U.S. Bound Flights Cancelled; Special Counsel Named for White House Leak; Site of Electronic Voting Firm Hacked

U.S. Bound Flights Cancelled

Europe’s biggest airline, British Airways (BA), canceled a London-Washington flight (BA223) today as security fears grounded a U.S.-bound plane for the seventh time in just over a week, according to a Reuters report this morning. It was the second day running that a BA flight from London to Dulles International was cancelled. The BBC News Online reports that, when asked what kind of security alert led to the flight being cancelled, BA said: “It is that particular flight that there are issues with, not the passengers.” The plane’s return flight from Washington to the U.K., flight BA222, has also been cancelled. On New Year’s Eve the plane was escorted in to Washington by fighter jets, with officials searching the plane and questioning passengers for hours. In other airline news, according to an AP report in The Arizona Daily Sun today, an Aeromexico flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles on Wednesday was canceled because of U.S. concerns that it was terrorism risk, a spokesman for Mexico’s president said yesterday. Late Thursday, the U.S. Embassy released a statement saying that the Mexican government decided to cancel the flight “in close consultation with the United States.” It said the decision was based on “credible intelligence information.” Special Counsel Named for White House LeakUPI report, Deputy Attorney General James Comey also told reporters that Attorney General John Ashcroft had withdrawn from supervising the investigation. Ashcroft had come under criticism that his supervision of the process would be a conflict of interest. The husband of the exposed CIA agent, a former U.S. ambassador, has said administration sources improperly revealed the name of his wife to Washington reporters in political retaliation for his criticism of Iraq policy.

A special counsel from inside the Justice Department will conduct an independent investigation of alleged White House leaks last summer that revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent, a top department official said earlier this week. Revealing such information could be a felony when it is disclosed by federal employees with access to national security matters. According to a

Site of Electronic Voting Firm HackedCNN story posted on Monday. Chief executive of VoteHere Inc., Jim Adler, said he was confident the company knew the identity of its hacker and had already turned over “megabytes of evidence” to the FBI and Secret Service. It also repaired the hole in its computer network the intruder used to gain entry over the Internet, he said. U.S. authorities are investigating the October break-in. Adler believes the person is linked to the debate over the security of electronic voting, and may be tied to the theft in March of internal documents from Diebold Election Systems of Canton, Ohio. Adler said the intruder accessed internal corporate documents and may have copied sensitive “source code,” blueprints for software. Adler also said the privately held company disclosed the federal investigation to stress that the break-in did not affect the integrity of its voting technology.

A company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online, according to a