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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 ;)
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
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
I've been watching Duncan Campbell for some years. Many claim he is the person who is standing up for the common man and is bringing to our attention devastating facts about how the government is invading the human rights of the citizens and subjects they are there to serve.
I think he's a twat.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you ever got through the UK education system and do a modern History curriculum you will be taught about how it is far more important to be able to evaluate evidence on it's own merits rather than being able to spout out figures and statistics and dates. You will be taught that whenever you read an article by any individual that is supposedly fact with some opinions expressed, you must understand the biases that the writer may have, and what the motives for writing those articles are.
Duncan has made a great living out of writing this sort of stuff. People want to read it, because it confirms their darkest suspicions, allows them to fantasise about what secret agencies really do, and in general lets them slip into a sort of "James Bond"-esque world that perhaps they wish to be a part of themselves. It never crosses their minds that it's a good thing that the NSA is intercepting a load of traffic, or the fact that maybe they aren't doing it at all - they want to believe this stuff so badly, they'll read anything that confirms it.
Therefore, we come back to Duncan's motives. He makes money out of writing this stuff, and has written several books that have afforded him a very nice life indeed. He has yet to come up with one single piece of concrete irrefutible (sp?) evidence to confirm any of his claims, and yet editors lick his writing up like cream - it's good column inches.
Furthermore, if any of Duncan's claims were in any way true, seeing as he lives in the UK and is therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act, by now he would have been arrested and his writings D-noticed. You would have to find them in the darker corners of the net rather than splatterd all over the UK National dailys, ZDnet, etc. Nobody cares about this though, because it allows the agencies concerned to ask for bigger budgets from those in power who think this is all a very good thing, instills fear in those criminals who believe that their major drugs operations are being monitored (now that's cheap policing if ever I saw it), and gives Duncan piles and piles of cash. It also entertains the rather moronic tabloid minds amongst our society into believing that Really Exciting Things happen down at NSA.
It's all spin, and you're expected to believe it. If you believe it, so do the criminals, and perhaps that's the point.
--
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.
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.