As you've probably heard, the directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, moved the minute hand of its famed "Doomsday Clock" forward by two minutes.

A group of scientists from the University of Chicago conceived the clock in 1948, three years after the U.S. introduced the world to nuclear weapons by using them on Japan. It was the scientists' warning to the world about the destructive power of the atomic bombs they had created. Eugene Rabinowitch, one of the cofounders of the Bulletin, wrote, "The Bulletin's Clock is not a gauge to register the ups and downs of the international power struggle; it is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions."

The clock hands are now positioned at five minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has come since the end of the Cold War. The statement released yesterday by the Board of Advisors of the Bulletin began:

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices."

Although the world's stockpile of nuclear bombs is lower than it was at its peak of 65,000 in 1986, there are still an estimated 27,000 in the world. And 26,000 of these are in the hands of the United States and Russia, and another 1,000 or so are held by Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea.

As noted in the announcement by the Bulletin, each of the 27,000 warheads now in existence has 8 to 40 times the destructive force that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In that relatively small explosion, 100,000 people were killed. Just fifty of today's nuclear weapons could kill 200 million people. Man clearly has the power to destroy all life on the planet.

Society has Armageddon in its power, but is it possible for it to "adjust its basic attitudes and institutions?" Possible, yes. Anything is possible that does not violate a law of nature. There is no law of nature yet discovered that says intelligent life in the universe must commit suicide.

Therefore, if mankind is in danger of destroying itself, there must be deeply-ingrained attitudes and institutions in society that are wrong. If not, society would not still be in danger of self-extinction more than half a century after the danger of nuclear weapons was so gruesomely demonstrated.

I believe the erroneous belief that has kept the Doomsday Clock set so close to midnight all these years is a belief that the state is an absolute necessity for the functioning of society, and that all individuals must submit to its authority. Yet, the state itself was the mechanism that both developed the weapons of mass destruction, and keeps the world in continuous danger of Armageddon. The state.

Will the clock advance to midnight? Will mankind destroy itself? Very possibly. But if, by chance or by luck, it does not, it will be because enough individuals recognized the terminal danger of empowering governments with sovereignty. In a world in which sovereign individuals controlled their own lives and fortunes, there would be no nuclear weapons, and no need for a Doomsday Clock.

JOHN PUGSLEY, Chairman 

In 2005, The New York Times revealed that President Bush had signed a secret executive order in 2002 giving the super-secret National Security Administration authority to monitor international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people suspected of having terrorist links. This "Terrorist Surveillance Program" bypassed the legal requirement of obtaining a national security wiretap order, as a law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires.

The Terrorist Surveillance Program is plainly illegal under the FISA statute. Violations of this statute are punishable by a five-year prison sentence. Bush claimed FISA doesn't apply in national emergency type situations, and that he has the "inherent presidential authority" to override any statute if the U.S. national interest requires that he do so.

But Wednesday, the Bush administration announced that it would suspend this "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and once again process all national security wiretapping requests through the legal mechanism FISA requires. While there's no doubt this is movement in the right direction-after all, the administration is no longer blatantly ignoring the law-will it have any real effect on the eavesdropping program?

That appears unlikely. The court established by FISA to issue warrants for national security related wiretaps, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, rarely turns down a government request. For instance, in 2005, of the 2,072 wiretap requests made by the Bush administration, the court approved 2,070-and the other two were withdrawn. Essentially, the court is a rubber stamp for surveillance.

And just who might be a terrorist target? Genuine terror suspects, of course, but also many other people who have little or no connection to terrorism. For instance, information released pursuant to Freedom of Information requests indicates the FBI considers peace activists, investigative journalists and even "militant vegetarians" to be potential terrorists. It's hardly a stretch to postulate that the international communications of such individuals might be wiretapped, particularly since amendments to FISA no longer require that national security be the "primary purpose" of a wiretap, as in existing law from 1978 to 2001, but only a "significant purpose" of it.

Most Americans, though, will no doubt be reassured by the appearance of due process in the national security wiretapping apparatus. But in my view, it's mostly smoke and mirrors, form over substance, and the Bush administration will go on wiretapping whoever it pleases, albeit with the connivance of the FISA court.

MARK NESTMANN, Privacy Expert & President of
The Nestmann Group
www.nestmann.com