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Inside Echelon
kris writes "German magazine Telepolis has an article by Duncan Campbell about Inside Echelon. The article gives a nice overview about what Echelon
is and how it came to be. This article is available in a German Version as well." Somewhat lengthy, and written with an agenda, but very interesting. Although I have to say it's wierd seeing banner ads in german ;)
Here is how the Gov beats hackers. I was there 15 years ago. Without a name it was open knowledge. It was working on voice.
It was an ARPA & NSA joint project.
Why does the Gov win? How many hacker projects are there 15 years in the making? And it was not new 15 years ago.
What is going to be fun is when some hacker finds a way to shove "cue" words into a packet invisibly such that Echelon can be overwhelmed with useless packets.
Remember that a million messages are more than anyone can handle. Give them ten million.
Who has the tarball for the ECHELON@HOME client??
If you look at the network maps (see the article about US and internet a few days ago), you can see that USA is really the only place where the data goes through when going from Europe to Asia, for example.
Now, why couldn't the NSA put up a listening station on US soil?
Let's look at it this way: if you wanted to spy on your own citizens, but there was a law preventing you to do that on your own soil, wouldn't you put up listening posts in your backyard? If you look at the network maps, the alledged NSA listening posts are exactly in those places where any traffic goes out of the USA.
I don't understand why the NSA couldn't set up a listening facility on US soil if they are listening on Europeans, for example. If the NSA wants to listen to US citizens (but can't do so on US soil), then putting the stations into UK, New Zealand and Australia would make perfect sense. Am I missing something?? (a few braincells of course, but is there a logical flaw?)
Getting back to gov't. Disbanding the FBI/CIA/NSA/Police/etc., would mean anarchy and chaos (Modern Russia is a good example of this). On the other side, Soviet Russia had very safe steets, even in the dead of night. But that is not acceptable either. The question then becomes, how much gov't oppression is considered acceptable? Every crime popularized by the media seems to incite gov't to "do something" and some new law is made. Naturally, these laws are never ever repealed. Thus, by definition, things can only get worse and never better. Eventually people get wound up so tight that revolution is the only option. Throw all the laws away, draft a new set of general guidelines and start the process all over again. This was the basis for the formation of the USA. Unlike back then, though, there's no more unclaimed land on the planet to move to and set up a new nation. Hydrographic nations anyone?
Interesting. I did not know "Junkbuster" was a German word too! Also, why do so many sites have that "Junkbuster" ad these days? I'm getting quite tired of it. I may have to install some sort of proxy to filter all these "Junkbuster" banners out.
Jeesh. Get over it.
I can spy on anyone and everyone with a cell phone. All I need is a police scanner, make a few minor alterations...
Intelligence collection along this line has been going on forever. The tools are just getting better to go with the increasing communication load.
Shall we do away with intelligence gathering? Let terrorists have their way? Quit trying to anticipate enemy actions? Quit trying to keep tabs on the weapons development of other countries, real threat or potential? Shall we hide our heads in the sand and assume nothing bad will happen?
Your communications are mundane, contentless, nonsense. Of no importance at all to the world, to the government, to intelligence agencies. Get OVER yourself.
IF, however, you begin to play with Hamas, or other terrorist organizations, then damn straight I want you to be watched and spied upon. That is what is SUPPOSED to happen.
Without intelligence gathering, myself (former military, Desert Storm combat vet), my comrades, our allies, etc, would face defeat. We NEED intelligence gathering of ALL types. We need sigint information on all emitters produced by any country, allied or otherwise. Why? Our allies and enemies sell weaponry to those who we may have to fight at some future point, depending on how their social development goes. You cannot always be assured that even an ally today will be an ally tomorrow in some cases. You need to know what their are doing, what the capabilities of their systems are, who they are selling to, etc, so that we will not be unpleasantly suprized at some point.
Part of MY job during my military career involved sigint - gathering information from radar emitters/weapon systems. One way (often the ONLY way) to get some of the information that is NEEDED is to approach a country's airspace, even penetrating that airspace, in order to get them to bring up their emitters to take a look at you. THEN you can gather the information which can help determine what the weapon systems (in this case air defense) are capable of and what countermeasures might be effective against them.
Ooooooh. Big evil. You also need to know how their communication is setup, where the nodes are, what codes are in use, etc. You then can plan on how to disrupt or destroy communication if necessary in a conflict. You can also get information on their plans so you can take action to counter them or prevent damage to us. That is reality. That is the REAL world, not your little, false, comfy front room with TV and VCR. You people need to get out more and learn what the real world is. Intelligence gathering is done by ALL countries against ALL other countries, both allies and opponents. ALL COUNTRIES DO IT and it is expected. Big freakin' deal. Everyone nails everyone when they are caught, but then it continues, no one is REALLY angry or hurt, just embarrassed. Important and REQUIRED intelligence collection continues. As it should.
A lot of you people appear to live in a silly, fantasy dreamworld with no connection to reality or necessity.
Echelon = NSA (foreign only)
Carnivore = FBI (domestic only)
NO CARRIER
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Meade SEAL Team 6 Honduras PLO NSA terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomp uter $400 million in gold bullion quiche Honduras BATF colonel Treasury domestic disruption SE AL Team 6 class struggle smuggle M55 M51 Physical Security Division Room 2A0120, OPS 2A building 688- 6911(b), 963-3371(s). Security Awareness Division (M56) Field Security Division (M52) Al A mn al-Askari Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI) Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdiens t Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnasti
It's a shame that humanity's greatest concerted efforts of high-technology have usually been destructive in nature. (I don't claim exceptions are non-existant -- look at Apollo.)
Actually even Apollo has roots in destruction. Why were we in the space race to begin with? Well, if you can orbit a satelite, it doesn't take much more to strap a big ole bomb on the rocket and have it pointed towards Washington or Moscow.
Sputnik scared the USA because our rocket program wasn't good enough to orbit something and therefore not reliable enough to make an ICBM. Sputnik wasn't about a tinny beeping satelite. It was about sending the USA a message.
Apollo grew from the race to build better rockets and evolved into a "we're better than you are" competition. I'm glad it was done, but we haven't been back, and don't seem to be going back anytime soon. What a waste.
The more you know, the less you understand.
Another motivation behind echelon is that the security services of the partner states are normally constitutionally prohibited from spying without cause on their own citizens. Echelon gets round this by having the partners spying on the citizens of the other partners. Naturally any interesting information obtained gets passed on to the relevant partner's organisations ...
Regards, Ralph.
Well, it ain't arranged though is it ... it just happens. Automatically all the intelligence They want is just ... available. "Well, jeez schucks we didn't ask for it did we?"
And, look, I didn't even touch on your naive trust in the oversight of NSAs compliance with their own charter, did I?
Regards, Ralph.
Yup - as the article says:
Put that technology between you and Slashdot, and watch First Posts and the like disappear; pretty soon the penis bird will become an endangered species.
This guy runs slashdot and he has never used a foreign website. He probably doesn't know what the 2 first W's stand for in WWW either. In fact he doesn't even know he is running a website, or what a website is. Now that's news for nerds!
It's no suprise then that their DSP technology is a quantum leap forward over what we have. Their technology would put all the 3D graphics accelerators on the market to shame.
So, you have massive signal processing capability.. whadda do? Build a few dozen supercomputers and a distributed network to feed them in an automated fashion. Today's society is flooded with signals - microwave dishes, cell phone, satellite, GSM phones, cablemodem, Voice-over-IP, ${BUZZWORD}, etc. You can't *possibly* process that in the time you need given the volume of information out there. It'd be like searching for a needle in a haystack. And the EM spectrum is big. Really big. So most of the network MUST by necessity be automated.
The interesting bits are sent from the autonomous nodes that make up Echelon into a centralized repository (the supercomputers?) for further processing. Interesting information is probably e-mailed to the desk of the agent who made the query (or printed out, if they're like most of us and still don't have "paperless offices").
Hell, what they have we'll have.. in about 5-8 years. Biggest threat - accidentally triggering the damn thing. :) bomb, president, anarchy, nuclear storage, timing....
So, it stands to reason that an actual existing echelon system is not nearly as useful as the threat of such a system. Much like although Fort Knox has no "pop-up machine gun turrets", the tour guides don't hesitate to let people believe such things for the deterrent factor.
Not that I know anything about national security, but it just seems logical.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Just asking, I'm new to Ottawa...
--
Here's my mirror
CIA has been cought selling questionable stuff before. Iran/contras anyone? Weapons for heroine?
Dunno about aliens
Black Helicopter... Dunno about Black Helicopter different from KA51 Black Shark. Which is Black. Good machine... If on your side. If not on your side also a good machine though you do not admire it for long...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
"One of [the Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea] more spectacular features was a tracking dish used to pass messages to the United States by reflecting them off the surface of the moon."
I hate to be a downer.. But Amateur (ham) radio folks have been doing this for years. It's called moonbounce or EME (I think: Earth Moon Earth or something). I've been out of the ham scene for quite a few years now, but I'm sure someone else can verify my claim.
Heck, I know an old guy who does this with a simple beam antenna and off the shelf radio gear. There's certainly nothing amazing about it.
l8r
Sean
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Duncan has been following Echelon since long before it was even admitted to existing. He's done extensive research into it and did in fact break the news to the EU Parliament as claimed. do a google search for echelon and he'll show up quite a bit if you're still concerned.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
We have PGP, PGPi, and myriads of other secure email methods. why are people not using them? They'd render Carnivore and Echelon much, much less useful. Well, that and anoynmous browsing, IPSec, etc.
.mil and .gov and .arpa hits /you/ get. I've been spidered by NIPR.mil -- an interesting site in and of itself. Search cryptome.org for what it does...
/. user page.
The default presumption must now be that someone is reading your email and parsing your logs--it's almost certainly automatic, but it's there. You should check your personal website logs and see what interesting
So, today's moral is USE ENCRYPTION. I have my 4096 bit public key on the standard servers and on my
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
You must have never heard of Nathan Hale. The quote "I only regret I have but one life to lose for my country" were his last words before being hanged as a spy on September 22, 1776 - the first American captured and executed for spying. He is considered a hero for the US Intelligence agencies, and a statue to him stands in front of the CIA headquarters. Our founding fathers not only believed in aggressive collection of intelligence, they practiced it and used it to help us win wars, not the least of which was the American Revolution.
I am not surprised at all that the US and others collect information on both allies and declared enemies alike. There are no "friends" among nations, only common interests. How many times in history has a nation formed an alliance, entered into a war in their ally's support, then later in the same war shifted loyalty and fought against their so-called "friend"?
The world is not the friendly place we would sometimes like to think it is. The keeping of secrets and the discovery of the secrets of others has been part of maintaining a country since the beginning of recorded history, and will likely remain so for a long time.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
I love their Echelon icon.
I could use it on my website as sort of an "anti-TrustE" logo. Or how about "feedback powered by Echelon".
An agenda? Oh dear.
I've always depended on Slashdot to take a neutral stance on all issues, especially subjects like free software and Linux. What will now become of this bastion of impartial reporting?
I glanced at this article and I put it in the same category as CIA selling crack in LA, Aliens crashed at Roswell, and the Black Helicoper stuff...
Although, there is nothing more fun than watching the black helicopter crowd froth at the mouth...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
So if they have all this great technology and it works so well, why does Carnivore exist?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
-Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
That's "Democratic Poll", as in "everybody votes on everything".
Americans (of which I am one) have some strange belief that if enough people vote, somehow the optimal solution will be selected, independent of whether the people who vote are capable of making rational choices.
Think about what the signal-to-noise ratio would be like on Slashdot if everyone got to moderate equally. (Hint: think seeing "penis bird" content while browsing at +4)
Personally, I like the suggestion Kurt Vonnegut had: when you go into the voting booth, you're presented with a simple quadratic equation with small, positive, integer roots. Input the two correct integers to proceed....
Part of the Second American Revolution!
If they labeled thier equipment as such they would have to filter out those labels later when they automatically extracted them from images in page views. Thats the real reason...
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Hotmail is laughably insecure; I believe it was Hushmail to which you meant to refer.
First, I'm a fan of Hushmail. I think they do a moderately good job (as opposed to some of the clowns in the field), and Genevieve is a sweetheart. That's well and good for them, but the problems with browser-based secure email are still substantial.
1. No code review. Hushmail's code is available for review, but as of this writing it hasn't been security-audited by a respected infosec house. There is no security without a security audit. [*]
2. Susceptability to Trojans. Okay, so they have a certificate from an appropriate CA... how many people actually check the certificate for authenticity?
3. Complexity. Believe it or not, a lot of people can't understand that "if you send email from a Hushmail account to another Hushmail account, it's delivered securely; otherwise, you take your chances". I've had people send sensitive information to my Hushmail account (here) from a Hotmail account, believing that the Hushmail address was some magic pixie dust that made everything secure.
4. Distinguishability. There are certain "secure" email services which get laughed at, lots, by people in the security field. There are other services which get careful and qualified respect. By and large, the userbase is oblivious to this; they make their decisions based on marketing. There are some services I've seen advertised in national news magazines which make themselves out to be superhumanly secure--and then, in the fine print, mention that "oh, by the by, we escrow your keys just in case". It is extremely difficult for an average consumer to make an even mildly informed decision as to which services to patronize.
... None of these problems are Hushmail-specific; they plague all of the browser-based email providers, some moreso than others. While I wholeheartedly agree that browser-based email services can provide a simpler, more secure way to send mail, they're just an evolutionary step towards where we need to go--they aren't a panacea.
[*] Unfortunately, the reverse isn't true--just because a product has passed a security audit doesn't mean it's secure.
How effective is encryption?
Depends on what you're trying to do with it. It's just a tool, nothing more. A hammer is pretty useless when what you need is a screwdriver; same thing with encryption.
If you're sending a love letter to your sweetheart and you want to make sure that it won't get intercepted in transit, encrypting your email is very effective. If you're sending details about your Hizbollah contacts and how you're building a nuclear weapon for them, you probably want more tools than just encryption.
Are we sure they can't break it?
No. Hell, we're not even sure we can't break it. Much of cryptography is built on math problems which are conjectured to be insanely, mind-bogglingly difficult. These math problems have never been formally proven to be as difficult as we think they are, though. Some people think that simple, elegant solutions exist to these problems exist, but so far they're in the minority.
This is not a death-knell for cryptography, though. So far, we're pretty certain that we can't break it by conventional means, and we've got reason to be optimistic that governments can't break it by conventional means, either.
Of course, the government has decades of experience at unconventional means--planting eavesdropping devices, shadowing people, bugging their phone lines, bribing people to give up their encryption keys. Encryption can't really help very much against these unconventional methods.
Now that the USA seems to be relaxing its control over exportable crypto, can we take this to mean that they know they can defeat it?
Absolutely not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. We do not know what inferences we should draw from the Government's relaxation of crypto regs. What we do know is the following:
1. Federal courts have decided, at the appellate level (one step below the Supreme Court), that source code can be Constitutionally protected free speech.
2. Federal courts have decided, again at the appellate level, that cryptographic documents (whether published conventionally or on the Web) are Constitutionally protected free speech.
The inference that I draw from those two events is...
<INFERENCE>
After losing those two almost back to back, the Government didn't have much choice but to relax the export regs--because the Federal courts had declared the export regs to be unconstitutional!
The government is not relaxing the export regs because they want to; instead, the Executive Branch of the government is relaxing the export regs because the Judicial Branch has told them, in essence, "if you don't relax these regulations, we will relax them for you".
Remember that the Government has three branches, and each branch thinks the government would work much better if the other two branches would just shut up and do as they're told. The Executive Branch often fights the Judicial and Legislative branches, the Judicial fights the Executive and Legislative, etc.
</INFERENCE>
Also, if PGP is effective, what key length is necessary to really be secure?
1,024 bits is probably secure for everyday use. I use a 2,048-bit key.
There's not much point in going beyond 2,048 bits. Really. PGP (particularly the unauthorized ckt builds) will let you exceed 2,048 bits, but there's not much point in it.
For every social problem, there is a technological solution that is elegant, simple and wrong. The current state of encryption technology is a brilliant example.
:) Right now even a 1,024-bit key is pretty safe, and a 2,048-bit key ought to be just fine for the indefinite future.
Lots of people have done studies of how easy it is to properly use encryption software. In one study, something like half the test subjects were unable to send out a PGP-encrypted message--this wasn't using the (arcane) command line of the 2.6 versions, but the much slicker GUI of the 5.x versions.
Guess what? It hasn't gotten much better. In some respects, it's become worse. The vast majority of people are unaware of the scope of automated surveillance, and as such, they don't care. Of the minority that is aware, the majority of them are unaware of how useful encryption tools can be. Of the minority that is aware, the majority are unable to look at competing products and come to an informed determination about which product is the superior of the two--"Honey, this one says it uses `superhumanly strong 40-bit Blowfish email encryption', and the other one just says it uses Triple DES, which do you think I should buy?".
Of the minority which IS aware of the scope of the problem, which is ALSO aware of the existence of tools, which is ALSO capable of selecting the proper tools and using them properly...
... most of them find encryption to be too much of an inconvenience.
Passphrases are hard to remember; at 1.2 bits of entropy per character (roughly), you need about 120 characters for a good passphrase. That's about two lines of text from a novel. Assuming you can type 60 WPM, or five characters a second, you're going to be spending 24 seconds just entering your passphrase.
That's inconvenient. How do most people deal with the inconvenience? They simply choose not to bother, or else they choose trivially weak passphrases, or they cache their passphrases for an absurdly long time, or...
Encryption, by itself, is not the answer--not unless you're so rabidly paranoid that you're willing to put up with the inconvenience even for something as simple as an email to your girlfriend saying "hey, I'm going to be home early from the office tonight, want to catch a movie?".
Some people are. I'm not. I use encryption for the things which are important--truly confidential material; company secrets, or communications with my lawyer, or other things in that vein. But otherwise, it's just damned inconvenient.
What we need is not "more encryption, dammit!". What we need is more usable encryption. This means:
* Encryption which is EASY TO USE
* Encryption which is HARD TO SCREW UP
* Encryption which is CONVENIENT
* Encryption which is TRANSPARENT TO THE END USER
We don't have any of that right now. We're not even close on most of those counts.
-- And by the by, there's absolutely no point in an average person using a 4,096-bit key.
Is it against our law to intercept another countries transmissions? Do we have a treaty that specifies against such behavior? It might be unsavory but methinks its not *illegal*.
The question of who will watch the watchers is ancient. I think congressional control of cashflow is limited by an agency's control of info flow.
Perhaps I am naive. I was under the impression that the DOD (like the DOT, IRS, etc...) was and always(?) has been a part of the executive branch. No "emergency" is necessary for the president to be the commander-in-chief. Yes?
We are a representative democracy. We are a democratic republic. People do vote (to elect leaders.) It would perhaps be more accurate to say: "Our republic practices representative democracy, with ballot petitions thrown in for flavoring."
Democrat & Republican are orthoganal terms. Democracy and Republic are not mutually exclusive.
I for one am sick of it. We need to stop this kind of thing before it gets out of hand.
Unfortunately, the deal is done, signed, sealed, and delivered. I'm reminded of a Denis Leary song; "...Why? 'Cause we got the bomb, that's why, two words, Nuclear fucking weapons..". In a way it's sad, but the power structure that exists currently will likely be in place until the end of (our) civilization. There's too many countries with nukes and other even nastier weapons of mass destruction (It amazes me this dropped right off the radar with the "end" of the cold war; Oh well). It is extremely unlikely that any of the nuclear-capable nations will fall without unloading their aresnals. For the kind of change you're talking about, you're effectively talking about an outight revolution, which is no longer possible. The right to bear arms was not taken; It was made moot.
I get more jaded by the day, but I'm happy I can write what I want, for now. Unless I reverse engineered something. Or if I want to talk about drug or improvised weapons manufacture. (Anyone remember the *real* Improvised Field Munitions Handbook, published by the US Gov?) Or if I want to write excessively explicit or amoral thoughts down. Oh well.
Heh, that's kinda depressing. Oh well. :)
..don't panic
Can anyone lend any validity to this article? It appears that this person:
A) Knows a lot about this
or
B) Is making all this up in an attempt at a good story.
or
C) A little of both
Those pictures of "interception stations" are strangely similar to every other large, white satellite dish you see around. In fact, there is one of those on top of the building I'm in right now. Is this a conspiracy?
Some of this stuff ("Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognise the content of every speech message or telephone call.") sounds sorta wrong. I believe that the technology is there, maybe not to do EVERY call, but to single calls out by region or randomly sampled conversations.
I'd like to know if anyone can truely verify what this article says as truth.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
The US NEVER was a democracy.. It's a republic. ;-)
Why can no one get that right
It even says it in the pledge of allegiance, remember?
"I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the USofA, and to the republic, for which it stands..."
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Thanks so much, you made my day. ;-)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I would agree with you, mainly because I don't think technology IS ready for voting by the masses. As a previous post pointed out, the Internet as we know it today is still vulnerable in many ways. I see online voting technology coming of age around the time that the 'digital divide' is bridged, and both are coming quickly.
Getting people interested in voting again will be a harder task to accomplish, but I've seen lots of figures regarding the websites of elected officials and candidates, and overwhelmingly people are calling for them to post their voting records. This stuff is publicly available but most of us (me included) don't have the resources and/or the time to look it up through conventional means. I think the web can do wonders for voter turnout in that respect.
Now, I don't think getting rid of Congress is a good idea, either, but getting rid of corrupt Congresspersons and all the fscking special interest parasites sounds great. The question is, what will happen when the lobbyists move from pestering Congress to spamming citizens? Ack!
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
>controls the military (rather than, say, an
>elected body of citizens), you are only one quick
>coup away from dictatorship.
You might try reading Norman Schwartzkoff's (I'm SURE I spelled that wrong) book: "It Doesn't take a Hero".
Not the growing up part, or the Vietnam or Gulf war memoirs (though they DO paint an intresting picture of the army's evolution over the years (from elite force guarding western Europe from socialist aggression, to degenerate mob during vietnam, back to an elite force of professional volunteers with the best training and hardware in the world (granted the author *IS* a little biased))).
What you should DEFINATELY read is his description of the selection process to become a General (OR, for that matter, an Admrial). It's a VERY rigourous selection process just to get to one star. Above that, the regular promotions board goes away, and advancement requires the approval of damn near half of Washington. In fact, IIRC, a four-star slot actually requires the confirmation of the senate, just like a cabinet post or supreme court chair.
I think it's a pretty good bet, that any soldier who would, at the behest of the president or anyone else, drive his tanks up Capitol Hill, would *NOT* have passed the selection process to become a general and get command of those tanks in the first place.
Of course, I COULD be an irrational optimist, or Schwartzkoff COULD have lied through his teeth (keyboard?)...
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
How? Most countries will not readily accept immigrants who are not highly skilled and experienced in certain "in-demand" professions. Some countries -- such as France -- currently have imposed a zero-immigration policy.
While many health care and IT professionals enjoy a comfortable degree of international mobility, the average Joe, regardless of his political persuasion, is stuck where he's born.
Regards,
For example, Campbell cites "TOP SECRET UMBRA" as the top level compartment for SIGINT. Well, it was -- in the 1960's. (It doesn't matter that much as the entire system is being completely revised eliminating TOP SECRET entirely -- see FAS's web site which is generally much better on this kind of thing when John Pike has time to update it.)
It's an important issue, but it would pay to use better sources. To see how old this information is check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers or William Burrows's Deep Black.
there are few things more irritating than a crpto geek . . . ask my wife . .
China?
--
When speaking of the founding father if the states I spoke of the dream they had, of an ideal. Their idea of who controled the government, who voted, may not have been all inclusive, but we have expanded that scope to how it was written.
As for them keeping slaves, that is something which I'm sure most people cannot agree with. They also had a large number of habits, personal, public, and socially exceptable at the time. They smoked things and snorted thing I'm sure some people do not agree with.
In the end they wrote down a document which include freedom for all, which included an ideal. Something more than just the simple words. It was something worth dying for. People did, and more than once.
I like the idea of US companies earnig their way into the world market without my having to pay for a spy system. A spy system that is being put to more uses than you are told about.
Let's forget about human rights and such. Just tell me what is being done with all that information they collect. I doubt you know and I doubt you could prove it in any case.
The truth is that it's a closed system, with some information going to some companies to compete unfairly in the world market. Who pick which company gets the information? As a closed system, those who control the government are powerless to say no. We are being left out of a country which we own and have paid for, and keep paying for in taxes and blood.
No matter what you say it's all just speculation seeing as you are in the dark. I'm in the dark also. I just don't pretend it's a good thing.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Again, it's not worth the price that was paid. Yes, it's known that it's common for bribery to be used. Just look at the olympics. This does not justify the US's actions and the fact that the US sunk to a lower level than bribery.
The price is simple. We cannot and should never trust our goverment's hidden actions and deeds. We should never be content not knowing, or sinking to that level.
I thik your support of a spying government is a foolish thing. I hope you realize that you will also be spied on. If you have childern, so will they.
I think the Hitler summed it up best "Only the guilty have something to hide." He used that phrase to gain access to the homes of some of the political compition. He used that power to bully more power.
It's still far more power than any government should be trusted with. I'm sure that time will tell. I am equally sure that you will see that this is a very bad pill my friend.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Items like this have a cost in, building, maintaining, and expanding. This system, I'm am very sure, it also keeping track of efforts to avoid it's watchfull eye.
When we speak about PGP or using encryption to keep our conversions secret, the NSA is listening. I'm sure they claim this is a valuable service.
It reminds me of something I once saw at a large company. There was a man high up in management who had little to do and few people working for him. He wanted to change this, so he had a plan to inclease his value to the company. He hired some lawyers and asked that all documents, internal and external, went through his department to make sure that there was nothing in those documents that could hurt the company legally.
This seemed like a good service to the company and it only required two lawyers. Well as the company was forced, and got used to, sending their document to these two lawyer there was far too much work. So the manager asked for more lawyer, because the demand was too high. And so on...
His empire withing the company grew and grew. He has added many other non value added services to his group, and I assume will continue to.
This sort of activity is know as "Justifying your position" or "Making yourself needed" This guy knew nothing other than how to make the company feel he was needed and providing a needed service. In reality the internal news letter never had andproblems and never would. The NSA is "Justifying their position."
The NSA and other organizations can spy on people to the Nth degree, and they might find something. They then often keep that information secret from the people paying them, but let higher ups in the goverment know. This information makes these people feel important, and maybe protect there jobs.
In the meantime, we have done this spying by trampling the good names of those who broke from such a spying goverment to found the US. We have teken the values that they penned with wisedom for us all to read, and now claim that they do not appliy to everyone, or all the time.
See under the US constitution you have rights. These are rights which we agree on one day belong to every single person. Human right. On an other day, during a war or a day when oil is lacking, or when a US company wants a contract over a French company, those rights don't apply. Seme people are more equal that others it seem.
Once we drew the line and said that one some days others (outside the US) don't the same freedoms and right under the US government, it was easy to slowly claim our own people didn't have rights also.
Where does that leave us, the peole of the world. If you live in the US your are automatically part of the goverment. After all it's "We the people." If the goverment does something monsterous, then it's because you sat back and let it happen. You are lazy because it's only happening to those people over there, or maybe just to the people down the street. Well now it's happening to you, and you just sit there and hope it does not stop Monday night sports.
I live in the US. I've lived here my entire life. The US should be held to the standards of our fouders, and nothing less. How have we honored their ideals. The same ideals that gave us this country and the American dream of living free. I do not include being spied on one of the freedoms our counties founder envisioned.
Unless the people of the US get off their fat asses and do something, they are to blame. Not the goverenment, because we are the goernment. We paid for it, and let it happen. If we were not told that means little seeing as we choose not to ask.
The buck does not stop with the leaders in DC. That is a lie. We put that person there. The president might be the countries leader, but we are his rulers. We let him know what can and cannot be done. If we are quite the world can assume correctly that we areee with the monsterous deeds of our goverment.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Seriously guys: this man goes on and on and on... A quick search on AltaVista for his name and Echelon turns up more than 20 pages of hits.
This guy never stops. He appars to be totally paranoid and he has -- as far as I can tell -- done no original research on his own.
Yes, it is worthwhile to discuss Echelon, the implications of Echelon, and, more generally, the role of intelligence services in democratic and civilised nations. But the ravings of this guy is not the right place to start a sensible discussion.
Please, can we get back to technology now? Try to read about flesh eating robots (seriously!) in the New Scientist for something more interesting than this guy.
---
"Where do you come from?"
Hi!
FIPR has a rather nice article on how you can protect yourself. The article is aimed against RIP, the draconian UK legislation that is currently winding it's way through parliament, but it is genrally useful.
It is a well written, balanced, and informative article, with useful pointers to resources on the internet.
The two mail services that offer encrypted e-mail are probably worth mentioning explicitly:
The article concludes:
---
"Where do you come from?"
Hi!
This isn't news - anyone can go inside echelon. They give you these little badges, and an honor guard escorts you around, walking backward the whole way and talking about the places you visit. Then you can go to the Echelon gift shop and pick up a T-shirt.
Wait, no, I'm thinking "Pentagon" again....
-Denor
Personally, I have not done much international travel and I don't know much about security/privacy practices of other countries. Where could I go (besides SeaLand) that affords me better protection?
This is not flamebait, I just am looking for more info.
Thanks.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
You could be sitting at your desk, and a window pops up on your screen asking if you'd like to participate in todays votes. You have the choice to vote on whatever national or local policy decisions are being made that day. You also have the choice to abstain. The problems? First, the digital divide. The haves and the have nots. Those of us with computers, or access to computers and the internet are the ones that get to make decisions about our country. The rest, the less privledged than us, have no say in the matter at all. The other problem is corruption. Would you really trust the government to run a system like this? It would be quite easy (or easier at least) to rig an election, or have a bill pass. Plus, this system would be vulnerable to hackers. Sorry, today's election has been postponed due to a buffer overflow.
www.echelon.com,..
Still trying to figure out if this is real or not.
Most americans today do not vote at all. Even in presidential elections, voter turnout rarely rises above 50%. In my subjective opinion, even many of those who do turn out to vote end up casting their votes based on poor information. This is not totally their fault; the media is supposed to help them out, but it is doing an increasingly bad job of this. But most voters are too lazy or do not care enough to go learn about the issues on their own anyway.
Why do you think there is so much money in politics today? Because people vote based on campaign commercials and other propaganda! It takes a lot of money for the candidates to buy all those commercials. If people went out and educated themselves about the issues, they would be able to rationally evaluate the candidates using their own information. Campaign propaganda would be much less effective.
But I am digressing here. My point is is that, whatever its problems, Congress at least tries to consider issues thouroughly before voting on them, at least compared to most of the general populace. Giving legislative power to the masses would quickly result in either tyranny of the majority or simple bad decisions based on poor information. Avoiding these outcomes is one of the reasons we even have a represenative government to begin with. These factors do not go away simply because we now have the technology to allow easy voting by the masses on every issue.
If Echelon is as all seeing as he is claiming, why is Carnivore needed? If they can tap lines of communication so easily, why not tap the feed into the ISP instead of setting a physical box inside the network. Something seems to be amiss. Either we're being led on a wild goose chase with Carnivore, or the Echelon rumers are grossly exagerated. Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Please, please always keep in mind that the best crypto is useless without secure endpoints.
If f.e. there's a real NSA-key in Windows and either sender or recipient are using it, spy agencys can just sniff for encrypted messages and get the plaintext out of one endpoint.
If you use encryption without secure endpoints, you even give these guys a good hint which messages are important.
For that matter, the U.S. has been under a state of "national emergency" since 50's cuban missile crisis. This means the executive branch has direct control of the military- not congress. The state of emergency was never repealed.
Now, this is not terribly sinister, but every US president since JFK has had executive control of military and used the "state of emergency" to issue sometimes-questional executive orders.
The unsettling thing about it all (if you happen to be a paranoid, libertarian, cough, cough) is that when the executive branch of a govenment also controls the military (rather than, say, an elected body of citizens), you are only one quick coup away from dictatorship.
Read the constitution.
-Cullen
cullen@unadvertise.com
Yeah, if he thinks that's weird, he should try getting an IP address in the range assigned specifically to German companies. A whole lot of sites (Google, for example, and many ad networks) suddenly start talking German to you.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Hey, I am German. I just find it amusing that the same site that is in English when I load it at university suddenly becomes German when I load it at work.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Now I'm not saying that Echeleon is a Good Thing, not at all, but you do have to admit that it really doesn't seem to target normal people. And the companies that are targeted really have the money to use encryption and should know better than to transmit mission-critical data unencrypted.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
National Security State
Great naming. Thanks.
Censorship on Slashdot
Personally, I think meaning 1(a) is too broad
You're funny. That's just the difference between democracy and republic.
would you really argue that Nazi Germany was a republic
No, because it was focused on one person. The Roman Republic was, and AFAIK never claimed to be a democracy.
Censorship on Slashdot
Jehreg
Anyone know where I can get a 128-bit key encrypted baby monitor ??
On another note, I wanted to try something out: They can see my house from the base, so I wanted to buy an old (huge) satellite dish and aim it at them, but not connect it to anything... :-)
Then I would just aim a video camera at the dish and see marines come in at night and dismantle the dish
Jehreg
I'm surprised they didn't have photos of the Seti@home accellerator too!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Ah, my bad. I was taught differently :) The point I was trying to make is that a (classical, at least) democracy is direct rule by the people, as opposed to representation. But it's occured to me that I'm probably wrong about this as well. Curse me and my inadequare schooling :)
Just being a pain, but the US was never a democracy; it's a republic. :)
Some of it has. NSA has a search engine patent, for example, and it's an impressive technology.
In the Cold War years, NSA was in the forefront of computing. The first digital tape drives were developed for NSA shortly after WWII. The first automated tape library (Tractor) was developed for NSA by IBM. NSA supported much early computer, supercomputer, and networking development. Much of this was published in "IBM's Early Computers", part of a history of IBM. Most of it made it into commercial products eventually. NSA may have a better technology spinoff record than NASA.
There were dead ends. Twenty years of effort went into cyrogenic computing in the '60s and '70s. ("I want a thousand-megacycle computer. I'll get you the money!" - Director, NSA, circa 1960.)
Since the 1980s, though, when the commercial sector pulled ahead of the military sector in technology, NSA has fallen behind. This problem has become embarassing enough to have been investigated by Congress. This is a generic problem with Government computing; things are changing too fast for Government procurement cycles, and the Government penchant for custom systems built to specified requirements holds them back.
Since when has national security ever been democratic in the United States of America? Yes, the Second Amendment was designed to allow for independent militias and something on the liness of your "democratic security," but the truth is, it can't exist.
Only when the whole society is armed and organized can it by dubbed "democratic" by your standards. And that would create a complete anarchy (not that I have any problem with that...)
Remember, the US Armed Forces are controlled by the Executive branch (think Clinton), not the Legislative branch (Congress).
Sure, war can't be declared without a vote in the House, but how many "police actions" have we had in the past half century?
The Original Celebrated Curiously Strong GHOST (mentha lemures)
Apparently Duncan & J.Bamford are working on a new up to date book on Echelon & the NSA.
Bamfords previous book, is absolutely excellent, though was published in '83 so is largely out of date.
IMHO, the best current site for John Youngs Cryptome which is unfortunately currently down due to a DDOS attack!
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
Apparently Duncan & J.Bamford are working on a new up to date book on Echelon & the NSA.
Bamfords previous book, Puzzle Palace is absolutely excellent, though was published in '83 so is largely out of date.
IMHO, the best current site for John Youngs Cryptome which is unfortunately currently down due to a DDOS attack!
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
These terms have nothing to do with each other, a republic can be a democracy, but it does not have to be, a democracy is not necessarily a republic.
A republic is a state that has no king or other hereditary head of state. A dictatorship is a republic too, the old soviet union was a republic (or more accurately, a federation of republics). But a kingdom can be a democracy - there are several in Europe, most notably the UK - their Kings do not have any legislatory power, only ceremonial functions.
Stefan
Echelon really seems to be right out of George Orwell's book "1984".
If the government(s) slowly start taking our privacy like this, when will it be too much? Will it be eneough when they start reading all our mail? will it be eneough when they start searching houses at random, just to make sure you are being "good"?
I for one am sick of it. We need to stop this kind of thing before it gets out of hand.
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
:-)
Have you looked at any Oradanance Survey maps of any "normal" RAF bases at all, and tried to correlate runways on the ground with runways on the map? No? Try it. It's rather difficult. Why do you think that might be? Perhaps because they might want to make it a little harder for enemies to bomb them to smithereens?
The argument that things don't appear on maps because there is something ultra-secretive there is just plain stupidity - it's not on any maps not because the governments concerned don't want people to know that it exists, but because they don't want to hand the enemy a scale drawing of where all the buildings are. To do so is just plain ridiculous. Especially in the case of Menwith Hill where there are large red-bordered road signs directing traffic to it all over the place (as RAF Menwith Hill).
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. He is a poor quality comedian at best and funnily enough Channel Four in the UK have commisioned a high-profile show all to himself because he's "right-on" and tackling "the system". If he didn't do this sort of stuff he would be a nobody with no show of his own.
I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. Had it come across anybody's mind in this thread that Echelon is just a huge pile of baloney cooked up by the NSA to get extra funding so they can have some really great coke-fuelled paries? No? Why, because the Washington Post didn't write an article about it?
--
It's interesting to speculate whether the increase of wealth in this nation hasn't been helped by national corporations being "supported" by Echelon-collected data.
ObArticleQuote (bold added):
One of [the Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea] more spectacular features was a tracking dish used to pass messages to the United States by reflecting them off the surface of the moon.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I thought I read somewhere that this is a hoax?
I mean even the banner ads are fake...
'I like your selfish mother's beer' ? what the hell?
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
I couldn't agree more with this conclusion. The main reason Echelon and other privacy invading projects such as Carnivore can thrive in the first place, is that the people don't use crypto and anon-services. Why?
People in general seem to live under the impression that their lives are not interesting enough for anyone to snoop on. "Why should anyone spend money and time reading my e-mails or listening to my phone conversations? I've got nothing to hide".
This is exactly the kind of an attitude that benefits the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and, as a result, people aren't encouraged to use crypto -- even if at the same time the very same agencies keep on hyping how dangerous a place the net is and how much more funding they need to counter this threat. Furthermore, and not surprisingly, major software companies have not, so far, put much an effort into producing an easy to use e-mail system that would incorporate strong encryption and authentication. On the contrary, Microsoft (let's face it, Microsoft's products dominate the market) seems to be hell bent on producing software that's full of security holes and whenever encryption has been included, ominous NSAKEYs and other intelligence agency connections seem to be involved. I don't know about you, but MS doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzy feeling when it comes to security and privacy.
It is also wrong to assume that your, mine or Joe Sixpack's life is not interesting enough to warrant occasional or even constant surveillance by the authorities. Joe Sixpack is a part of the body politic and, as every citizen, is also a potential criminal. To the big business, he's a consumer and his habits are valuable information. Oh yes, he'd be very well worth of watching if you just could do it.
And with new technology, you can.
Current technology provides the law enforcement community (and why not the business community as well) possibilities that even the hard core technophiles do not always fully comprehend. In the past, in order to keep an eye on someone required a group of people to operate the equipment 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Unless you happened to live in a full fledged police state, like DDR where half of the population had been hired to spy on the other half, the authorities just couldn't keep an eye on everyone.
Nowadays, as the article points out, e-mails, faxes and phone calls can be screened automatically based on keywords or even your voice. Automatic face recognition is making its way to mainstream surveillance allowing a more effective use of those cameras you can see in any major European city center (don't know about US). It's becoming so easy for the authorities to monitor the bulk of the population that the tempatation to gather dirt illegally on political opponents, keep an eye on special interest groups and collect brownie-points for cracking down on crime by spying on everyone even remotely connected to the case must soon be overwhelming. Obviously the authorities aren't the only threat. Spammers and people who are in the business of profiling netizens also benefit from the complacent attitude towards privacy.
Is new legislation controlling the new technology answer then? I doubt that. There is not enough political will or technological know-how within the legislative branch to do it. However, as long as using strong encryption is legal, we can at least retain our privacy in the net. Unfortunately, it doesn't help if only the people who are interested in technology use encryption when all the majority of the people know about encryption is that "only criminals use it". People need to be educated about privacy, cryptography and their right to keep things hidden even from the government.
Although I have to say it's wierd seeing banner ads in german ;)
Sound like /. openness is limited to GPL and such. Open your mind and your [beep] will follow.
At the beginning was at.
>2) Why in hell does everyone care if the government sees his or her precious
>communications? Unless you're making a bomb the government probably doesn't care.
Common misconception. Get out more, read the papers. Talk to the victims firsthand (typically people who are active in things like peace organisations or those "dangerious" groups who promote things like "fair trade".)
A protester here had agents invade his home because he dared to speak out against APEC policy.
Of course, it took years of court cases before the agencies stopped dening involvement - years of enduring ignorant derision by people who niavely believe that these paranoid agencies are not interested in normal citizens, and so anyone who thinks they're under surveillance must have delusions of importance. A man who captured an agent violating civil rights had police storm his house days later. It took court battles before the hand of intelligence agencies emerged - though it was patently obvious to him from the start. These are just examples that happened in the last couple of years in the area in which I live, and the details get scarier than the overview I just gave.
3) Every one of you has probably had your life saved by systems like these (anti-terrorism). If you would use a little common sense you probably be thanking the government.
Dream on. Most terrorist action that takes place in the world is _perpetrated_ and/or funded by intelligence agencies. These people are the primary cause, and the least effective cure.
A lovely example was the bombing of the "Rainbow Warrior" in New Zealand by French agents - why did the New Zealand SIS not detect and thwart the terrorist plan? Because to the SIS, the "terrorists" were the Nuclear-free campaigners, and the French (a nuclear power) were the good guys. So while the SIS were busy opening the mail of normal New Zealand citizens who supported a nuclear-free New Zealand (it's probably just an intimidation tactic, but still violates rights without justification, and it makes those citizens the targets of mockery from the niave and ignorant if they try to say anything about SIS opening their mail), their French allies were busy perpetrating terrorism and killing people on New Zealand sovreign territory. You think the CIA protects you and is somehow different?
This is the unromantic reality of intelligence - it is never held genuinely accountable to any outsiders, and thus is universally incompentant, paranoid, insular, out of touch with reality, dangerious, and above all law. Warrants may be required by law, but since they never need to be actually produced (any involvement at all is denied), actions without warrant are routine.
For another classic example, the Steve Jackson Games debacle illustrates several of these points.
You claim the agencies are not interested in normal people. How far from normal is a bunch of
enthusiests working on a humourous card game about hacking? Hell, I've done something almost identical myself. Steve Jackson Games was very nearly destroyed by the arrogance, incompetance, abuse of power, and contempt of their rights shown by the agency involved.
Intelligence is real, and it destroys the lives of real people, people who are model citizens (they must be hiding something!) and have done nothing wrong.
Intelligence is the enemy of freedom and democracy. And not even just figuratively either - when an emerging democracy is deliberately crushed by the CIA, because a puppet govt was better in the "interests" of the USA, niave justifications about it being "for our own good" because of "all those nasty terrorists that I've never seen but which the agencies make into superstars" seem really, really stupid.
Talk to trustworthy people with firsthand experience. It'll open your eyes.
>If you mean the time they were raided during Operation Sundevil in 1990.. thats coz Loyd Blakenship was working there..
:)
>he was a well known hacker/cracker type.. The NSA have been watchful of the company ever since.
From memory, the guy they were watching didn't work there, but had merely spoken on a few occasions to someone who did work there, and this is apparently grounds for raid and confiscation. But that's only the start of the incompetance and abuse. The place was raided without warrant. Usually this is a safe thing for agencies protected by "National Security" to do, but Jackson took it to court, which demanded their warrent, at which point they could only produce a warrent for someone else entirely (which had also expired months earlier) and lamely claim "we thought this one applied, honest!". They damaged and for up to two years refused to return vital equipment wrongfully taken, some of which I think was never returned and/or destroyed. SJG was a small company at the time and this abuse took them to the verge of bankruptcy. And this is by no means a complete list of what was done, and other incidents suggest this sort of incompetance and contempt of civil rights is the norm in "intelligence" work.
I can't remember all the details, so I reserve the right to have missed a few dirty deeds and/or have messed up some of the details
I just re-aquainted myself with the details of the SJ games case, and realised that the stuff I just posted has several mix-ups with things that happened in a different case alltogether. So disregard the post - it has some serious innaccuracies.
:)
The general point however (abuse of power, contempt, incompetance, etc in agencies that are above public scrutiny) is of course well supported by the case, even if I screwed up many of the details
This is the scrambled table of
contents for the CIA almanac which
some hackers have been offering as
the World Almanac. [I tried to edit it as
txt doc, no dice.[no indication of why in the
properties file]
doo doo, doo doo,
doo dooo, doo doo
da da da dum you are entering the twilight zone.
]X[
You have never truly been in love
until your gonadotrophins
have been stimulated
by the Masonic, female, fascist,
Order of the Eastern Star,
known as Venus, to astronomers;
known as Lucifer; to occultists.
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. So if you believe in something, you're too biased to talk about it? I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. I don't accept it at face value, but nor do I just ignore. I appologise about the maps. The OS map that I have for the area DOES have it on. The map that I had with me when I posted didn't (and I'm sure that the ones that I had with me last time that I was up there didn't either). Sorry.
If you want to read more about Menwith Hill (the UK site for Echelon) try http://www.menwithhill.com.
It's a site produced by British political comedian Mark Thomas, who presents a "humourous political documentary" program on UK tv.
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
(But then again), opening people's mail is what they do in other countries, isn't it? :|
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
P.S. H-bomb, President, Rocket, Money. Hello to NSA, do you read me?
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
that most of you would not trade living standards and personal security for privacy...
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
Mark Thomas (an English commedian known for enjoying arguing politicians into impossibly tight corners, and also for his sometimes less than legal stunts) has been ranting about Menwith Hill and Echelon for _years_. I find it hard to believe that this is kind of thing is news to people. I believe that Mark Thomas has found some air-space over Menwith Hill which he can fly a hot-air balloon over. All he's looking for now is sponsers to buy a custom made hot-air ballon, and then a flight in it over the UK HQ of Echelon. Unless I'm mistaken. Phil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand
That sounds like a good idea to me, but there are a few flaws with the idea. The main one that I'd like to bring up (and one that I don't think any of the other replies have brought up) is the fact that we don't know enough about everything to make the right decision. We all have opinions, and some decisions are based purely on what the opinion of the majority is (issues such as abortion), but there are decisions that should be made by experts.
I'm not saying that we aren't smart enough to run our own country, I'm saying that some things shouldn't be decided by the general population voting. Some economic issues, national security issues, and various other things that the average person just isn't qualified to make a decision about. This may be because we're not all trained to understand the effects of some actions (we're not all economists, I know its one of my weak points) and that's why we elect people to handle these things for us.
After all, if we spent all day every day doing research and voting, when would we have the time to be effected by what we're voting on?
The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically
You've gotta love the paranoia, I know I do. I'd like to point out that we are a democracy (as much as we have ever been). You've got to understand that we elect people into high positions, and they make decisions or appoint people to make decisions for them, that's the way the system works. We can't vote on every single thing that happens in the government. We've got to allow the people we elect to do their jobs, or elect someone else to do them.
I don't think our national security was ever handled democratically. Could you imagine our troops standing in the woods waiting for the votes to come in on where to attack next?
You may not agree with everything that goes on in the government, I know I don't, but you can do your part to change it. You can eather sit back and bitch about it and let things get even more messed up, or you can go out and try to change things...
The CIA and the NSA are not handled by any democratically elected official, nor by anybody appointed by such an officail
And you call me uninformed? Your paranoia is taking over again. Who pays the bills to run these operations? People in elected offices (the congress) do. Sometimes the people in charge (who aren't elected, but are appointed by people who are) get out of the loop, but they can get back into the loop, and they have the power to control what's going on.
If you don't like how security is being handled, you can vote for people who will investigate these agencies, people who will reform them, and people who will shut them down if they're in violation of our rights. No matter how carried away they get they still must obey the constitution and secure our basic rights. I'm not saying that they always do, but I'm saying that they are required to, and if they're not then we have the power to do something about it.
I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand. I'm not sure which Presidents have lost the public vote, but ended up Presidents because of the electoral college, but the technology, if not actually present, is at hand for online voting and direct democratic participation in the government. We could dispatch the electoral college entirely. In fact, I'm somewhat at a loss as to its current utility. We've had what it takes to eliminate the electoral college for decades, as far as I can tell.
Certainly, I will not sit on filibuster.gov or something, waiting all day to cast my vote on every little thing, but, I don't have to vote on every little thing right now. I could conceivably vote on the issues which were important to me.
This technology could start at the county/city level, move up to the state level, and then eventually federal.
Also, we need not control the troops in the woods. How about people casting simple, "let's get out of Vietnam" votes? We need not try to vote in every little thing, all the time. We could concentrate on some of the broader issues.
Mind you, some of the Greeks thought that this would be mob rule, and the elitist in me cringes at the thought of millions of sub-100-IQ Americans punching away at the "Let's have gladiators on national holidays and public torture of criminals!" option on their WebTVs, but with a small but bold experiment at a local level, we could see how it works out.
People seem to misunderstand. It's not about how the economy is run, or about how the figureheads get put into power, but about who has responsibility for the security of the state.
The CIA and the NSA are not handled by any democratically elected official, nor by anybody appointed by such an officail. There may be an appointed person who "oversees" these branches, but they sure don't run them.
From The Quotable JLG:
"I am afraid of what voters will let government do in the name of national security. I fret about the power of the NSA."
Red Herring, December 1996
http://www.bedope.com/qjlg/
The moral of the story is that you're using a public network when you use email. While it's certainly immoral and usually illegal to snoop, governments will always do whatever it takes to insure their power. We've seen it time and time again with the US's relationships with other countries.
Knowing that, we know that in general they will be watching for all threats. If a coalition decides to form to watch these threats, like Echelon, it will happen. If you insist on using these postcards, at least encrypt your data.
Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State. (The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically). There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.
If it was based purely on whistleblower accounts, you'd have a point. They're rarely reliable.
The bibliography, however, includes a large number of more official sources, FOIA releases and congressional testimonies: the story is credible enough that political action (albeit in the European Parliament, a fairly weak institution) has been taken on the strength of the various reports that are cited.
As to the other stories you cite, there really is no point of comparison (except maybe the one about the CIA). Echelon is a story about a group of nations doing, by their intelligence services, something in their direct strategic interest using the best technology available and disregarding the law to do it. What's so lacking in credibility about that? The real surprise would be if they weren't up to something like it - and up to the point where they break the law and infringe my privacy without my having given them cause to suspect me, I approve of it.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
For another classic example, the Steve Jackson Games debacle illustrates several of these points..
If you mean the time they were raided during Operation Sundevil in 1990.. thats coz Loyd Blakenship was working there.. he was a well known hacker/cracker type.. The NSA have been watchful of the company ever since.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Have you ever heard of Lojack. A system for tracking where you're car is going. Hmmmm. Do I really care what happens to my car if it's stolen. No that's what insurance is for. I don't know, starting to get very paranoid. Might have to pull the on old Betsy (my computer) cause the gov't is spying on my online habits. WAIT A MINUTE, THEY.......
This isn't sig. it's banner for advertising.
I appreciate your concern about the lack of knowledge that we have about what's going on. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the beast. There is simply no way for a spytype agency to reveal what they're doing to the American public b/c then they would also be revealing that to the people they're spying on. The only hope is to elect people you support, and hope things don't get too screwed up.
With respect to the companies thing, obviously I am in the dark, but I have heard one story that was released a while ago. I can't give you much of the details, as I am only recounting from memory, but apparently an US agency determined that a French corporation has used bribery to obtain a contract from a South American government. They called them on it and a US contractor got the deal instead. If that's a good example of how the system works, I guess I'm okay with that. Sort of preventing other companies from gaining illicit advantages. Admittedly, it may not work like that always, and so its good to have independent people worried and investigating these things. But until they turn up some dirt, I can only go with the information on the table.
First, I'm not sure that Echelon-like programs are useless. There are a variety of threats to the public safety that existed during the cold war and continue to exist now, which can be prevented to some extent by the information gathering that Echelon provides. Admittedly, organisations, particularly those in the government, will tend to try to justify their own existence/collect more funding/etc. But more is required to demonstrate that the NSA has overstepped their bounds.
Additionally, it is easy to talk vaguely about the universal human rights that our founding fathers established, but, frankly, its rather naive. Remember, many of our founding fathers were supporters of slavery. And just in case you thought they were ardent supporters of freedom of speech, read about the Alien and Sedition Act. Essentially, it limited voting and free speech to prevent opposition to the party in power. Fortunately, it did not last long.
If you want to talk about rights violations, state what rights you're talking about, how they're specified in our constitution and how they're being violated. Its not sufficient to mention human rights, and then expect us to all agree that the NSA is evil. I've lived in the US all my life, too. And I am not proud of all the things the US government has done. But until you can provide me with examples supported by sound reasoning, I see no reason why I should be ashamed. And even then, I reserve the right to disagree with your judgement.
The (British) government says it merely updates police powers to intercept and monitor communications, bringing them up to speed with technologically sophisticated criminals. People who refuse to yield encryption codes could face up to two years in jail.
You think the Echelon sabre rattling is a coincidence?
1. Airwaves are public property. Treat them as such. If you don't, it's your fault when somebody reads your mail.
2. A government has the final say over what its land is used for. Once again, if you don't keep this in mind, it's your fault when your messages get intercepted.
When there's so much strong encryption readily available, I'm amazed that people will complain about this sort of thing at length rather than use the most basic measures to prevent it.
This kind of reminds me of my first Sheepdot article I did, Jam Echelon 2. You can read it at:
/. effect to my poor little server.
http://www.sheepdot.org/raize/jamech.htm
I don't provide direct href links since that tends to give the
For those of you who didn't already know, Jam Echelon was considered the biggest failure ever set forth by an online community. Not only did it do absolutely nothing favorable, but you had hundreds of people spamming newsgroups with ridiculous postings.
Not to mention the words that were in the hotlist, like the letter "a", "bugs bunny", and other really stupid things.
Think about it folks, if there is a system to monitor *us*, it is going to monitor everything we say in any email, not just particular emails.
Such a system could exist, but in my opinion doesn't. We've got more important everyday loss of freedom on the Internet that doesn't have to be part of a scam that some New Zealand company came up with.
Sure, Echelon and its ilk scares the hell out of me, but think about it for a bit: if such a system did exist, what an incredible engineering feat it would be!
Can you imagine all the CPU power backing it up, the massive amounts of bandwidth, the sophisticed language parsers (something tells me it's a bit more complex than "does this message contain 'bomb'?") and the satellite and ground-based listening posts?
It's a shame that humanity's greatest concerted efforts of high-technology have usually been destructive in nature. (I don't claim exceptions are non-existant -- look at Apollo.) I wonder what that says about out nature.
How cool would it be if some of technology involved would trickle down sooner rather than later. Think about all the incredibly cool -- and useful -- things we could do!
yours,
john
Somewhat lengthy, and written with an agenda
I thought I filtered Katz!
but interesting
Oh.... Nevermind.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
Beats being a DonkPunch wannabe. Talk about aspiring to mediocrity.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
I'd like to see all of the patriotic American nationalists that we have in this country, flying their red white and blue on their pick-up trucks and snapping at any two-bit 'hippy' that dares suggest America isn't the greatest nation in the world, react to having every bit of communication recorded and played back to them, from their email and letters to their phone calls.
As can be seen from these shotlists, the House has voted to establish a committee on Echelon. The first meeting is planned for September 9th, 2000.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/ebs/s hotlist/ref15543.htm
http://europa.eu.int/comm/ebs/s hotlist/ref15545.htm
There are also five volumes packed with good stuff (some by the mentioned author himself) at http://www.europa rl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/publi/pdf/98-14-01-1en.pdf
(and 2en.pdf, 3en.pdf, etc.)
Enjoy your reading!