China Arrests Church Leader's Adviser
AP reports, "The legal adviser to an imprisoned leader of China's unofficial Christian church has been arrested along with a prominent church activist and his wife, international human rights groups reported Friday."

India Blocks Almost All Yahoo! Forums
AP reports, "A government ban on an Internet discussion group run by an obscure separatist movement has ended up blocking access to popular, unrelated Yahoo forums in nearly all of India...But for technical reasons, Indian Internet service providers were unable to block just the Kynhun site - and had to shut down every Yahoo discussion group...The Indian government occasionally blocks Web sites it finds objectionable, including one for a Pakistani newspaper during India-Pakistan fighting in 1999." :: It is worth noting how vulnerable to Internet is to national control. I wonder how realistic it was to imagine Buck's underground webzine or Zion's website would be immune to GC censorship when the web of today is so easily controlled by governmental authorities?

Southern Baptists Applaud Mel Gibson "Passion"
The Jesus Journal reports, "Mel Gibson's representation of the sufferings of Jesus Christ in the upcoming movie "The Passion" surpasses all earlier efforts by cinematographers, according to Southern Baptists who were invited to view a rough cut of the film in Dallas."

Passports and Visas to Add High-Tech Identity Features
The New York Times reports, "Technologies that scan faces and fingerprints will become a standard part of travel for foreign visitors next year, and for all travelers in the near future." :: Are we ready for the return of the infamous phrase "Your papers, please," at checkpoints? A day when people are not allowed to buy or sell without official identification seems not so remote when the day of not being able to travel without official identification is so close at hand.

Ham Radios Came to Rescue in Blackout
AP reports, "When technology failed on a massive scale last week, some old-fashioned broadcasting stepped into the breach as ham radio operators took to the airwaves to reach emergency workers.For millions of people in the Northeast and Midwest, the Aug. 14 outage took access to e-mail and the Internet with it. Landline and cellular telephones were jammed by a crush of calls. But the ham radio, which came into being in the World War I era, connected firefighters and police departments, Red Cross workers and other emergency personnel during the most extensive blackout in the Northeast since 1977." :: I wonder if Trib Force members should be trained in the use of ham radios?

Training for Internet Evangelism
Until now, just about the only available training for Internet Evangelism has been informal self-study and learning-by-doing. Now, with the launch of a formal 12-week Distance Learning course in Web Evangelism, offered by the Asia Internet Bible Institute, you and your TF team can sign up for professional instruction on how to use the Internet to share the Good News.

Temple Mount Secured for Jewish Holiday
AP reports, "Police prevented dozens of ultranationalist Jews from entering a contested holy site Thursday...The hilltop, once home to two biblical Jewish Temples, is now the location of the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine. Thursday was the annual day of fasting and mourning for the destruction of the Temples by invading armies." :: This report is a bit late, but I did want to note it. Activity on and around the Temple Mount is always prophetically important.

Google News Alerts
This is just a quick aside, but those of you who follow the news (and you would not be here if you didn't) may be interested in this new service from the good folks at Google. All you have to do is give them a topic you want to follow, tell them how often you want to get an alert, and then give them your e-mail address, and they will then alert you everytime your keyword is mentioned in online news.

Believer Murdered, Pastor Clubbed in South India
Christian Aid Mission reports, "Hindu extremists clubbed a Christian believer to death in Karnataka state recently, beat another pastor till he was unconscious, and then hindered relatives from conducting Christian burials. Even though Karnataka itself does not yet have an anti-conversion law, the presence of an anti-conversion law adopted last fall in neighboring Tamil Nadu-and similar laws in four northern states of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh-is thought to have lent a permissive atmosphere for such violence."

Stealing The Internet
The Tom Pain public interest journal reports, "The Internet as we know it is being hijacked, warn two leading digital democracy defenders. If telecom giants have their way, Americans will soon be paying for net use by volume, and every move will be part of a grand marketing scheme." The marketing bothers me, of course, I hate pop up ads as much as the next guy, but what really worries me is the monitoring that is required for advertisers to set rates and for businesses to assess the value of a web property. They have a monetary interest in knowing who is visiting a web site, and when, and from where. It will be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to surf the Internet anonymously. The tools that corporations use to monitor the Internet can also be used by governments, both benign and totalitarian.

A New Era for PGP
ZD reports, "Speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Vegas, PGP pioneer Phil Zimmermann says the dark times are over for the encryption software." This may be merely an interesting tech article for those of us in the West, but for missionaries working in repressive countries like China, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab and Islamic world, the privacy of e-mail communication may be a matter of life and death. If your church is sending missionaries to places where the enemy rules, make sure they are equipped with the latest in e-mail security software.

Keychain Drives Store Files Smartly
AP reports, "In our rich media world of digital music and photography, flash memory has replaced the floppy disk as king of portable storage. The market is now flush with a bazaar of key chain storage devices that use it." Portable memory for your Trib Force, and who knows, perhaps those Saudi customs officials won't know your keychain contains a Bible.

Secret Networks Protect Music Swappers
CNN reports, "They are the country clubs of the file-sharing world, exclusive Internet networks that require knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique." I wonder if this strategy would help missionaries sharing the gospel in countries that repress Internet communication?

Biblical Studies Foundation
Here is a great resource that came to me from the Christian Website e-mail list that I'm on. According to their recommendation, "The Biblical Studies Foundation is a non-profit organization founded for the purpose of distributing sound, evangelical Bible study materials in electronic format so those with small personal libraries or without access to a local Bible college or seminary library, etc., may have access to sound biblical studies from their home.

New GPS handheld hunts for customers
ZD Tech News reports, "Garmin, a maker of global positioning system devices, has begun shipping its first PDA. It hopes to create a new niche for the slumping handheld industry." :: Every on-the-go TF team should probably get one of these. Or not. I know, I love tech toys, but sometimes a good map works just as well, right?

Senate pulls plug on computer dragnets
According to this report from ZDNet Tech News: "The U.S. Senate votes to cut off funding for a computer-surveillance program that would comb credit-card bills and other private records to sniff out suspected terrorists." TIA RIP?

Video cameras will monitor plane passengers  
According to this report from WorldNetDaily: "Airline to keep customers under constant surveillance, record faces." Think about how much of the LB series has to do with flying, pilots and airports, all of that would have to be reconsidered in light of new surveillance technology.

Funding for TIA All But Dead
According to this Wired News report, "The Senate inserts a provision to a key bill that denies all funding to the Terrorist Information Awareness effort. It's a move that would make it much more difficult for the Pentagon to try to establish its massive data-mining spy network." Big Brother loses one, amazing.

Cell Phone Calls Flying High
According to this Wired News report, "A Colorado company is working on a device that would let airline passengers use their cell phones during flight. But, as on the ground, cell-phone calls in yet one more public place could ruffle feathers. By Elisa Batista." Buck would use this all the time I bet.

New Kind of Snooping Arrives at the Office
According to this New York Times report, "Employers have stepped up their surveillance of employees, often using stealth techniques to peer deep into their computer use. :: I looked into this some time ago and found that this is all perfectly legal, you should assume that you have no privacy at all in the workplace. Many people use their office computers for personal business because the connections are often faster than what you have at home. What you need to realize is that your company IT manager is probably keeping a log of all employee Internet activity. This includes e-mail as well as sites visited. So, you can see, that if companies can do this in the United States, how much more can governments hostile to the spread of the gospel (like China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, etc.) do to monitor the Internet activity of citizens. It is only a matter of having the righty spyware.