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'Echelon Study' Released by European Parliament

Posted by Hemos on from the you're-being-watched dept.

ckolar writes, "Duncan Campbell's report on Echelon has been delivered to the European Parliament's committee for Justice and Home Affairs and is available online. " This is the study that was commisioned by the EU - very interesting reading.

5 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Don't Complain Here by 348 · · Score: 5
    Whining and bitching about big brother will achieve nothing. I you are interested in having more of their mission etc. made public, curbed completely or audited, the way to make a little noise and get heard is to write your representative. On the Echelon Watch site, they have an e-mail, letter, and fax engine that all you do is add your name, address etc. and something like this will get mailed.

    As your constituent, I'm writing to ask for your support for a congressional inquiry into a threat to the privacy and civil liberties of all residents of the United States. I've read several credible reports that suggest that the global electronic communications surveillance system -- frequently known by the code name ECHELON -- presents an extreme threat to my privacy and that of other people around the world.

    If you want to free hand your correspondence, get your senator or representatives name, address etc, from their wed site, and send the letter. Complaining on forums such as Slashdot, Attrition or HNN will not accomplish anything in bringing this stuff into the light. Whining on Slashdot only increases your Karma.

    --

    More race stuff in one place,
    than any one place on the net.

  2. related links by ATKeiper · · Score: 5
    Some links relating to the technology related to Echelon can be found in a recent edition of Crypto-Gram.

    Also, there are several related links on the Personal Security page of the Center for the Study of Technology and Society.

    Finally, if you want the wire version of the story, click here.

    Yours,
    A. Keiper
    The Center for the Study of Technoloy and Society

  3. Europe is pissed off by spaceorb · · Score: 5

    And it seems that France in particular has a taste for the fantastic. Microsoft is the NSA's largest customer, and IBM was forced into using DOS by the government?

    France allegedly has its own Echelon, and no doubt that the UK does also. So if they're doing it themselves, why are they so pissed at the US?

  4. The problem with Echelon by jd · · Score: 5
    The biggest problem with Echelon is the people that it's monitoring.

    How so? Well, I've seen several posts suggesting writing to representitives. What good is that going to do? The NSA has refused to even say if the name even means anything to them, under Client - Lawyer privilage. Have you seen Congress push them into saying anything further? One try, and they seem satisfied they've done their part.

    Ok, what about this jamming? As I've said on a number of occasions, NOBODY does interception by keywords. Even IDS systems use pattern-recognition and context-sensitive detectors. Why would one of the largest, most advanced, most brilliant collection of programmers and mathematicians use a simple 'tcpdump | grep'? It makes no sense.

    Ok, so "conventional" jamming won't work, complaining gets nowhere, what CAN you do?

    I'm not going to say people are powerless, because they're not. However, they DO need to be unorthodox. You can't break encryption, if you don't know the algorithm, or possible set of algorithms. Even then, your probability of a false positive goes up considerably, the greater the number of keys and/or algorithms.

    There are a GREAT many encryption algorithms out there, some stronger than others but that's not really the point. If nobody can really tell which algorithm you're using, your effective keylength is equal to the key length of the -LONGEST- key possible, PLUS log2(number of algorithms).

    eg: PGP/GPG uses RSA to encrypt a secret key, but uses a simple secret cypher to encrypt the message itself, using that secret key. If someone modified PGP/GPG to allow you to pick (or have it randomly select) one of, oh, 16 algorithms for the secret encryption, then your effective keylength is equal to 128 + 4 = 132. That's a lot tougher to crack (it'll take 16 times as long) and might well prove too difficult for a real-time system, such as Echelon.

    Even so, I =can= tell you that Echelon is complex. My understanding is that it includes vast arrays of DSP chips embedded in the physical network, for pre-processing. The only hope is to make systems such as IPSec and PGP/GPG sufficiently advanced that one-size-fits-all solutions can't be used effectively.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  5. How to really jam Echelon by burris · · Score: 5
    If you control a Linux box that sits on the net, go right now and get FreeS/WAN and install it. This is a free, open-source implementation of the IP/SEC protocols. Funded by John Gilmore (of Sun, Cygnus, EFF, and DEEP-CRACK fame), this software gives you secure Virtual Private Network support in Linux.

    Set it up and create secure connections between your peers. Very soon it will support automatic keying using DNS-SEC (public keys kept in the DNS database).

    Echelon makes little difference if everyone is using end-to-end transport level strong encryption.

    Burris