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Echelon in the News
We've been deluged with Echelon stories today, although as far as I can tell, there was no real news about it whatsoever. The committee examining Echelon met today, and that was apparently enough of an excuse for news agencies to report stories based on the draft report that was leaked last week. (The final report isn't due to be presented until September - it doesn't appear that today's committee meeting actually released anything.) News stories from here and there: CNN, BBC, Computerworld... well, I'll skip the non-English ones. And if you're wondering what this "Echelon" thing is, there's a handy guide.
The name is not Echelon, it's AOL.
The accusation from the Euoropeans that concerns me just as much is the allegation that the U.S govt. may have used the echelon (or similar) system for the benefit of U.S Businesses by providing tip offs etc. I remember reading somehwere that a few aviation deals in europe went boeing's way at the very last minute, when (i think) Airbus was the front runner. It really then comes down to the haves (in this case, people with access to echelon derived information) and the have-nots (3rd world countries etc). it is a case of 'All your confidential intercontinental ibusiness deals are belong to us.'
I encourage others to post translated articles or non english articles about the same storie here...
Folks, large organizations (nation states, corporations, religions, professional lobbies, Star Trek fandom, etc.) act to promote their own interests.
Echelon is in effect because the U.S., the U. K. and their partners (Canada, ANZAC, etc) benefit from the intelligence gathering and use it not only for national security purposes (which is reasonable, necessary and defensive in a world of suitcase nukes and bottled anthrax), but also for commercial and industrial espionage (like Echelon target nation France's use of their intelligence agencies to assist French corporations in getting foreign contracts to benefit France).
What we forget at our peril is that countries such as France who deride and rail against Echelon-like tactics gleefully use the same tactics themselves when they've been able to get away with them.
I much prefer a world where most of the signal traffic is monitored under a Pax Americana/Brittania, under the Special Relationship (disclosure: I'm Canadian and I know damned well we help spy domestically and internationally), and where the bad guys get caught before they can build an illegal missle defense system... no, wait, I mean before they can take power using undemocratic Supreme Court decisions to overrule the popular vote...Well, I'd still like a world where there's at least the possibility of avoiding a sneak attack. Remember that Eisenhower tried to justify the U2 overflights by saying "No more Pearl Harbours" (and, after seeing the movie's inept love triangle, I certainly agree).
Echelon, like any powerful tool, can be dangerously misused. Guns are deadly, but I want my local police to be well armed.
My main concern is the U.S. government and how big money determines who even gets nominated.
But I'll take even a George W. Bush (a man who makes Reagan look well informed) to a Robert Mugabe or to a Li Peng any day of the week.
Echelon can and has saved a lot of lives. Let's just make sure it's not more expensive to our liberties than we are prepared to pay.
Now, I agree that there is little or no legal basis for me assuming that privacy will be protected, but that can (and must) be solved by changing the laws. It's not because the lawmakers of 100 or more years ago did not envisage internet when considering whether regular mail should be private, that the founding moral principles behind the laws that they made do not apply to that same internet.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
PGP and GnuPG can already do this, via the keyserver structure.
When I recieve a message from someone whose key I don't have, my copy of GnuPG goes to the public keyservers and requests that person's key, downloads it, and adds it to my keyring. If I'm sending anything particularly sensitive, I then call them up or otherwise verify that the key really is theirs.
The real issue is convincing people that it's worthwhile to generate a key pair, put in their password every time they want to send mail, actually go through the trouble of verifying keys' validity, etc.
I am against the fact that grocery stores, private organizations, my college are selling my information about everything I do to third parties to solicit me w/shit.
So do you think I care if someone is reading my messages, my emails, and what I see on the web? FUCK YA I care...
I understand that there is no "privacy" protection in our laws... But I really think that under no circumstances should the government be allowed to see what I do in my own home on my own time...
Bah.
Yes.
1. Keeping the government itself within the bounds of the law is necessary if "law" is to be anything other than a cynical excuse for the powerful to do whatever they want. This remains true even if the particular abuses committed by lawless government agents are set aside for the sake of argument.
At this point, I suppose that someone will raise some variation of the "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" argument. The answer to this argument is simple: if a government agent really believes that he has to do something illegal to prevent a catastrophe, then he should do it and take his chances of going to prison for it (a la G. Gordon Liddy, who at least deserves respect for taking his lumps and not whining about it).
2. "Doing something illegal" != "Doing something wrong".
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Oh.. not that long ago.. german government, for one, is sponsoring GnuPG. Here's the press release.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I'm surprised to see many responses on the old disgraced theme of only those who have something to hide should be worried.
At least apply the same question to Echelon itself. If they're only doing good things with this, why is this done in total secret? Surely if they had nothing to hide, they would welcome doing this as publicly as the FBI, just to take an example?
Echelon Watch
Society > Issues > Human Rights and Liberties > Privacy
Definition of the word echelon
How to Download YouTube Videos
That said, does that make it right for the government to monitor our communications? Sure, they do it in the name of national security, but honestly, how often do you think they're going to use it to prevent a terrorist attack, as opposed to, say, browsing through your email? Echelon is an invasion of privacy, clear and simple. It's just one the general public doesn't know about, and the government can pretty much get away with - for now. It's kinda the equivalent of the postal office opening all your mail, reading it, then repackaging it and sending it to you.
[sarcasm] Never mind that there was sensitive or personal information in that letter - by God, it's their right to know! And besides they're doing it for our own good! I mean, where would we be if we didn't have the government to protect us from ourselves?[/sarcasm]
If you fancy SlashDotting the Men Within the Hill, the domain of their firewall (appropriately called Hadrian)is ns1(dot)menwith(dot)army(dot)mil There is some more info here http://www.nukem.freeserve.co.uk/contents/localare a/menwith/
Hi-Spooks:)
I did think of posting anon, but it probably wouldn't make any difference so I may as well earn some karma for my crimes :)
No, the Brits should've put forth a little more effort in suppressing the revolt in their North American colonies...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Nope - not joking - pay as you go mobiles are anonymous to the user BTW
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
While the more or less innocent computer users of the world (who can honestly say that they dont do little illegal things online? - your MP3s etc) get persecuted on a regular basis - probably with information gathered by Echelon, the real terrorists continue unscathed.
:)
:P
Because, you see, real terrorists tend to have brains - rather than use the internet where any transmission could be intercepted and traced, why not use your handy pay-as-you-go mobile phone? - Although it can still be intercepted, you can remain completely anonymous - just remember not to say your name over the air
Interesting thought - I wonder how many 'people's revolutions' have been thwarted by someone forgetting to buy a top-up voucher?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Yes I do... They have shown that all they need to do is "alter" the meaning of the message by removing content. To the federal government you are guilty until they find someone else more guilty than you..
You should care about the sites you view.. If the government decides that sites explaining how to (within the constitution) replace the government are ILLEGAL (Sedition) and viewing/running that kind of site is punishible by death (Treason against the United States of American Businesses) THEN you'll worry.
UPS Sucks
But if you do that it will take weeks ! and by then your witty comment will be totaly out of context (this giving them MORE reasons to monitor you - like you trust that all your NORMAL snail mail goes through the USPS, a branch of the federal govt.).
UPS Sucks
Companies already collect an insane amount of personal information and profile me to get inside my pocketbook. So the government is recording all of my online correspondence and/or activity? What's new? I don't see people complaining about everyday privacy intrusions, such as Safeway's club card.
I must say the area of "terrorist threats" has been taken a bit far. I know of an individual who while drunk said he would like to kill him neighbors, and because of a past history of "careless acts" (DUI) while drinking, was prosecuted for making "terrorist threats" and is now on probabation, and was informed it was one strike, towards California's three strike law.
While I dislike the person on probation, I think that is a bit extreme.
While it's not a complete solution, the first step is to stop voting for anyone that has "R" or "D" next to their name on a ballot. While pretending to be adversaries they collude to expand their collective power by continuously eroding our freedoms, thus we end up with things like Echelon.
Until the people wake up and realize that every person inside the Beltway (for starters) is concerned only with maintaining and expanding their own power, there is no hope for the future of this once-great Republic. We need to break the stranglehold that Democrats and Republicans jointly hold on government and its power at almost every level in this country. Only then will we have honest discourse or debate on any issue, much less the hope of some accountability.
Might I humbly suggest that one start here?
You mean Slashdot?
Yeah, you're kinda right.
18 /. articles and counting! Maybe they should create a new topic.
----
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
George Orwell must be spinning in the old grave at the thought of Big Brother.
~~ What's stopping you?
I seem to recall that there was a bill or something that proposed to make encrypting an email the basis of probable cause, and therefore a legal excuse to obtain a warrant for search / seizure. It was posted in here a few months ago.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
It has been my experience posting in this forum that British citizens will often support such a system, while Americans almost to a man won't. I attribute this to the relationship that the Brits have with their government; one of consanguineity, a sense that one is of the same type, beliefs, origins, disposition, and outlook. As an American, I am baffled as to why, but they do support video cameras in their streets, surveillance platforms in their Irish towns, and other Big Brother devices.
The psychology must be one of fear. One must feel that he would be the last group to be attacked by the government he is so loyal to. That combined with an unrealistic fear of criminal elements / foreign terrorists / evil agents allows one to be seduced by the technological fix of spying on the entire planet indiscriminately.
Now, if you Are one of those in the Inner Circles of Power, well, then you have almost no choice but to embrace better ways of (as you must perceive) keeping your grip on the wolf's ears. Power serves itself in this instance and as such is incapable of saying 'no' to a means to enlarge, insulate, and safeguard itself. I suspect there is no good rationale for the existence of Echelon or Carnivore except for the need to stay on top.
But this is antithetical to our Constitution, and one would think, post-Magna Carta England, because one of the enlightened priciples espoused by the architects of (at least the US) system of government is a regime founded on the consent of the governed.
Echelon is certainly Un-American, and probably not very terribly British.
And the French, who know freedom, sovereignty, and independence as much as anybody, would certainly be the ones leading this charge, I would think, since they accused US of using Echelon to spy on some Brazilian contractor to steal a contract from France for, um, England? Hang on. Here.
Interestingly enough, it says that this was built during the Cold War. Also, using only the most dubious of logic, this quote from former CIA director James Woolsey:
A questionable justification from Woolsey for this activity at the time was that European companies have a "national culture" of bribery and are the "principle offenders from the point of view of paying bribes in major international contracts in the world".
Hell, you don't see us stopping work on missile defense just because the Soviets crumbled, do you? It's kind of like that.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
When you're in your home, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Your home is your your owned personal space. Your to control and keep others out of. If law enforcements wants to tap in and watch/listen, then yes, they need a warrant from a judge.
The internet is a distributed cooperative network. You do not own it. No one person owns the net. And on the net, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Hence no warrant is needed to look at email or sniff your packets as they pass by 3rd party sites. It's no different than a cop patrolling streets looking for crime. He's in a public area looking for trouble. The internet is the same.
Neither is e-mail private. People see the substring "mail" and instantly want to assign it all the rights and priveleges afforded to real mail. e-mail is not a gov't protected nor a paid private carrier protected point to point service. E-mail is the equivalent of writing a note on a postcard for a friend across the classroom and handing to the person in front of you saying "psssst. pass it on to "Joe@FrontOfCLass". It moves through many hands on its way any of which can read it as it goes by. Including that FBI agent seated 3 rows in front of you.
Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there.
I mean, it is, isn't it.
Them Brits should never have been allowed to become a US state ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Don't like Echelon/Carnivore/whatever? Then you should routinely encrypt your emails with GPG (or equivalent).
However, I don't like Echelon, and I don't do this. Why not? Because it's too much hassle, both for the sender and the receiver of the email.
To fix this problem, I'm designing a system called Herbivore which is intended to make the encryption transparent to the user; it does this by adding some extra fields to the email header, which broadcast a user's public key.
So if I'm using a Herbivore-compliant email client, and the person I send email to is too, then all messages (except the first one sent between us) will be automatically encoded and decoded using GPG.
(Before you rush out to download Herbivore -- it isn't implemented yet. I'm currently writing a very simple command-line email client that implements Herbivore; then I will add the functionality to one of the common open source email clients (probably kmail as that is what I use)).
Why do these people think we actually believe This Is For Our Own Good?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
as the BBC report shows - Europeans MP's are getting worked up about it - now those of us in Europe are quite frankly gobsmacked since these people usually spend their lives in committee debating nothing of importance and contributing nothing of interest to those of us in the nations from whence they were elected.
For something to make them sit up and take note it must be really bad...
blazing a trail for mediocrity...
Hypothetical question: If you knew that the information gathered would never be used against you per se (unless you were doing something illegal), would you still be opposed to Echelon? I mean, what if the government really just used it for tracking terrorist activities, and you could be sure? It seems to me it would be no problem then. And I don't see it being used for terribly bad things? Why does the NSA care what web sites I'm surfing? If the NSA is after me, I have bigger problems than that...
If I want to send somebody a private message I'll want to use U.P.S. now.
blah.... technology %-)
0 001 11 1
NSA (and CIA) were founded by the National Security Act of 1947.
Don't Panic! It's too late for that anyway...
I would like to correct two mistakes that seem to be common in this discussion: First, there IS public accountability for the Intelligence Community (IC). Oversight of the IC is the primary responsibility of the House Permenant Select Commitee on Intelligence (HPSCI, pronounced "hip-see") and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, known to some as "Sissy") In addition, executive branch oversight is done by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). SSCI and HPSCI both conduct open as well as closed hearings about IC activities and will respond to public requests for information, subject to classification, of course. Second, I'm not aware of any case in which the IC has done economic espionage, as I define it. They certainly do (and should) collect economic data on a variety of countries, for example, estimating their GDP, productivity, etc. They also collect information on foreign weapons systems and use that information to develop new US weapons. But there is a high level of consensus in the IC that they are not interested in collecting information on foreign products and giving that information to US companies. For one thing, how does one choose which companies get the data and which do not? More succinctly, as one CIA officer pointed out, "I don't mind risking my life for my country, but I'm not very interested in risking my life for General Motors." (My memory may be faulty in this quote--it might have been Ford...)
Don't Panic! It's too late for that anyway...
Echelon: the program which checks for possible plots and attempts of terrorism, ie: a way to go into ur email.
Has anyone actually taken into consideration that Echelon could fall into the wrong hands, that of hackers or people who would use it for their own evil purposes. Its bad enough the government has it and can do wrong with it, but think of what someone in the public can do if they have it and is pissed off.
Echelon, is not just a privacy concern, but a security one as well
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
"The net is too big" is a myth. The net is really not all that big when you think about, it just "feels" very big. Also almost all traffic goes through a very small number of very fat pipes, the net is very poorly decentralized. Its incredibly easy for any organization with a fair amount of money (e.g. Echelon) to monitor 75% of internet traffic, which is more than enough. If a relatively small, "poor" company like deja (now google so not so small anymore) could archive all of usenet from 1995 (minus binaries), monitoring most of the net is a joke. There are already a number of organizations that have saved "snapshots" of the web.
Above and beyond that, complacency based on "the net is too big" argument display a horrible lack of long-term thinking. Bandwidth and storage are still getting cheaper all the time, and its not an unfeasible notion that within the next 20 years or so, technology advances may make storage possibilities essentially unlimited. Combine that with advances in AI software that will make much of the monitoring completely automated, and advances in optical circuits that will help make the monitoring real-time. Give it 20 to 40 years - this sort of large scale monitoring will be NOTHING. To casually brush off the inherent dangers in allowing systems like echelon with a statement like "the net is too big" is dangerous. These systems should not be allowed to exist in the first place, or should exist only under condition that the system is open to citizens' scrutiny. You're saying "ah who cares lets just allow them to keep running it because it isn't that effective anyway". We shouldn't for a moment let governments think the people don't disapprove, it is wrong ON PRINCIPLE, regardless of whether its technologically feasible. I thought americans had something called the FOIA anyway for this sort of thing?
So long as there is a provision made to check up on a system like Eschlon, I would have any problems with it provided, as you said, a warrant was needed to break encryption.
No. The problem is that the government still should define what is terrorism. You can have thousands of examples. The USA never gave a Visa to anyone that belonged to a comunist party, even the democratic ones as the from France and Italy. Martin Luther King was investigated due to anti-american activities. They would investigate anyone that has contrary opinions to the american government.
All U.S. Signals Intelligence activity falls under the United States Signals Intelligence Directives (USSIDs). These documents and the applicable Executive Orders very clearly delineate what can and cannot be collected and considerable attention is paid to an individuals reasonable expectation of privacy. This stuff is taken very seriously and careers end very quickly when people try to step over these bounds.
If anyone is really that interested just do a little research and put in a few FOIA requests if necesarry. Then if you choose to remain paranoid it will at least be well supported paranoia.
"Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there."
I agree with you, but how do we make sure that the government doesn't try to crack encrypted email without a warrant? You state that if you are in your home, you have an expectation of privacy, and so any searches require a warrant from a judge. You also say that if you encrypt an email, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The logical corrolary of this is that any attempted crack of the email should require a warrant.
This brings me right back to the point I made in my original post. There is no oversight ensuring that any attempts to crack encrypted email do receive a warrant. Even if you encrypt, and have an expectation of privacy, there's no guarantee that the person authorizing a crack of the email answers directly to an elected official, as a judge does (sort of).
I'm the stranger...posting to
What disturbs me most about Echelon is that there is no public accountability whatsoever, or even an admission to the public that Echelon exists.
Consider: In the United States, a warrant is needed for a phone wiretap, video surveillance, seaches, etc. These warrants have to be approved by a judge - that's public accountability. The judge is a public official appointed by elected officials - wiretaps and searches are authorized by a person only one step away from elected officials who are directly responsible to the people.
Echelon isn't like that. There are no warrants, we have no idea who approves an Echelon search, and there is no accountability to the people, because the people don't know which elected officials, if any, have oversight. If a governor appoints a judge who makes boneheaded decisions about warrants, the public can refuse to re-elect the governor. How does the public know who to NOT vote for if a mistake is made with Echelon? How does the public even know if a mistake has been made?
The worst part of all is that the US government refuses to even admit the dang thing exists, and without such an admission, there's nothing even the ACLU can do. How do you force the government to disclose something that "doesn't exist"?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Hypothetical question: You are a terrorist. What would you answer?
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