty problems involving computer software, mathematics, motion monitoring, and communications, Vian said.

But for How and his fellow researchers, Vian added, it won’t be entirely boring.

“You can see from what’s going on in the lab,” Vian said, “that it’s just a blast.”

“And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.”

- from ‘My Brother Leopold’ by Edgar Pangborn (1973)

60th United Nations General Assembly Legal Committee failed again on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 to progress on The Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Convention and Definition of Terrorism that would be binding on all countries.

60th United Nations General Assembly Legal Committee did issue condemnation of terrorism.
60th United Nations General Assembly Legal Committee failed due to the differences between Western Countries and Organization of the Islamic Conference. Organization of the Islamic Conference insist on language that would exempt armed resistance groups involved in “struggles against colonial domination and foreign occupation.” Organization of the Islamic Conference also insist on The Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Convention and Definition of Terrorism cover activities of regular armed forces. Activities of regular armed forces are covered by humanitarian conventions and law of war conventions, thus fall outside terrorism conventions.

Even so, absence of terrorism definition hinders efforts to coordinate an international response to terrorism. Without a common definition countries remain free to interpret their own obligations and define for themselves which groups are terrorists and which groups are freedom fighters.

Saudi Arabia uses this absence of terrorism definition to provide funds to Hamas.

Iran and Syria uses this absence of terrorism definition to provide funds and to provide support to Hezbollah.

With Somalia largely in the hands of fundamentalist Islamist groups, the Democratic Republic of Congo reeling in the efforts to hold free and fair elections, the Darfur crisis and its spillover to other countries, and reports of increased activity of both al Qaeda-affiliated Salafist groups and Iranian/Hezbollah affiliated Shi’ite groups, the United States can no longer afford to leave the vast African continent on the bottom rung of international priorities.

After several years of internal debate, the Pentagon is finally recognizing this reality and is moving to fast-track the creation of an “Africa Command,” on par with the Southern Command (South America), European Command etc.

As an unfortunate relic of the Cold War, Africa is currently divided among three different commands: European, Central and, for the islands off the east coast, the Pacific Command. This means no single unit has responsibility, accumulates historic knowledge or expertise, or looks at the entire package of inter-related issues, from terrorism to organized criminal structures to HIV/AIDs.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), one of Congress’ most knowledgeable Africa hands and prime mover of the restructuring, outlined the difficulties this approach has brought in a Nov. 14 op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor:

“The core function of a combatant command is to plan for military contingencies in the region. Yet Central Command has its hands full fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-and watching Iran. While the European Command has been increasing its Africa activities, its key focus has followed the eastward expansion of NATO. The Pacific Command, meanwhile, is headquartered more than 10,000 miles from Madagascar. These commands are challenged to closely monitor Africa’s troubled states and vast ungoverned areas.”

The Pentagon is now in the final phase of preparing different options for how the command would operate-as a full-fledged regional command or as a sub-command.

I think, given the vast and complex nature of the multiple Africa conflicts, the looming challenge of competing with the Chinese over commerce and natural resources, a command is fully warranted.

In addition to the terrorism issues that are scattered throughout the continent, having a unified command would allow a closer relationship with the armies we are trying to deal with, and a chance to gain more than a smattering of knowledge on each of the major issues and countries. And, as Royce wrote: “Why concede Africa to Beijing, which undermines democracy, human rights and transparency?”

A recent Nixon Center conference on Terrorism in Africa, in which I particpated, laid out some of the dangers now facing Africa: growing al Qaeda networks in eastern and southern Africa; Iran’s growing influence; the destabilization forces in the northeast presented by the United Islamic Courts, with the growing threat of wars across Ethiopia, and the increasing reliance of the United States on energy from the continent.

All of these factors, to me, argue for a strong command that can dedicate itself to the continent that will be on our worry list for the next decade and beyond.

Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.

Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making exemptions difficult to justify.

“I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts,” said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Frankly I’m surprised and pleased they were granted.”

But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod and other portable players.

The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.

In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren’t able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones’ underlying programs.

Providers of prepaid phone services, in particular, have been trying to stop entrepreneurs from buying subsidized handsets to resell at a profit. But even customers of regular plans generally can’t bring their phones to another carrier, even after their contracts run out.

Billington noted that at least one company has filed lawsuits claiming that breaking the software locks violates copyright law, which makes it illegal for people to circumvent copy-protection technologies without an exemption from the Copyright Office. He said the locks appeared in place not to protect the developer of the cell phone software but for third-party interests.

Officials with the industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association did not return phone calls for comment Wednesday.

The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.

The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes — for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under “fair use” provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.

Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.

“The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors,” Billington wrote.

Billington also authorized the breaking of locks on electronic books so that blind people can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

He granted two exemptions dealing with computer obsolescence. For computer software and video games that require machines no longer available, copy-protection controls may be circumvented for archival purposes. Locks on computer programs also may be broken if they require dongles — small computer attachments — that are damaged and can’t be replaced.

The final exemption lets researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities. Researchers had cited Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s use of copy-protection systems that installed themselves on personal computers to limit copying. In doing so, critics say, Sony BMG exposed the computers to hacking, and the company has acknowledged problems with one of the technologies used on some 5.7 million CDs.

In fact, the timing and the murder of anti Syrian Christian Minister Pierre Gemayel should not be any surprise. Indeed for months now, anti Syrian Lebanese personalities have been under heavy physical threat. Some of them have been even shuttling between Paris and Beirut to lessen the odds of them being killed. Even French President Chirac has been pointing out about the imminent dangers and offered in some cases protection for top leaders. Also recently a list has been circulated with the names of the potential victims of Syrian terror. The most prominent politicians including Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblatt, Fuad Siniora, Samir Gegea are rounding the top spots on the list.

While there’s no doubt that Syria is all over this latest murder as it was in the 2005 targeted assassinations of anti Syrian activists, intellectuals and journalists, the operatives might turn out to be pro Syrian Lebanese, including potentially Hezbollah members. Indeed it’s no coincidence that Hezbollah left the Siniora government ten days ago and is preparing massive street demonstrations for Thursday; Jumblatt actually thinks it’s going to be part of a coup. Also since the Siniora government just approved the installation of an international tribunal to find out the truth about the murder of Rafik Hariri which will likely prove Syria’s central role, Syria wanted to send a clear and loud message. Today’s murder of Pierre Gemayel and also today’s attempt on the life of anti Syrian Minister Michel Pharaon are the signs of Syria’s strategy of escalation to plunging the country in chaos and if possible into a civil war.

Two years ago, Syrian President Bashir Assad warned that if his army was to leave Lebanon it will burn and destroy the country beyond recognition. Since Syria supposedly left Lebanon in 2005 (they really did not Syrian troops joined the Lebanese army and Syrian secret service is still infiltrated in top positions), it had one goal: come back.

Using its proxy Hizbullah is one of the ways for Syria to reach that goal.

What remains still the most striking is that very recently, US, French and British top leaders have warned very clearly Syria not to meddle into Lebanese affairs even stating that Syria was the biggest destabilizing factor. If the West and these countries in particular are serious about protecting Lebanon and facing heads on Syria, it’s high time they act now because Syria for the moment could not care less about the West’s warnings.

It is difficult to read a serious news analysis of American options in Iraq without running into the idea that Washington must open a dialogue with Syria and Iran. This means that Iran and Syria have won the first round of their political boxing match with the United States, and that we are likely to witness a spike in regional tensions as round two of this contest for control of the Middle East sees the antagonists probing all angles of their opponent’s potential weak spots.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton is expected to include in its recommendations to President George W. Bush the opening of a dialogue with Syria and Iran, seeking their cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and allowing the US to withdraw. The study group, sensibly, has already met with Syrian and Iranian diplomats in the US and at the United Nations.

Yet the concept of engaging Syria and Iran, as it is thrown around in the US, smacks of a troubling combination of romanticism, desperation and neo-colonialism. Syria and Iran have a combined total of around 10,000 years of cumulative experience in dealing with foreign armies that come into the area with an eye to reconfiguring the region and dominating the world. They know how to deal with such phenomena, including by letting foreigners get hopelessly stuck in the local quicksand, spinning them around a few times to increase their confusion, and then negotiating a deal that gets them out, makes you look good, and reverts local hegemony to the local powers.

The US has used significant diplomatic and economic pressures, and not-so-veiled military threats, in the past three years to force changes in the policies of Damascus and Tehran, without major success. So now it seems prepared to try a more rational approach. Syria and Iran are perfectly willing to be engaged by the US. They have a list of issues they would like to include in the discussions, starting with an American commitment to drop regime change as a sword Washington hangs over their head.

Yet Syria and Iran are unlikely to behave like Libya – by caving in to the pressure and unilaterally giving the US what it wants. In recent years they have done exactly the opposite, by defying the US and the world. Both countries feel they are in strong positions for the moment, and will become even stronger as they are courted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They will demand a high price for cooperating with the US and helping it leave Iraq.

As part of the negotiating process, they will pressure the US by pursuing policies that further weaken Washington’s already frayed position throughout the Middle East. Syria and Iran can do this through their control of their long borders with Iraq, their ties with groups inside Iraq, their close working relations with Hamas and Hizbullah, and their capacity for mischief and political violence in Lebanon and throughout the region.

Many Lebanese, in particular, are concerned that Syria and Iran will both demand greater control of Lebanese affairs in return for cooperating on Iraq. This battle is already under way in the streets and political corridors of Beirut.

Damascus and Tehran also know that preemptive cooperation is usually more effective than preemptive regime change as a foreign policy instrument, which is why Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem was in Iraq earlier this week for discussions on reopening diplomatic ties with Baghdad. A Syrian-Iraqi-Iranian summit of presidents may happen soon.

Washington is in the awkward position of seeking a dialogue and political cooperation with two countries that it has either mainly ignored or actively sanctioned and threatened in recent years. It has diligently disregarded their advice on addressing the Palestine-Israel issue and Israeli occupation of Arab lands as the essential starting point for any revised and more constructive American engagement in the region. So now Washington expects them both to stand at attention and offer cordial assistance, only because the US cannot figure out how to get out of the mess it created for itself and for Iraq? Neo-colonialism comes in many forms, and this is only the latest and most acute.

The US is prepared to make reasonable deals – as most superpowers desperate for redemptive exit strategies from foreign military adventures usually are. The problem for Washington is that its recent pressures against Iran and Syria have expanded into international processes. A UN investigation into the assassination of the late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri may blame Syrians for the dirty deed, and Iran is being hauled in front of the Security Council to be sanctioned for its ongoing nuclear industry developments.

Neither of these endeavors can be turned on and off at Washington’s will, nor should they be. Yet they will be high on the Syrian and Iranian lists of issues to discuss with Washington. Expanding roles for Syria and Iran in the region may be the price the US and the world have to pay for restoring stability in Iraq, which understandably frightens many in the region.

It is important that in its hurry to find an exit strategy for itself from Iraq, a chastened Washington does not simply embrace new forms of neo-colonial behavior and plunge the Middle East into ever more volatile forms of instability or revised configurations of local security states that it warmly embraces.

A democratic, free, stable Middle East remains a good idea, but the lessons of the day would seem to be that it will not be achieved by either American militarism or indigenous autocracy.

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has just released a study of jihadi literature, analyzing who the most influential thinkers in the movement are, based on a year of mining the most influential texts and web writings. The New York Times did a piece on it, but it deserves much broader attention.

The study is a valuable addition, because it includes a summary of many of the most influential jihadi texts, biographies of many of the author, and thinking about the way forward in combatting the theological and theoretical basis for the struggle. It is available online here.

As I have said repeatedly, it is vitally important to read what the enemy says about itself, and what the rationale is for their actions. Far too often I have been in meetings where the architects of the jihad struggle is dismissed as stupid, unsophisticated, and totally unknowable. This study helps make them knowable, and that is the only way to begin to develop a more comprehensive long-term strategy that might actually have some impact.

Within their belief system, what they do is both rational and to a degree predictable. Knowing what drives them-particularly their unshakable belief that there is only one truth and anyone who deviates from that is the enemy-is also a great opening for exploiting the schism that inevitably arise. This was true between bin Laden and Azzam, and is likely true among different current groups.

The Executive Summary offers, I think, one nugget that should give pause to both Democrats who embrace the Islamist groups like CAIR in the mistaken belief this is a replay of the civil rights struggle, as well as Republican who continually meet-and allow law enforcement and intelligence officials to meet-with these Islamist groups as part of their “outreach.”

“Finally, a word about “moderate” Muslims. The measure of moderation depends on what type of standard you use. If by “moderate” one means the renouncement of violence in the
achievement of political goals, then the majority of Salafis are moderate.

“But if by “moderate” one means an acceptance of secularism, capitalism, democracy, gender equality, and a commitment to religious pluralism, then Salafis would be extremists on all counts. Then again, there are not many Muslim religious leaders in the Middle East that would qualify as moderates according to the second definition.”

I am not sure the first statement is true-that most Salafis renounce violence. But I am quite sure the second statement is absolutely true, and a lesson that badly needs to be learned and understood.

Testimony in the trial of Chicago resident Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar of Northern Virginia, continued yesterday. FBI Agents gave testimony focusing on items found in Ashqar’s home during a search of his Oxford Mississippi residence on December 26, 1993, in addition to wiretaps of his phone and fax lines.

Special Agent Bradley Benabidez testified that the FBI acquired over 2400 hours of audio during the year that they maintained a wiretap. Benabidez further described the December 1993 search of Ashqar’s home where a team of agents from the FBI photographed over 1600 documents.

A few of those documents which were discussed later in the day provide fascinating insight. One titled Policies and Rules of the Association, was a veritable manual on secrecy and concealment. Although the “Association” in question was not identified the phrases written within it, were clear. Instructions were given concerning the destruction of sensitive documents, using a cover for meetings including warning symbols to be implemented during meetings in case an attendee believes he is under surveillance. Attendees at a meeting are also to apply jamming devices during those meetings and unplug phone and fax lines. Concerning “Safety of Travel and Movement,” a cover story must be developed in advance and materials provided to match that cover story, for instance, if one is pretending to be a tourist then tourist books should be in the person’s possession.

Another document, titled Hamas Genesis and Commencement, dated 25 July 1991 was distributed by the political wing of Hamas. In this document Hamas described itself as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood that “jumped from training and preparation in Palestine to the Jihad phase.” Under the subcategory “Structure of the Hamas Movement,” the leadership of the movement was described as being divided into offices that were located in 30 Arab, Islamic, and European states. According to the document, the Afghan Jihad created an opportunity to train Hamas mujahideen and provide them with operational experience in battle and that Afghan mujahideen who engaged in battle serve as human resources.

Telephone calls between Ashqar and al-Rantisi

The government played and read for the jury several phone calls between Defendant al-Ashqar and high level Hamas leaders including Abd al Aziz Rantisi, a co-founder and leader of Hamas. One shocking phone call between the two men occurred on the day of a Hamas attack on October 24, 1993. In this phone call, played for the jury over speakers with a translation provided to them on an overhead projector, Rantisi informed Ashqar of the attack asking him if he heard about it. When Ashqar replied that he had not, Rantisi told him that two soldiers had been kidnapped and killed. Rantisi then told Ashqar that they had even taken the ID Cards of the two soldiers and both men began laughing. The phone calls and faxes showed Ashqar to be a an important player who was close to many leaders in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Europe.

Cross examination by Muhammad Salah’s lawyer

Defense Attorney Robert Bloom cross examined agent Benabidez who had also testified the day before. Bloom maintained that the Social Security application filled out by Ashqar which listed Salah’s address in Bridgeview as Ashqar’s address meant nothing because Salah commonly offered his home to Palestinians who came to the United States and did not have a place to stay.

Hamas communications and Ashqar’s personal contacts

The Government’s next witness was an FBI Special Agent tasked with preparing all of the wiretaps for this trial. She explained the fax coversheet which she added to each fax. The coversheet contained a date, time and if the fax was incoming or outgoing, and a “to/from” section. In the case of an incoming fax the “from” section was labeled unknown since the wiretap could not ascertain the fax’s origin. The agent read an outgoing fax dated 10/7/1993 from Ashqar to Fax number 011-44-81-450-3246, a London number. This fax suggested that a conference take place on the anniversary of the Intifadah 12/9/93 and was signed Samir, a pseudonym for Ashqar.

Special Agent Jill Pettorelli was the next witness called on behalf of the government. Pettorelli read the translation of several of the documents which the FBI photographed during their search of Ashqar’s residence. One document attributed to Hamas was a list of prisoners scheduled for exchange with the Israelis and subsequently to be sent abroad. The letter asked the recipient to ignore the previous list and adopt this new list. Of the 33 names on the list the first three were listed as follows:

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Life
Yahya al-Sinwar, Life
Salah Shehadah, 10 years

These three names represent three high-ranking HAMAS leaders in Israeli custody.

Another document read by Agent Pettorelli was a list of entries from Ashqar’s address book which included Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy leader of the political wing of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, former director of a Springfield, Virginia “think tank” founded by Marzook and current senior political advisor to Hamas, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, as well as co-Defendant Muhammad Salah.

Blake Ross is nervous. It’s a muggy May day in New York City, and the 20-year-old has to rent a tux for a big ­soiree where he’ll be hobnobbing with celebrities at one of his first‑ever black-tie events—a dinner for Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year. And he’s not very practiced with bow ties. “I never made it to my prom,” says Ross, who has thick eyebrows and pronounced ears, making him look like a young Franz Kafka.

No wonder he projects such intensity: Ross has been busy. While still a teenager, this self-taught coder cofounded the Mozilla Firefox project, a spin-off of Netscape’s Mozilla Web browser, sparking a global phenomenon. Firefox has since been downloaded by more than 200 million people worldwide, threatening the supremacy of even Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Although Firefox was ultimately wrought from the work of thousands of programmers in the free-software community—the hive of coders who share and collaborate online—Ross has become a poster boy for the revolution, a role he neither expected nor is comfortable with. People are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million per month—most of them from Internet Explorer—because the new browser makes surfing the Web safer and easier. Some call him “Microsoft’s worst nightmare.” Ross just says, “I’m more on the side of mom and dad.”

With his newest venture, he’s doing mom and dad their biggest favor yet. Two days before the black-tie event, dressed in T‑shirt and jeans in an Italian restaurant owned by his uncle, Ross plugged in his laptop and prepared to unveil, for the first time to any member of the press, his next big thing. Just as with Firefox, Ross began this project by asking himself one simple question: What’s bad about today’s software?

The answer, he and his programming partner, Joe Hewitt, decided, resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. “Right now, people want to shuffle around content,” he says, “but the world’s fused together by a collection of hacks.” Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. “Step back and ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Ross says.

The problem, according to Ross, is there’s no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service ­providers, and applications.

Ross’s answer is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”

Today, something like e-mail can involve two completely different experiences, depending on whether or not you’re using the Web—Outlook versus Hotmail, for example. A Parakey e-mail program, on the other hand, provides a single access point for your mail, “unifying the desktop and the Web,” in Ross’s words. Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Parakey isn’t MySpace 2.0. The enormously popular MySpace, by comparison, is a sort of bulletin board, a place to post a limited number of selected things (photos, videos, blogs) that you’d like anyone in the world to see. You upload a few party pictures, post a message, maybe instant-message a friend, and then split—making MySpace a pub in which you’d spend a friendly evening, whereas Parakey is the apartment you go home to.

“It’s a nice way to create and store all your stuff,” Ross says, “and know where it is.”

To understand where Blake Ross is going with Parakey, you have to understand where he’s been. As part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet, Ross discovered early how geek culture was conspiring against his parents. Although his mom, a psychologist, and his dad, a lawyer, hold graduate degrees, they were stymied when they tried to do just about anything online. Ross recalls his mother frequently yelling across the house to him, asking for tech support. She couldn’t find her Internet Explorer bookmarks. She was getting besieged with pop-up ads. She didn’t know how to protect herself from viruses.

While his peers might relish such power over their parents, Ross is squeakily earnest and really wanted to help out. So he went off to slay the dragons haunting the Internet. Late into the night, he sat under his shelves of Archie toys and taught himself to code, first HTML, the Web programming language, and then Microsoft Visual Basic, a popular tool for creating simple applications. Even back then, Ross made a habit of keeping his family and friends in the dark. “I don’t like telling people what I’m doing until I have something to show them,” he says.

“My friends would say, ‘How can you leave him in his bedroom for so many hours?’” his mother, Abby, recalls. “We didn’t know what was going on in there.” When their son would request programming books for his birthday, they began to get an idea. “Everyone started to tell me he was going to be the next Bill Gates,” Abby says. In fact, the young Ross had another target in mind: Netscape’s embattled Mozilla browser. Netscape had ushered in the dot-com era, but by 1998 its pioneering browser had been almost completely superseded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. So that year the company made the bold—or desperate—move of releasing the code for its software to the world of open source. “It was a way to touch a product used by a couple million people,” Ross says. And it was something that could help his mom.

After many long nights online, Ross became well enough known in the Mozilla community to get offered a position with Netscape (by then owned by AOL). Yet when the 15-year-old Florida native, accompanied by his mom, arrived at the Silicon Valley office in 2000, he was less than impressed. “It was the bloody remains of battle,” Ross says. “I didn’t feel like anyone in management thought we had a chance of winning this thing.”

But there were others in the cubicle trenches who hadn’t conceded the browser war to Microsoft. Late one night in the summer of 2002, at a nearby Denny’s restaurant, Ross fell into an impassioned discussion with Dave Hyatt, a senior engineer at Netscape who shared his vision for a leaner but more flexible browser for the masses. Rather than starting from scratch, the two took the Mozilla browser, which they thought was bloated with super­fluous features such as chat rooms and an e-mail client, and began stripping it to the bare essentials. They felt they were raising the Netscape browser from the ashes and so named their stripped-down version Phoenix. But the rebel project became anathema to some Mozilla diehards. “I don’t see the need for Phoenix,” posted one detractor at the time. Another was more succinct: “Phoenix sucks,” he blogged.

Enrolling in Stanford for the fall of 2002, Ross decided to have a go at being an ordinary college kid. He lifted weights. He started dating. He discovered the rock band Coldplay. But his geek legacy was also alive and well. Before long, his vision of a lean mean Web browser caught on in a major way. Phoenix—later named Firebird, then Firefox—gathered momentum. Ben Goodger, a 23-year-old engineer from New Zealand, had been shepherding it along with the growing support of other open-source enthusiasts. Chris Messina, a 22-year-old programmer who was a key player in the development of Deanspace, the influential Web site Howard Dean used to attract support for his bid at the Democratic nomination, joined the Firefox team for the same reasons. “It was all about empowering people through technology,” he says.

Drawing on the viral marketing strategies of the Dean campaign, legions rallied behind the alternative browser. They got a snappy logo, an Earth-hugging fox, and they launched a community hub called SpreadFirefox. Supporters around the world posted digital photos of their efforts at guerrilla marketing. They dropped a Firefox banner on the Danish Parliament building in Copenhagen, carried “Get Firefox” placards at an anti-Bush rally in London, plastered posters around Taiwan. In a mere 10 days, they raised US $200 000 to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times.

Firefox went prime time in June 2005, after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about the “vulnerability” of Internet Explorer and suggested using alternative browsers. Even Slate magazine, owned by Microsoft, threw in the towel. “I’ve been using [Firefox] for a week now,” trumpeted a Slate scribe, “and I’ve all but forgotten about Explorer.”

The success of Firefox put the spotlight on Ross, whose young age and puckish charm made him a media icon—much to the consternation of Ross and the open-source community. But Ross’s ability to articulate Firefox’s goals and challenges in his blog earned him a following. He was a coder who could talk the talk. And people listened. Soon even members of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team sought Ross out. One night after he addressed a Silicon Valley technology group, they invited him for dinner. “I thought they were going to take me out in the parking lot and beat the crap out of me,” Ross says. Instead, they gave him a company sweatshirt with the Explorer’s familiar “e” icon grafted under the bones of a Jolly Roger. It was tongue-in-cheek but symbolic nonetheless. Ross had raided their kingdom.

With that kind of attention, it’s no wonder Ross is feeling pressure to follow up.

Inside his uncle’s restaurant, Ross launches into a laptop demo of Parakey. This isn’t a press conference; he’s just showing his brainchild to me informally. It’s the sort of venue he ­prefers—low key, one on one. And it’s in these moments that he really comes to life. As developers well know, disseminating new software is not only a technical challenge, it’s also a communications task. You’re not just engineering a solution, you’re marketing it. And Ross has considerable talent in both spheres. Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla Corp., which distributes Firefox, says, “Blake is a good spokesperson. He expresses well the many ideas that drive us. Having an individual that people and press can relate to does help sell the story.”

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.” Why? Because online is how the world, like it or not, increasingly talks. If Ross’s mom can’t do something as basic as share her recipes or ­photos with her future grandchildren online, then she gets left behind. In the 21st century, this sort of information isn’t passed on at the Thanksgiving table anymore. It’s communicated through the Internet. So without something like Parakey, there’s a chance it’s not going to outlive the baby-boom generation.

Grandparents love seeing their kids and grandkids on Flickr or Snapfish, but they’re often too intimidated to put their own pictures on these sites. The reason, in part, is that they have to jump through many hoops: dragging pictures here, uploading them there. Parakey, inherently (and potentially profitably), is aimed at making it easier for them—and everyone else—to get their stuff online.

It’s not just grandparents who aren’t using the Web as much as they could—it’s everyone. Right now, Ross says, “we have two wildly advanced platforms—the desktop operating system and the Internet. That leaves users with a frustrating choice. Do you want to create content with powerful tools in an ad-free environment and bury it in a system that’s accessible anytime, but only in one place and by one person?” The alternative, he says, is weaker tools and an ad-heavy space that can be accessed by anyone anywhere, but only when you’re online. “We don’t believe people should have to make that choice,” he says.

Pointing to the screen of his laptop, Ross shows me what he calls a “family portal” for a fictional clan named the Andersons. Mom has a page with her recipes displayed. Dad has his collection of war documents. The kids have their party photos. Although it looks like a Web site—down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section—it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera. So instead of clicking between, say, the Windows desktop and a MySpace home page displayed in a Web browser, you are always operating within your Parakey site.

Take digital photos, for example. Here’s how the Parakey experience works: you plug in your camera, and your photos get stored seamlessly on your computer in such a way that you can view them quickly and easily through your Parakey site. No more digging through folders for the right image files. They’re organized and displayed as attractively as a site like Flickr might display them, as thumbnails with identifying text beneath them. Parakey allows for serious editing functions—from cutting and cropping to eliminating red-eye—all within the context of your Parakey page. But it also brings some more basic (and fun) scrapbooking habits into the digital realm. Ross clicks on an icon representing what he calls the Toy Box. Open the Toy Box and there are all sorts of accessories for dressing up the pictures: word balloons, devil horns, goofy fonts.

Now let’s say you want to share your collection of graduation photos with some select family and friends. The problem today is that there are several layers to getting that done. Many sites require users to register before seeing a photo album. With Parakey, you send a digital “key” to people whom you want to be able to access your site. The keys appear as little icons that look like, no surprise, house keys. Each one contains a unique identifier, essentially a password. When a recipient clicks on the key, he or she gets a cookie installed that contains this password—and, as a result, gains access to the stuff you’ve designated on your site.

Drag, say, a silver key onto a collection, and that action makes it for your eyes only. Drag a gold key, and you open it up to family. A bronze key opens it to friends. Right now if you have ­photos you want friends but not co-workers to see, and vice versa, you need two different Flickr accounts. And unlike many sites, Parakey doesn’t require your loved ones or chums to register before viewing your photos. And it makes downloading content easier, too. The idea, eventually, is to do away with the file archiving required today. Everything you encounter while surfing online—photos, videos, tunes—you can drag right onto your Parakey page, end of story.

To use Parakey, you first must download a small application. This is at the heart of the Parakey system. It contains software that essentially turns your computer into a local server. This approach has one huge built-in benefit: you can manage your content quickly and efficiently, even if you’re off-line. Again, it’s not that you’re making your hard drive’s contents available for the world; rather, you’re organizing your Parakey site, say, http://dave.parakey.com, only some of which will be open for others to view. Whether you make your changes online or off, there’s only one interface (avoiding the Outlook/Hotmail problem); everything is ultimately stored locally, your computer being synchronized with remote servers whenever you are online. “You never have to care about the uploading process,” says Ross. “That just happens transparently.”

Ross wants independent developers to create a variety of applications for Parakey. To that end, he and Hewitt have created a programming language for Parakey that they call JUL, a mashed-up acronym that stands for “Just another User interface Language.”

JUL is specially designed for the online world in which Parakey applications will reside. JUL applications are themselves comprised of other applications that come in all shapes and sizes. The interface for Mrs. Anderson’s recipe application, for instance, might include much smaller ones such as a metric-to-English-units converter or photo-goes-here. “You’re not thinking at [the HTML] level anymore,” Ross says. “You’re thinking one level up. That will make it easier to build desktop applications on the Web.” And despite Ross’s connection to Firefox, Parakey will work with any browser.

JUL applications also notice Web events that take place when someone is reading a Parakey page—an update to a sports score, for example, or a new blog entry—and instantly update the page accordingly. Users of these applications don’t have to request these updates, and neither do the JUL developers who wrote them. They simply include “formulas” behind the scenes that reference different information sources. If a source changes, JUL automatically reevaluates the formulas—much as a spreadsheet does.

What do developers think? At press time, it’s hard to say, because Ross is keeping his cards, for the time being, close to his chest. But those who know Ross say that the work on Firefox laid the foundation for his current project. Goodger, one of the key players in igniting the Firefox phenomenon, says the goal of helping ordinary folk navigate the Web, is “an ideology in and of itself.” And it’s one Ross has always taken to heart. “Blake has played a formative role in this,” Goodger says.

Naturally, Firefox is the model in Ross’s mind of how he and Hewitt—who was one of the original Firefox engineers—ought to develop Parakey. “If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”

This statement expresses the differences between the Firefox and Parakey business models. Firefox began life as an open-source, not-for-profit experiment and recently has begun morphing into a moneymaking enterprise under the Mountain View, Calif.–based Mozilla Corp. Formed in 2005, Mozilla makes money through sources such as Google ads included on the Firefox search results page. Parakey, on the other hand, is launching with profit in mind. While many of the details remain under wraps, the idea is to roll out initially with a single application, such as the photo system, which will demonstrate how the platform can be exploited. Once all the infrastructure is in place and scalable, they’ll make a more concerted play to involve outside developers, probably around January. Ross says that advertising revenues will come in differently from the way they do in Google or other ad-dependent businesses. He can’t say more about it for now. Although market analysts have yet to probe it, some are already unsure how well Ross’s new project might do. “I’m skeptical,” says Joe Laszlo, a research director at Jupiter Research, a technology-research firm based in New York City. “The vast majority of people who want to publish content at all prefer a best-of-breed shop and don’t want to do it all in one place.”

As Ross shuts down his laptop and digs into dinner, his mind turns to other matters—like Time magazine’s big event, scheduled for the following night. With Parakey development taking up his time, he hasn’t had much left over for parties or even his Stanford education. He’s taking time off from everything until he gets this project done. But, as always, he still makes room for his original muse—his mom. When she calls him up complaining about some new technology that’s confusing her, he knows there’s more work to do—and a new opportunity on the horizon.