Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
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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.
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.
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/
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
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".
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!
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.
Biggest threat - accidentally triggering the damn thing. :) bomb, president, anarchy, nuclear storage, timing....
I would suspect any system capable of real-time monitoring, decryption and filtering of terabytes of data is sophisticated enough to avoid a simple spam keyword attack. It might get by the quick filter, but I would imagine that the profiles of terrorist activity are much better. I don't know many (intelligent) terrorists who would communicate about C4 in email without disguising it; For example, "I got the baloney (C4).. we just need some mustard (Detonators) and bread (casing).
I've done a little "signals gathering" of my own. It's very easy to decode pager traffic in your area (In my case, I can get the whole freaking province!) using a sound card and a good scanner. You can tell who's doing what by the number codes they leave (you just drop a lookup table off to each of your "associates", and I would assume any monitoring by the NSA also works along these lines. It's interesting though. Maybe I need a life.
It is also quite possible to distingush who wrote a particular paragraph from the syntax and vocabulary used; I would expect for longer emails it would be as good as a fingerprint. I was invovled in a project to post-process digital elevation data taken from a plane. You could tell what data was taken by different pilots by the "error signature". Nifty. I assume liguists can/do the same.
..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...
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...
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 . .
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.
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
What, pray, is not believable about official government statements and interviews with NSA people in the New York Times?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
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
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.
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)
On the other hand,
You can see tremendous overlap between "republic" and "democracy", perhaps explaining the term "direct democracy" for when people vote on all issues.The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
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.
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.
I'm working on a mod for Half-Life that will allow me to bribe the President for money under threat of a H-Bomb! The Rockets are controlled by terrorist teams. I'm planning on charging a lot of money for this mod.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!