The School of the Americas (SOA) is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers that was initially established in Panama in 1946. Since 1984, when it relocated after the Panamanian President demanded “the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America” leave, it has been based at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school, frequently called the “School of Assassins,” was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001—its former name was tarnished by released torture manuals and graduates guilty of human rights abuses. Since its inception, the SOA/WHINSEC has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers—many of whom have now been linked to massacres, torture, rape, and military coups. SOA/WHINSEC-trained members of the Honduran army are responsible for the recent coup of democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya’s government.

The School of the Americas Watch is an organization founded in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois, a priest who was enraged after spending four years in dictator-run Bolivia in the 1970s and hearing of the rape and murder of four Catholic Sisters by members of the Salvadorian National Guard. SOA Watch describes itself as “a nonviolent grassroots movement that works to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, to close the SOA/WHINSEC, and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents.” Eric Lecompte, National Director for School of the America’s Watch, came to speak at M.E.Ch.A.’s Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) program. After his speech detailing the history of the SOA and the atrocities of its graduates, the DFP had a chance to ask him a few questions:

How did you first hear about School of the Americas?
I first learned about the School of the Americas [when] I was a high school student on the south side of Chicago. There were people from Illinois in the mid 1990s that were going down to be a part of this demonstration that was taking place at the gates of Fort Benning. So, I started to hear about it in the media in Illinois, and as a result I began to do more research. Shortly after I had an opportunity to take a trip down to Latin America and learn from people first hand about what the school was doing there.

What would you say the most common defense of the SOA is that you’ve heard?
What I’ve heard essentially is to fight communism, fight drugs, fight terrorism, and to promote democracy. Those are the things I’ve heard from those that are proponents [and] supporters of the school.

When you directly bring up SOA graduate’s involvement in massacres, what do these proponents have to say?
Honestly some of the responses are “that’s a few bad apples.” That’s some of the response. When I’ve talked very candidly with people from the Pentagon or the State Department, even in the last few weeks, they’ll say things like “well, you know those people they’ve killed are liberation theologians.” So, it’s a mindset difference —that either that these atrocities are taking place happen at the hands of a few bad apples or that somehow those who’ve been the victims had it coming to them.

How do you find out who graduates from SOA?
Well up until 1995 (sic) [2005] we would issue a Freedom of Information Act request every year and we would get a list of all the names. Sometimes even the school just handed over the names to us. But starting in 1995 (sic) [2005] they would black out all the names so we wouldn’t be able to receive them. For the past four years we don’t have a clear record of the graduates.

Does the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation claim to no longer use the torture manuals?
Yeah, I mean essentially that is a part of what they say: that they are no longer using those manuals and that the school doesn’t exist for that purpose anymore. But what they are very clear about is that the school still does teach counter-insurgency warfare, which is what we’re concerned with—it’s warfare taking place among a civilian population. [This] leads to the question in these countries that have such incredible needs for humanitarian aid, such need for constitutional reform, democratic reform, judicial reform, why is so much money being vested in their militaries? We’re not going to read tomorrow morning in The Globe that Guatemala and Mexico have gone to war with each other, so why do they have these huge militaries? The reality of it is that these militaries [are] to be used internally not externally.

You said in your speech that six countries had withdrawn their troops from training at the School of the Americas, or WHINSEC. Which were those?
Costa Rica, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina have all totally pulled out. Chile, number 7, has done a 2/3 troop withdrawal.

And which countries still have parts of their military in training at the SOA?
Well, not all the rest [of the Latin American countries], but most of them.

Does your organization try to convince Congressmen and women to vote against the funding of WHINSEC?
We do. We have a bill in Congress right now [H.R. 2567] that has 84 members of Congress as cosponsors, including Jim McGovern, that’s 85. We also advocate for cuts in the funding of the school. We’re [also] trying to work with the [Obama] Administration to get an executive order to close the school.

In the past, who are the Congressmen and women that have opposed shutting down or defunding the SOA? Have they been mainly Democrats, Republicans, or a mixture?
We’ve had a mix. The reality of it is its mostly been Democrats [supporting the closure of the SOA], but on funding counts we’ve always been able to count on about 30 Republicans to be voting with us. The leaders of our current bill in Congress are Jim McGovern from Massachusetts—he’s really the champion—but also John Lewis from Georgia is a big supporter. We also have a few Republicans [supporting the current bill]; we have four or five Republicans signed on including Ron Paul, who are calling [for] the school’s closure.

Check out SOA Watch’s website­—soaw.org—to find out more about the bill in Congress to suspend operations at SOA. Also learn how to participate in their annual protest at the gates of Fort Benning, coming up on November 20th.

About two months ago, I suddenly was no longer able to log on to my Facebook account. We all know the procedure: click the “Forgot Password?” button and have it sent to your email, where you can reset your password and quickly get your life back. However, I have tried at least eight times now, and the most I have gotten is one mocking email from Facebook claiming that all I had to do was respond and I would finally receive a new password—but apparently they were just kidding. After a week or so I moved on from Facebook and decided I didn’t need it anymore, but alas, I found there was no way to delete my account. The good news is I have been liberated by the expectations that used to shackle me to my wall. The bad news is that the wall still stands, and now the most I can do is to watch my poorly-maintained identity as it drifts through cyberspace, being tagged in obscene scenarios (ok, that’s my fault), and deterring potential friends with my forced anti-cyber-socialism.

My unfortunate experience has made me a lot more aware of cyber-shenanigans and I decided to examine the issue. Appropriately enough, October happened to be National Cyber Security Month.

What exactly is cyber security? Most people think it is analogous with the health of living organisms. My story is the equivalent of a minor itch—especially compared to some of the breadth and destruction inflicted by certain computer illnesses. Just like health in human beings, there are two kinds of illness: those inflicted by some other organism, and those that are simply accidental. The Consumerist recently reported a number of people who were accidentally charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on their debit cards due to a malfunction in the bank’s computer. This is a very rare and unavoidable type of bug, and of course Visa agreed to fully reimburse the victims. Still, it’s a reminder that our bank accounts exist in cyberspace, which, like the world we live in, is unpredictable.

Then there is the other kind of illness: the virus. People called “hackers” or “phishers”—essentially rogue computer scientists—engineer them. Most of these criminals derive funds by siphoning discretely from savings accounts, acquiring information about competitors, or if they are especially talented, by directly robbing a bank via computer.

Other common computer illnesses, usually driven by commercial motivations, are generally called “malware.” Some viruses, called “trojans,” can hijack your email account and force it to send out spam to other email addresses—contagious viruses are among the most successful. Other viruses will remember the keystrokes when you type in the password for your bank account and use it to redirect your money to another account. For about a week, your account appears to be normal while the virus is doing its work, and by the time your balance visibly declines, the virus has vanished without a cookie trail.

So what can we do to prevent getting these viruses, and recognize when they invade our computers? The first steps consists of what you’ve heard many times before: Always have trusted virus protection, never leave your computer unlocked in a public space, and don’t open suspicious emails claiming to extend your “membership.”

However, these cyber-hygiene maxims leave a lot of questions about cyber security unanswered. Is the amount of Internet crime going to decrease with improved technology in the future? Then there is the more obvious question: why is there so much Internet crime in the first place? Is Facebook to blame?
In order to answer these questions, I went to Thayer Engineering professor George Cybenko, a specialist in this area.

DFP: “What do we have to do to improve cyber security?”
G.C.: “Improving security will require two things… a) better technology and b) better user awareness of security threats. People are working on a) and making progress. In order to achieve b), users and consumers will have to be educated.”
DFP: “So if the technology is out there, why are so many computers and networks still getting sick?”
G.C: “Although there is better technology, not all users invest in it. Even large companies cut corners on security investment—it’s a calculated cost-benefit analysis.”
Maybe Facebook is to blame for my untamed Facebook wall, I thought to myself.
DFP: “Is data protection keeping up with the new boom of Facebook, Myspace, and online desktops, or is the overall safety of our online identities getting worse?”
G.C.: “The vulnerabilities of Facebook and Myspace are not related to data protection or encryption technology. [The problem] is that people put stuff out there for many to see. There’s more personal data out there [nowadays], for sure.”

It is important to remember that not all viruses are illegal, and not all illegal programs will give you viruses. Some “warez” come in the form of free online “cracks” for unlocking full-version functionality in popular programs that you can download on illegal websites. Although they can be extremely helpful to an unscrupulous consumer, they are also illegal, and authorities usually discover them in a few months. Many of their creators have no incentive to design these programs other than peer recognition. “Hacking has become a business with economic incentives which are not completely open or known,” Cybenko added. For example: Counterstrike, arguably the most internationally successful first-person shooter of all time, was adapted from another published computer game (Half-Life) by an anonymous computer hacker.

Ironically, one could theoretically use an online “crack” to protect one’s computer against viruses. However, due to the many legal risks of downloading freeware—and the fact that at second glance most spyware and virus removers are themselves malware—this is highly discouraged. Although the cyber black-market is not synonymous with corrupt and infected files, there are other obvious calamities to watch out for.

These risks have nothing to do with viruses or computer health in general… they are more legal in nature. Downloading music, cracks, and keygens with generic software clients like Limewire or ever allegedly safe torrent clients is simply a game of roulette. The world of free downloads is a “gray market” that ranges from semi-legal to illegal.

I do not advocate illicit activities, but if you must indulge in cyber piracy, you should choose your methods of downloading wisely—and again, the DFP is most assuredly not advocating these. If you like the regularity of a place that won’t get shut down every few months, the safest option is buying the premium package from a file hosting website (such as rapidshare.com or hotfile.com) for a flat rate and with unlimited downloading capacity. This usually costs about $60 dollars for a year, but the selection is like an all-you-can-eat media buffet. You can search for files on this database through torrent websites like warez-bb.org, or you can use a little trick a-la-Google that will allow you to access to the database from the back, saving time. After you have subscribed to a website like rapidshare.com, simply search on Google: “file:rapidshare.com name of file”, and it will present only premium files from the site. But you still take all the risks and dangers associated with pirated content—including potential legal ramifications.

The Internet is the landscape of the new millennium: it is a battlefield, a library, and a Las Vegas. Like any of these places, if you don’t know the rules you can be taken advantage of and/or hauled away, and even then, the rules aren’t always enforced. Worst of all, you can compromise the safety of anyone with whom you may be connected. However, if you stay quiet and accept that you—and your wallet—have to make certain sacrifices, you will find yourself in command of enormous potential.

Despite his many accolades, Ravi Shankar is a humble man. Dressed in simple white garments, he bowed in respect to the crowd. For someone who has performed and composed with the likes of George Harrison of the Beatles, Andre Previn, Yehudi Menuhin and Phillip Glass in major musical capitals like New York, London, Woodstock and Vienna, his smile radiated not pride, or distance but an aura of quiet confidence and warmth.

When I sat down to listen to him in the Spaulding Auditorium at the Hopkins Center of the Arts on October 20th, I honestly did not know what to expect. I’ve experienced only isolated performances of Indian music. In high school, a Bengali friend was very involved in traditional Indian dance. My experiences with Indian music were limited to the modern hip hop, dancehall and techno infused variations found on albums like DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra. But unlike DJ Rekha, Shankar opened my eyes to the roots of Indian music.

Shankar’s musical contribution to the world has been met with honor and appreciation. In his homeland India, he has won three of the nation’s civilian awards including the most imminent prize, the Bharat Ratna or “Jewel of India” in 1999. Shankar was awarded the Commandeur de la Legion d’Honneur, the highest civilian award of France in 2000 and the Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2001. Additionally, he is the recipient of three Grammy Awards, and the International Music Council UNESCO award in 1975.

Onstage, Shankar was accompanied by Ravichandra Kulur on a tradition Indian flute, Tanmoy Bose on the tabla, a pair of hand drums, and Pirashanna Thevarajah on the mridangam, a large double-sided drum. Each of Shankar’s two young protegés played the tanpura, a North Indian lute that resembles a sitar. Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka, could not accompany him that night due to illness. It was, as he said, the first time in fifteen years that she would not be performing with him, yet Shankar was kind enough to still grace us with his performance.

Before Shankar came on, Kular and Bose wetted the crowd’s appetite with a dramatic South Indian hymn to the Hindu god Ganesh. As the tanpuras murmured wistfully in the background, Kular’s flute soared above us all, like bird surveying a grassy plain. Bose’s tabla galloped alongside us like a sure-footed gazelle. Basking in the sunlight of their music, we were carried between heaven and earth. Our hearts were in tune with the joyful ragas of the flute and the drums.
At the heart of classical Indian music is the raga, “a precise, aesthetic, melodic form” says Shankar in On the Appreciation of Indian Classical Music. Although Indian music is characterized as modal, the raga must not be confused as the scale, melody, composition or key found in Western music. A raga can be best characterized as the soul of a piece of music. A saying in Sanskrit translates as “That which colors the mind is a raga.” The raga colors the music, effecting notes and embellishments while setting the emotional tone of a piece. While music students in the West learn through the notation method, in India gurus pass their knowledge of the ragas to their disciples within the oral tradition of classical Indian music. Shankar himself trained under the renowned guru Allauddin Khan.
There are ragas for the nine rasas or sentiments, ragas for particular times of day, ragas for each of the seasons and ragas for every cycle of life. Each raga has a vadi , or principle note, a samavadi or secondary note, and a jan (life) or mukhda (face) which are the cluster of notes that truly define the raga. All these notes make up the characteristic note patterns of a raga. Over 6,000 ragas arise from the permutations and combinations of 72 parent scales.

Shankar breathed life into his ragas. Once on stage, he began the traditional recital with calm and slow exploration of the chosen raga. The immense sweeping song of his sitar ran like a river running through a dusty land. From this introspective beginning, Shankar moved on to the jor, in which different rhythms were used to elaborate and embellish the raga’s basic theme. He then reached the gat, 4 to 16 bars of rhythmic structure and fixed composition within the raga. Here Bose and Thevarajah entered on the drums. Bose also lent his vocal expertise to the piece. The gat culminated in the jhala, a partly improvised part of the raga. The piece reached its climax in the sawal jabab, where there was a beautiful, exhilarating and rapid interplay between sitar and tabla, concluding in a sensual, romantic thumri.

As I listened to Shankar’s sitar that night, the raga, the soul of the music synced with my individual consciousness, my own raga, and elevated my soul to a higher realm of awareness. The soul is a frequency of pure energy vibrating in the shell of our bodies. This frequency can harmonize with that of the universe, thereby enhancing our entire being. “Our ragas are the vehicles by which this essence can be perceived.” explains Shankar. The soul is a wave among waves. Like the sound waves of music or the electromagnetic waves of color, such waves are packed with energy that can be amplified, harmonized and synchronized. When all these waves resonate, when soul and universe harmonize, the subsequent release of energy is not only powerful, but also purifying. It is through this revelation do we realize of the true essence of our existence.

At the end of the performance, the entire auditorium jumped to its feet and applauded long enough for the musicians to bow three times. Shankar is indeed perfected through his music. It does not take a guru to appreciate his musical mastery.

Internet censorship is bad. Image courtesy of Melissa at http://www.flickr.com/photos/melissa/293920852/sizes/o/.

McCain introduced a bill on October 22nd that makes non-neutral network service by major ISPs explicitly legal. This could be an article about the right-wing propaganda surrounding net neutrality, and the corruption that’s driving it.  I could talk about how nowhere in any pro-network neutrality legislation is there room for anything even remotely like “government takeover of the internet.”  I could also talk about how McCain, a man who has publicly stated that he does not know how to use a computer, is the single largest beneficiary of telecommunications and internet service company lobbying money. Addressing these issues requires no carefully thought-out argument; they’re clearly absurd.

Instead, I’ll tell you exactly what net neutrality is and why it is so important. Net neutrality means that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all websites equally. In the political arena, net neutrality usually refers to legislation making it illegal for ISPs to give preferential treatment to some websites.
For example, imagine that your ISP decides that they want to make a little extra money. They’ve been laying some new lines that will greatly increase the speed of their service, but they haven’t started using them yet.

They approach big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, asking them to pay up for exclusive access to the new fast lane. Domino’s has the money, so they get in the fast lane, while Joe’s Humble Pizza Joint, where they just got a spiffy new online delivery service up and running, stays in the slow lane.  
Maybe Domino’s pays your ISP a little extra to take Joe’s Humble Pizza Joint out of the picture.  

Or maybe your ISP, as it expands into new areas, offers a two-tiered network service, where access to the big names is the baseline, and access to Mom and Pop websites costs extra.

Network Neutrality legislation would make what your ISP is trying to do illegal. Network Neutrality is not about government regulation of the Internet—no agency or committee is being created here. We just want one simple law stating that ISPs are not allowed to give preferential treatment to certain websites.
“But the internet is already free—surely bringing the government into this will only fuck things up” Well, the internet is mostly free. In recent years, we have seen the scary beginnings of non-neutral network service.  For example, Comcast, one of the most popular ISPs, currently prevents its users from seeding torrents.
“But OMFG Bittorrent is piracy!  You wouldn’t steal a car, would you?!?!” Bittorent is a protocol for downloading files, just like http (the protocol for downloading web pages), and it can be used to distribute content legally and illegally.

Imagine that you and your friend had watched Wayne’s World a few too many times and you decide film a television show in your parents’ basement. You’re just doing it for fun and don’t have an agent or extra money, so the best way to get your “shwing” out to the masses is to publish online (where it would be cost-free).  

You create a website at wordpress.com and publish your videos on YouTube, but you want to make high-quality downloads available so that people can see your ripped pant legs in High Def at home. You consider buying server space so that you can host the videos yourself, but serving large video files is incredibly expensive and the price increases proportionally to the number of downloads.  In other words, the more popular you are, the more expensive it will be to make your content available. You may even put your videos out with a Creative Commons license that allows free, legal, noncommercial sharing and remixing.  You want people to see your show and mess around with it by creating remixes with dancing hamsters, but the server fees are too damned expensive.

Bittorrent is your answer; it allows downloaders around the world to voluntarily “seed” your high-quality videos at no cost to you.  The more popular your videos are, the more seeds, and the faster the downloads will be (while the cost to you remains free). It enables your Mom and Pop (or, in this case, Wayne and Garth) operation to thrive by harnessing the ability of the Internet to connect everyone equally.
This is what Network Neutrality legislation is hoping to protect. Television is already largely useless because of major commercial interests that turn news into a puppet show controlled by large corporations pushing their products and their political agendas.  
The Internet is uniquely suited to egalitarian treatment because the publishing costs are so low.  
While Mom and Pop’s Brick and Mortar Store is being put out of business by Wal-Mart, we still have a chance to keep momandpop.com online.

Baker-Berry, proud home of several many potential candidates for the Dartmouth 8. Photograph by Candais Crivello.

The reason why Dartmouth is better than any other Ivy League school is the fact that you can have sex on it’s mascot. The green may be a risky place to bump uglies, but then again, that is precisely the reason why it has earned a spot on the Dartmouth Seven.

In case you have no life, the Dartmouth seven is a list of places where you have to have sex before you graduate. Some may think (and by some I mean I) this list harkens back to the seven deadly sins, or sailing the seven seas, or the lucky number seven, and for that reason they may be attached to that number.

But please, allow me to retort. After all, its sinking the 8-ball that wins you the game, 8 is the Chinese lucky number, are 8 planets in the solar system (fuck you, Pluto). In fact, the Dartmouth “7” is actually not completely agreed upon in some of the worse educated echelons of Dartmouth society, and frequently a stray 8th will slip in there (usually golf course). For the record, the agreed upon Dartmouth 7 as of now consists of:

President’s Lawn
The Green
Bema
Stacks
Steps of Dartmouth Hall
Top of the Hop
Football Field

This pivotal decision is obviously not up to the DFP. The Dartmouth 8 should be for the people, by the people. In a recent interview with Dartmouth community members, I asked what location they would add to the Dartmouth seven.

These were their responses:

Inside an SNS truck – FoCo Grill guy

The Climbing Gym – unknown

In the pool – Alyson Picket ‘11 “bathing suits allowed, water jets not included”

The Tower Room x4 – Jacob Batchelor ’12 “Make sure she’s not a screamer”

Golf course – Riley Kane ‘12 [get a hole in one]

The pendulum in Fairchild – Santiago Romero’11 (for that slow, gentle sex)

First Floor Berry – unknown

Graveyard – unknown (so totally blasphemous)

Foco x3 – Mandy brasher ’12 (mmm…)

Dick’s House – unknown {as long as you’re both sick…}

On the swing of the metal beam sculpture behind the Hood Museum – Nathaniel Seymour ’12 (so postmodern)

Novack x2 – Chistopher Valleu ‘12 (extra point during finals)

The pond when its frozen over – my personal fave

On a pong table x2 – unknown (extra points if it doesn’t flip over)

Dr. Seuss room – Anonymous (where the fuck is that?)

We think a lot of these places blow the Bema and the Steps of Dartmouth Hall away. If you agree, send us your opinion (blitz “DFP”) and we will tally your votes for the next issue.