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I take it you've never heard of ECHELON?

I mean... c'mon. Everyone knows that at least one third party was already listening in on those conversations anyways. What's the surprise that someone else figured out a cheaper way to do it? That's just good geeks at work trying to impress the bean counters over at the GAO.

Note to self: two tinfoil hat posts in one sitting... I need to cut back on the Mt. Dews after lunchtime

Wiretapping also works: the Al Qaeda cell in Italy that was planning to outdo 9-11 was caught by wiretapping.

And it has been around and known about for some time. Talk about late breaking news.

Here are a couple of links about it. Hell, one of them is from Wikipedia...

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
• http://www.echelonwatch.org/

This illegal spying and stuff has been going on since before bush was in office. Actually it isn't illegal either but that another story.

We have always had agreements with other countries to spy and tap phone conversations. If something interesting is found they alert the proper authorities. This was automated around 1997 and now key words are caught and automated recording takes place. Typically, our agreements with the other countries allow them to collect the data on US citizens while we collect on their citizens. This gives the appearance of the government not having to deal with the constitution.

This project is commonly refereed to as Echelon Here is a tad bit more info on it

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized spying and searches in terrorist/national security and other related matters regardless of the nationality or location of the person(s) being spied on. Originally this act intended for a court consisting of around 11 members to approve the actions. This court regularly reports to congress. Unfortunately (fortunately depending on your outlook), in 1979, President Carter decided that under certain circumstances could allow government officials to bypass these procedures. This was probably a reaction to the hostage crisis during his term. President Clinton expanded this a little in '95. Bush using the processes from these executive orders changed the policy being used to take advantage of them. Unlike Carter and Clinton, his provision were made into law by provisions in the patriot act.. Your probably right in that these executive orders go against the constitution but until they are successfully challenged, they are law and therefore legal. (That doesn't mean it rite though.)

As for the ban on torture loophole? I think you are misreading somethign here. All this deal did was say that interrogators accused of using improper methods could offer as a defense that they were acting on orders that a reasonable person would believe to be lawful. This doesn't mean that i could order you to starve a person until they talk and you would get away with it. What it does say is that if an order is lawful to a reasonable person you can use that as a defense. This means if i order you to wake the prisoner at different time in the night to disrupt thier sleeping habits and confuse them, as long as a reasonable person wouldn't consider that torture, you wouldn't get in trouble. Imunity isn't even mentioned either. This is a purposed bill too, it hasn't made it's way into law and needs to be cleared with debate before it becomes law.

I know it is fun to bash Bush and the current administration. People always do it when thier party isn't in control. Lets be honest here and bash him for stuff that needs to be bashed. Saying we can toruture people even though existing law says we cannot is stretching the truth a bit. This doen't mean it hasn't happend and if it did, those resoncible should be presecuted. Saying ilegal wire taps or ilegal spying isn't being truthfull either. The facilities that made it possible were put in place well before bush or his cronies came to power. Under current law, regular law enforcment have to get permision from a judge (well except for patriot act provisions). But we can see were government officials aren't held to that law unnder certain circumstances. Is it right that government officials can spy on it's citizens without going thru the regular chanels? Probably not but that doesn't mean it is not legal.

In case anyone is wondering, executive

We use Startup Monitor and ZoneAlarm Security Suite software firewall. The newest ZA pops up a window the first time anything suspicious happens. It's a big problem convincing users to report the ZA popups, but if they do, Windows is much safer.

However, it's a losing battle. The problem is that Microsoft makes more money if its operating systems self-destruct. What you call "vulnerabilities" billionaires call "maximizing shareholder value".

If rich people sold good operating systems, poor people would not buy the next upgrade.

Using an operating system is like having a partner in your business. If it is a Microsoft OS, your "partners" want some things that are bad for you. If you use Linux or BSD, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief; your partners want what you want.

It's absurd that governments of countries use Microsoft products. It's even absurd that state governments in the U.S. use Microsoft products. The U.S. federal government spends more money on world-wide surveillance than any country in the history of the world. Exploiting computer systems is now one of the biggest new frontiers in surveillance.

The U.S. government's Echelon surveillance system watches everyone all the time. (Echelon quote: "Since the close of World War II, the US intelligence agencies have developed a consistent record of trampling the rights and liberties of the American people.")

The biggest discretionary expense of the U.S. government is the cost of war. The president and the vice-president of the U.S. are people who themselves and their families and friends made their money through oil and weapons. Is it any wonder that the price of oil is so high and we have war?

When a country uses Microsoft operating systems, it effectively has the U.S. government as one of its partners. Given the present climate of corruption and conflict of interest and adversarial behavior and using war as a justification for anything, why do countries want the U.S. government and U.S. billionaires as partners?

If volunteers can make a secure operating system ("Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!") is it difficult to believe that the amazing number of vulnerabilities we've seen in Windows are deliberately allowed?

The ACLU has a fairly comprehensive, albeit slightly out of date, site dedicated to ECHELON.

I'm sure, almost POSITIVE that Echelon reads SMS messages in the US. They don't censor them, but I'm sure if you're up to something they notify authorities. How else will they achieve the New American Century?
I'm sure they have tons of backup plans. Including ... yes you know.

Sharks with freakin ... yes we know.

Link here

Echelon. Supposedly able to tap into any conversation, email, etc etc and hunt out keywords like "bomb", "president". http://www.echelonwatch.org/

The US has a long history using it's combined power of trade, diplomacy and intelligence/espionage to further it's goals and the goals of it's private corporation.

(Disclaimer: links below are from various Google searches and are there to give context. They do not necessarily express my views, or even agree with me.)

Echeleon was used in corporate espionage to benefit private US corporation, to the detriment of corporations from US allies.

The US complained to the WTO about the EU policy of banning genetically modified foods. The issue is not yet fully resolved, but looks like the EU must eventually let GM-foods in. US companies are very strong in GM-foods and gene technology in general.

The US (and the EU, Japan and others) oppose a developing nation's right the apply protectionistic economic policies. That's, IMHO, what's really behind the Cancun failure and the Singapore issues (PDF). It's also two-faced, disgusting and imperialistic as about anything in the world today.

The US is using strongarm tactics in exporting it's brand of copyright laws.

The US has by no means limited it's interference to humans rights or other laudable goals. To suggest so it at best naive, but maybe "willfully ignorant to the point of being harmful to the world around" would be closer.

--Flam

I'll remember that when I watch the fireworks the next fourth of July. For all the good it will do me.

Evidently I don't have enough privacy rights to stop the government from searching through my library records, seeing what books I buy, or reading my emails in the name of stopping terrorism (and doing so without a court order). Thanks to the patriot act.

Then there is Total Information Awareness reborn which is the marrying of commercial and government databases to rob me of even more privacy, and echelon.

So privacy is a nice idea, but unfortunately, that is all that it is.

Our government is out of control in more ways than one.

Echelon

Why still haven't we heard any news inside the US about ECHELON?

This is Echelon. And yes, they do fall in the tin foil hat catagory.

Perhaps the term "prolific" isn't referring to scale, but to percentage or per-capita tapping. ...BTW, what about echelon?

Who's to say it's not really happening?
I'm indifferent to it, and was just offering a possible explanation for the OP not wanting to use the ISP's mail server as smarthost.

If however, you are like most people, and you do draw a line between public and private information about yourself, then Google's innovative strategies combined with its overwhelming market share make it a privacy time bomb just waiting to explode. If Microsoft were behind Google, much of the world would be up in arms (Remember NT's supposed NSA Backdoor?) No so with Google. Strangely, perhaps because Google actually works pretty well and isn't laced with bugs that allow viruses to damage your home computer, no one makes a fuss.

In the recent years the public has sometimes been shocked to learn about some of the side effects that our technological progress has brought. Organizations combining data from multiple databases (for 'marketing' purposes) and technologies such as license plate recognition make possible a 'technical utopia' that Big Brother could only have dreamed about.

This combined with the hightened fear of terrorism and the corresponding (over-)reaction by governments has led to a information gathering infrastructure that is unique in world history. In the post 9/11 world there has been increasing pressure from the American government on organizations and companies (from your local library to European airlines) to forward all types to information to 'the authorities'. Google is most likely just one more intelligence source, though in all probablilty a highly valuable one, in the war against terrorism.

Suspicions that Google has 'ties' with the NSA was published in Slashdot (Should You Fear Google?) last Febuary. After reading some of the comments associated with that article, one begins to wonder if Goggle is just the Internet arm of the Echelon project.

While each tenticle pulling at our privacy is relatively harmless by itself, the combined affect of the multiple attacks on our personal privacy is large and disturbing. Worse still, is that we have only ourselves blame. Our very own democratic governments encourage and protect the individuals and organizations that are attempting to implement these policies. And largely because of own our ignorance and apathy, we don't raise our voices against it.

It's like comparing the public's reaction to a government proposal to mandate the installation of ID chips in its citizens, which causes a massive outcry, vs. parents desire to install the same chips in their children, because of their fear of abductions. The end result may be the same, but in the second case we did it to ourselves.

I guess the moral is that we should just be a bit more aware of what we're doing, and a bit more willing to say 'no'. While the current western decomcratic governments probably do 'have our best interests at heart', what happens when some unsavory character sells or gives this information to our enemies, or worse our government is no longer domocratic and becomes our enemy?

Welcome to the USA/UK pact. It's illegal in both countries for the inteligence communities to spy on their own citizens. We spy on yours, you spy on ours, data exchanged, problem solved.

Or have we found a Slashdotter that isn't aware of Echelon. Surely not!!

If you do, you already have this sort of thing. Sure, you need to hold the card 6 inches from the panel for it to open the door, however it can register the presence of a card over a much longer distance. So, that ID badge you already carry could be doing just this sort of thing. It all depends on how the system was configured.

But, this isn't all that new anyway. Mobile phones have been able to do similar things for quite some time. Take this high profile rape case in the UK, where a couple were cleared of criminal charges using mobile phone location evidence.

Hell, while we are talking about the complete loss of privacy in todays society, I might as well throw in this link to an official European Union report into the routine monitoring of the internet and telephone networks by Echelon.

This new thing isn't anything to fear. You should be scared already.

The software for this task is called echelon

sig-fault

This is TERRIBLE news!!

How do I know the government or my company isn't going to start another one of those survellence projects like echelon or carnivore to filter through the flushed documents!? I'd have to eat the printed TP to make sure sensitive information didn't fall into the wrong hands! And what if I'm alergic to the ink!?

Wait! If they have web browsers in the john, the government can use carnivore to track my movements! I stopped using my cellphone and pager when I heard about echelon, now I have to hold it 'til I get home!?

Oh, wait! If I just don't use the TP, they won't know I was there! Hahahha!! But this is still bad news... I'll have to put up with the guy in the next stall surfing to [profitable websites] and *censored* while I'm trying to have my necessary "discussion" with mother nature...

...mustn't forget to put the tinfoil under my hat today...

IANAL, however from reading various court decision it has been standard that the courts have said that people working for, or asked by the police to do something are working for the police.
For example the police cannot ask someone to break into a house and look for something illegal, but if the person was breaking into the house, say just to rob it, found and it and reported that to the police it would be legal. In wiretapping laws you have example where people have taped stuff themselves and gave a copy to the police and that was legal, however if the police gave the recording gear or did something mroe then just say "Bring us evidence before we can do something more" then the people have been judged as acting as an agent of the police and it was illegal.
Another comparision that could be made would be to echelon where it is reported that Government A collects info on citizens of Government B, since it would be illegal for B to collect it, then since B did not actively seek out the info they could legally use the info. However I don't know of any court cases where people have been tried on echelon produced evidence. Does anyone have some?
BTW
Before the patriate I law it was illegal for the government to use some public forms of information gathering to get information on a person, such as a search on Google. While under current law they allowed to use some publicly available info, alot is still prevented with a judges orders.

Or have we all forgotten echelon?

Somebody has already mentioned the purvasive CCTV camera that make the UK the most visually monitored country in history.

And it's been proven to reduce crime, and help crime detection, high profile cases like the murder of Jamie Bulger show how CCTV can be extremely helpful, and outweighs any paranoia concerns about being watched while in public. When CCTV is fitted into every home, then we'll complain, not before.

What about the partial criminalization of encryption under the RIP Act? You have to give the government your key if they demand it, otherwise 2 years in prison. The governement has sought, and obtained, powers to monitor e-mail, web usage and phone calls without judicial warrants.

How is being asked to hand over your key, any different to being asked to open your safe on production of a warrant ? Do search warrants mean locks and safes "are partially criminal "?
As for monitoring email, web usuage and so on, the Americans have that field completely sewn up.

The private right of gun ownership has been substantially destroyed in the past several years (with a concurrent rise in violent crime, including a rapid rise in gun use by criminals).

Don't even go there. We WANT tight gun laws, we don't want a gun in every bed side drawer culture. For more information see these comments.

People now go to jail in the UK for so- called "hate speech".

And you can't yell fire in a theatre despite having "free speech". Personally I'm in favour of not being able to say "blacks go home" "Jews faked the holocaust and are all money obssessed thieves" "Muslims are a lower form of life". The law came into force, because racial minorities were being harrassed with verbal abuse morning noon and night by British racists. Your right to free speech ends when it is designed to harm me, just as yelling fire in a theatre is illegal.

What has broken their will, I don't know--years of inept socialist rule? Some post-colonial ennui? Too much spotted dick?

Nice troll, we spent the best part of 2 decades under hard right rule with Thatcher, so spare me the brits are commies crap. As for breaking our will, we broke the governments will over expanding data access laws last year , and over 5000 people wrote and complained about ID cards this year.

It seems to me that Paine is correct after all. Any government, no matter how well set up, is a double-edged sword. Unfortunately, his dream for American democracy is dead. In it's place is the old adage, Might Makes Right. Money, it seems, is not without its drawbacks. We as a nation are still dealing with the affects of the Industrial Revolution: an era which marked the rise of the corporation, and a proportional decline of U.S. democracy.

Our legislature is bribed into passing laws that are not only unconstitutional, but also demonstrate an unconscionable degree of avarice. Our Courts, charged with the review of the law to determine its constitutionality, have declined to remove this blight from our lawbooks. Jefferson was understandably worried about creating a political machine which has so little room for direct democratic participation.

And what are we left with? A legislature more interested in furthering the interests of the multinational corporation then the general Public? An executive branch that has asserted autocratic powers (For Further Reading)? Law enforcement that has a careless disregard for the law? And a supreme court which is derelict in its duty? Something must be done to restore the American way, and put power back where it belongs: in the hands of the people. Paine would say that it is inevitable-- violations of the 'natural law' concerning government do not go uncorrected. As computer techs, we should understand this. When something is broken, you fix it. What we need is a debugger!

I wish to note however, that you do not use a sledgehammer on a PC that doesn't work, nor do you perform any unnecessary drive reformats. In this manner, I do not advocate a use of physical force to solve our current dilemma. (There ECHELON, you can rest easy now.)

It is with no small irony that I choose to quote from an author whose works are in the public domain. Copyright does not mean, "eternal money," nor does it mean, "absolute power." Unfortunately, there are some people that construe it as such.

An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.

That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM (another URL) project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.

On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com presumably claims to have All The Web.

Project Echelon has been around a long time, since 1971, although its capacity has been greatly expanded in recent years. There were a number of exposes about this back in 1998-1999 timeframe. For a good overview see the FAQ and other stuff at Echelon Watch.

How is Internet or any TCP comnmunication different than a real phone, or a letter ? As far as I can tell to watch over and tap your phone or letter authroity need a special judge writing. So why suddenly Internet which is only another form of communication , is soooo different that it need to be surveyed in real time ?

Ahhh... but the phone is surveyed in real time ;-)

So let me see if I have this right.

The US Military want to prosecute somebody for doing something they've been doing for years ?

Clearly though the idea that Echelon can hoover up phone/emails and record/scan them is just so much hooey, as I always thought it was. Reassuring in a way.

Wish I didn't have to be so cynical, but I have this gut feeling the next press release will be how NA signed a multimillion deal with the NSA/FBI for this new product.

Where are the telescreens?
FBI and CIA spyware in the forms of Magic Lantern, Carnivore and Echelon just for starters. Your computer may not be forced to be on all the time, but it sure is two-way and it sure is possible for it to be used to spy on you and probably is via carnivore every time you send or receive email.

The secret police everywhere? The most obvious example of the increased powers of the secret police is the mendaciously named "USA PATRIOT Act" which has been criticized from the right, the left and just about every other leaning as well.

The cameras that monitor my every move?
Tampa, Boston, Orlando, Washington DC are all places with cameras in public areas like sports arenas, streets and airports watching and recording everyone that passes in their field of view. Then there are the traffic cameras that have been installed all across the nation from DC to Hawaii. Plus, don't forget, big business's contribution to Big Brother's campaign - the survelliance camera which you can count on recording your every move inside (and out) of almost any corporate owned retail establishment. That one doesn't even need a link they are so ubiquitous.

So, you see see, even your vain attempt to set up a strawman does not do the problem justice. We are a nation of cowards who long ago sacrificied our liberties for a few ineffective promises of security - if anything the terrorist attack on 9/11 is proof of that. So what do we let our government do? Even more of the same ineffective, yet terribly stiffling, practices that hurt the common man and do so very little to prevent further attacks. Previously each sacrifice was just one small change, hardly anything to be concerned about, but since 9/11 in the degree of the slope has taken a huge curve downward.

P.S. If you think the class of politicians and lawyers are even close to being equal citizens of the state with the average Joe, you are the raving lunatic. Either that, or a member of the privilged elite yourself with a blind eye towards the real state of the nation. If you can't believe that, just take a look at the benefits of being a member of the ruling class in Washington - no mandatory social security - they have their own plan with better returns and more guarantees - they are exempt from the federal fair labor practices laws - they have (good!)health insurance for life as well as a huge pension for life, even after serving only one term. It's a nice gig if you can get it.

They have. Especially corporations whose trade secrets are stolen. The tool is
Echelon.

The US has been using Echelon to conduct economic warfare against the EU, and the Swedish government weren't too happy when Novell sold them a 'secure encryption' system for confidential use within their government only to find 40-bits out of each 80-bit key escrowed with the NSA. We all know about Microsoft collaboration. The attacks on the EU haven't just hit home in Germany and Sweden but also many other EU countries. France, upon the evidence presented to them on Echelon, did a 180-degree turn on their encryption policy and went from a ban on all encryption to an immediate allowance of strong encryption for anyone for any use. I think we may well see a government push towards open source in the EU except for the UK. The UK hosts many of the spy stations used against our EU neighbours, and in return the USA throws us a few intelligence scraps when they feel like it.

Back on topic, it's interesting to see Bush throwing up the threat of foriegn nuclear weapons as the next excuse to distract attention from his domestic failure. Does he think his pathetic scare stories will drag us back to our Cold War paranoia? Will we then give him a free hand to attack the first on his long list of peeves, Iraq?

And finally can people please stop referring to Pakinstan as a "nuclear superpower" unless they provide evidence the rest of us don't know about. The last report on Pakistan nuclear testing I saw said that their "nuclear bomb" test was the equivalent destructive power of a large lump of TNT and seismologist have shown their tests yielded nothing like their government claims.

Phillip.

> Then they must use some hybrid approach: human editors and AI

Well, there's the implied assumption here that the people running this surveillance operate with standard hardware, where standard means something google, altavista, lycos, etc. can get their hands on. Sketchy information suggests that they do not; specialised hardware seems to be the order of the day.

Besides, there's a lot of research going on in terms of context recognition, here to name one place.

There's nothing new in a government monitoring such phone calls. Hasn't anyone heard of Echelon or Carnivore?

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but we can pretty much assume that it goes on all the time if you don't use strong encryption for your communications. The only thing unusual about Australia in this regard is firstly that this sort of intelligence gets mentioned publicly and secondly we Australians are very good at whipping up one-sided outrage in the national media.

In the same vein, Slashdot has a nasty tendency to go with the "Australians do it again" angle every time that nation is mentioned. "Australia" translates directly to "privacy issue" in the lexicon of Slashdot-level understanding.

Whereas the American government reads a lot (some say 90%) of internet traffic with it's "it doesn't exist, honest" system, Echelon. And then there's the one it does admit, Carnivore. And there the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

In fact, they've been zipping all of the Internet content for years with their Echelon technology. Every e-mail, webpage, Slashdot post etc. is currently stored on a half-full CDROM that every NSA employee carries a copy of.

How long until this little app ends up on a PC that is not on US soil? Will some foreign nation be able to make an offical-issue of this? It seems like the FBI might not be thinking this through.

... then again, there is Echelon.... apparently no one minds...

The French don't trust their citizens and for years banned all encryption (except some businesses, with them having to hand over keys). They may have, as you allege, used the intelligence in an underhand way. However, I think your reason for 'relaxing' their stance on encryption is mistaken, or only part of the reason. Upon discovering all about Echelon, and the extent to which the USA have been gathering intelligence on French business (and allegedly lost billions due to NSA handing key data for US businesses), it brought about the greatest 180 degree turn in crypto politics seen to date. From a complete ban to full support of strong encryption, with the encouragement of open-source software. To think things had steadily been improving since this article 2 years ago. It would be a blow to the memories of those lost if their sacrifice failed to make the world a better place.

Phillip.

"Data protection is an oxymoron" - David Rushkoff

Personally I feel that the thought of living in a "free world" was killed off long ago at the inception of government. Call me a loon conspiracy theorist if you will, but again let's look at the reality of tracking: Facial Recognition in Tampa, ease of tunnel toll devices to track speeding, Echelon, Digital Angel, and the countless others. So why does would anyone want a chip in government? My thoughts on this would be simple, they expect to catch tax cheats and criminals with it, however what's going to be done when we live in a society where we've become drones who can't think for ourselves?

Take a look at what the Secret Service did to Gold Age, a raid with no charges all because they cannot monitor what people do with their currency, which scares Big Brother since they don't have control of the situation at any given time.

Is monitoring currency good for you? No because of the abuse that could take place behind it. What happens to a business man say Bill Gates should he have an affair and pass some cash (which until now is untraceable, sure there's serial numbers but that wouldn't work) to say a call girl. Can you imagine the joy in someone's eye should they feel like blackmailing Bill because they tracked him. Sure it's not right to cheat but open your eyes and get an honest look at where things could go.

For those who want a lesson in politics and money I suggest reading "The End of Ordinary Money

Echelon Watch

Society > Issues > Human Rights and Liberties > Privacy

Definition of the word echelon

This would be Echelon.

Funny they didn't mention it in the article. (but then again they rarely do.)

Read more at cryptome.org.

Its interesting to me that the anti-authority script kiddies are going to eventually be the reason and the justification for the authorities monitoring everything we do online.

Ever hear of Echelon?

As president, how would you protect our rights as citizens to personal privacy, whether it be internet-related, or not? For example, on the most extreme end, how do you feel about suggestions regarding requiring DNA samples from anyone who is arrested for any reason (advocated by the International Association of Chiefs of Police) to taking DNA samples from all newborns (an idea floated by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).

On a seemingly less intrusive note, also related to personal privacy are new proposed Federal Communication Commission rules which seem to be designed to empower the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the SEC's plan to create an internet snoop system to "monitor fraud"? And finally, what is your opinion of Echelon?

If you re-read my message, I said suppose my e-mail is to a friend elsewhere in Europe - that is Europe-Europe communications. Please pay attention!

My mistake, but I still don't think there's any expectation of European law applying if the message leaves the US, even in transit.

If you think I am naive, you are mistaken. I have been involved in datacomms in the UK for 15 years.

I'm sorry, that was partly because I misread your message regarding the Australia thing.

Also, for your information, governments tend to take a DIM view on other governments snooping on their citizens.

I didn't say that no government would care about this spying by the US; indeed, many have complained. Rather, I said that yours and mine (US and UK) don't care. This is the case because our countries have been in a joint spying venture since 1952. I'm not aware of the UK government complaining to the US about spying, or vice versa. See ECHELON Watch for more information on what I'm talking about.

Well, the NSA applied for a
patent , for a device... or mechanism, that takes conversations, and basically summarizes the topics of those coversations. Now, the significance of this is that they can basically use highly advanced speech recogition software(are you saying the NSA wouldn't be able to attain/develop such a thing!?!... much more developed than any commercial software) to catalog coversations, use this device that has been patented to summarize the topic of the conversation, and if it has anything to do with bomb, terrorism, or any other keywords, then it would notify the proper authorities.

Of course, my whole view on the NSA-Echelon situation is... my life is pretty boring... so if the NSA wants to spy on me and others to prevent terrorism, so be it.

Oh, and by the way, the website i found the link for the patent is ACLU's Echelonwatch.... i still think there should be a ACLUWatch though =).

Folks:

Two years ago reasonable and informed people could (and did) doubt Echelon's existence. But today if you doubt Echelon's existence, then clearly you haven't been paying attention. Duncan Campbell is the man who blew the lid off Echelon, and his report in all of its detailed and independently substantiated glory is available for free on his web page.

The EchelonWatch page by the ACLU is another good source with current news.

Regards,
Zooko