Asia Times: NIPPON: Who's your software guru?



	March 2, 2000	atimes.com

Japan

NIPPON: Who's your software guru?
By Bradley Martin

Now that the Y2K bug concerns are more or less past, with some leap-year glitches reported in Japan on February 29, but nothing catastrophic, maybe we need something even scarier to worry about.

Ponder the news that five companies run by Aum Supreme Truth - the bizarre cult that staged the deadly sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways in 1995 - have developed software for Japanese government organizations including the Defense Agency and for such private companies as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.

Reporting the story in Wednesday's editions, Yomiuri Shimbun said the buyers hadn't realized whom they were dealing with. In many cases that was because the Aum companies were involved as subcontractors, one or more levels removed from the original contracts the buyers had signed. The Aum-backed companies won contracts and subcontracts by quoting prices as much as 30 percent below the going rate.

When investigators raided the five companies on Tuesday, one thing they found was a floppy disk in which personnel data on several thousand employees of a major company were stored. The authorities are trying to find out if any other secret information was compromised.

In any case, the news underlines a warning last June by a respected former law enforcement figure that Japan is extremely vulnerable to attacks by ''cyberterrorists''. According to a June 29 report by Wired News, Raisuke Miyawaki, former head of the organized crime unit in the National Police Agency, told a Washington seminar that the country suffers from ''a lack of technology knowledge and a leadership void'' and should compensate by forming an ''emergency cybercorps''.

According to Wednesday's Yomiuri report, the Defense Agency said one of the new systems of the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force, or army, was found to have been installed by Aum-related companies. This is not the system that handles classified defense information, the agency said. Rather, it's a system tying together 20 army garrisons' networks for Internet and e-mail access. Nevertheless, the GSDF will not use the system immediately but check to see whether security has been compromised.

Aum software companies' customers included some 80 private companies, Yomiuri said. The systems they bought included management systems to keep track of salespeople and clients. In addition, buying systems of various sorts were about10 government offices including the ministries of construction, education and posts & telecommunications.

The five companies together go under the name M Group. (That Japanese M Group is not related in any way to Thailand's M Group, the publisher of the Thai business daily Phuchatkarn [Manager] and former publisher of Asia Times.)

The Aum M Group companies employ some 40 Aum believers who are engineers, some of them graduates of top universities and/or former employees of non-Aum computer-related companies, according to Yomiuri.

Even before the extent of Aum's software enterprises became known, it was widely known that the cult used computer sales companies as a cash cow. Mainichi Shimbun last June reported on two companies described after a tax audit as ''the hub of the cult's computer sales network''.

Police and tax officials said then that Aum was earning around 7 billion yen a year selling computers from seven retail shops in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. In that case, just as in the software case, the Aum edge was in pricing - its goods were selling for some 20 percent less than comparable goods from other shops. ''Authorities suspect that the shops can sell goods cheaper because the cult can hire its followers as employees at very low cost,'' said Mainichi.

One Aum company then was called Poseiden and operated a shop called Trisal in Tokyo's Akihabara electric town, selling computer parts at discount. Another Aum company, a wholesaler then known as SBR, had changed its name twice in the previous year, the paper quoted authorities as saying.

Aum denied any connection to computer stores, including an SBR-run shop called Hyper City. But Mainichi reported the telling detail that the cabinet there where employees stored their shoes after entering the shop included one cubbyhole labeled saitaishi, or great teacher. Sataishi at the time was the second highest rank in Aum, right under leader Asahara.

Aum has long been a relatively wired group. Some of its computer-related businesses are a decade or more old. It was suspected of using Internet forums to pass instructions, chemistry lessons and warnings of police investigations around the time of the nerve-gas attacks on subway riders, long before the Net started to catch on with the population as a whole. Aum's software companies, according to the Yomiuri story, used both telephone and Internet sales promotions to win many of the contracts that were revealed on Tuesday.

The subway attacks in March 1995 killed 12 people and injured many more. The cultists who carried out the attack later revealed that they had been taught the world was coming to an end.

Aum in January changed its name (to Aleph) and deposed Asahara, its jailed leader. Now it claims it has reformed and has no violent intent. But few Japanese are willing to stake their lives on the veracity of that claim. Most find it alarming that Aum continues to lure new, often well-educated recruits. Many Japanese fear further murderous mischief.

It's not illegal to be a member of Aum. After the sarin attacks the authorities in Japan feared that too tough a crackdown would be seen as a return to the pre-1945 days of the militarists' ''thought police''. But popular fear and loathing nevertheless have required various official actions to make life uncomfortable for active Aum cultists. Last August, for example, the Air Self-Defense Force reported it had given two sergeants who were Aum members doing ''repair work'' the choice of leaving the cult or resigning from the service. They chose the latter.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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