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Echelon Architect Interviewed
ploog writes "Echelon has been surrounded by controversy since rumors of it first popped up on the net. The US Government has never admitted to it, although various other governments have. Now, a lead architect for Echelon and its "big brother," Echelon II, has been discovered and interviewed. This is fascinating stuff. He is able to give some details about how Echelon works, although he doesn't come divulge everything, for obvious reasons.
Trying to deny Echelon just got that much harder. Link found via Megarad.com."
Since the server is already slowing down, here's the article.
ECHELON'S ARCHITECT
Echelon now has a big brother. Meet Bruce McIndoe, lead architect for Echelon II, the 'most productive intelligence program' in history
By Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg
Meet Bruce McIndoe. He has information that the Danish government and several others around the globe, continuously pretends isn't there. McIndoe knows that Echelon is real. Because he helped to build it. "Yes, that's right", McIndoe confirms to the Danish paper Ekstra Bladet today Bruce McIndoe dedicated more than ten years of his life to Echelon. He helped to finalize the original Echelon system starting in 1987. After that, he started to design Echelon II, an enlargement of the original system.
Bruce McIndoe left the inner circle of the enormous espionage network in 1998, a network run by the National Security Agency, the world's most powerful intelligence agency, in cooperation with other Western intelligence services. Ekstra Bladet tracked down Bruce McIndoe to IJet Travel Intelligence, a private espionage agency where he is currently second in command.
IJet Travel Intelligence is an exceedingly effective, specialized company that employs former staff members of the NSA, CIA, KGB and South African intelligence services.
The company's task is to furnish reports for top executives from US business and industry that reveal everything about the destination to which they are travelling for their multinational company. All the information they need to make the trip as safe as possible. The company resembles a miniature version of his previous employer, the world's most powerful intelligence agency, the NSA.
And they are almost neighbours.
Bruce McIndoe's new company is headquartered in the state of Maryland, near the NSA's gigantic Fort Meade headquarters.
CURIOUS SPY
We phone IJet Travel Intelligence and a secretary asks us to spell our names. Bruce McIndoe calls back one hour later, at the very minute we had agreed on. He starts by asking the first questions. "It appears you have written a lot about spies, intelligence and Echelon before."
"Well, you might say that."
"You have especially written a lot about Echelon, haven't you?"
"Yes, we have, some two hundred articles."
Bruce McIndoe is more than just casually inquisitive when he calls. He hasn't wasted any time and obviously ran a background check on the two curious reporters from Denmark, and it all took less than an hour. Now that he has broached the subject of top-secret Echelon himself, we decide to get right to the point.
"You were one of the architects for Echelon II. When did you work on that program for the NSA?"
"When I was at CSSI. We worked for the NSA most of the time that CSSI existed. Mainly from 1987 until four years ago. At that time, my company was bought out by a company known as the Computer Science Corporation. Although CSSI was involved in many large-scale projects for the NSA, Echelon was probably the biggest."
"Is Echelon II some sort of superstructure to Echelon?"
"Yes. Echelon has existed for a long time, as you know, and they needed to update the system."
SILLY POLITICIANS
"Have you kept up with the European Echelon discussion and the report issued by the European Parliament?"
"Yes, I have followed it quite closely, actually. At least I know that some countries are uncertain about the entire program, and I'm familiar with their considerations on whether they shall continue to support it. The US government and its allies have already run into somewhat of a challenge."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, they can't avoid the glare of publicity anymore. If I perform a search on the word 'Echelon' right now, I can find maybe one thousand articles dealing with Echelon, so it is a pretty well-known system by now. And as you know, many people mildly disapprove of Echelon. So accepting the use of it poses a challenge to many countries."
"The European Parliament is airing the possibility that the EU should make its own Echelon system?"
"Well, there are three possible options. They can openly join Echelon and demand more control, they can make their own system or they can refrain from having one. But in my opinion, pretending it doesn't exist just isn't an option. Especially not after September eleventh."
"Were you ever involved in the first Echelon system?"
"Only at the end of it. It was already operational when I entered the picture."
"The report of the European Parliament firmly establishes that Echelon is a global surveillance system which intercepts private and commercial communication and that it is led by the US in concert with Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as second partners. But the Parliament is not totally sure the system is named Echelon."
Bruce McIndoe laughs dryly and somewhat indulgently about the thought of our silly European politicians. IJet Travel Intelligence's website proudly, and with surprising candour, mentions McIndoe's contribution to making Echelon II. The website states that: 'Bruce was one of the lead architects for the National Security Agency's Echelon II program, identified as one of the most productive intelligence programs in the agency's history.'
LISTENING IN ON EVERYTHING
"On the whole, it doesn't take long to verify the existence of Echelon if you look at the US Defence Department's budgets. And besides, code names are usually not classified as top secret. This practice enables people in the right circles to refer to the program, yet without revealing its capacity or how it operates."
"So you are the person who can document that you have made Echelon II?"
"Yes, that's for sure. I can even do so without revealing any secrets. Echelon II is the successor, so to speak, of the original Echelon system."
"Can you tell us whether it is used to monitor all types of communication?"
"No system of such enormous magnitude would only be used for a single purpose. They use it for everything they can, if they feel it's necessary. Whenever they need to exploit its potential, they do it."
Bruce takes a little breather while he considers whether he has said too much:
"But it doesn't mean they're a bunch of wild cowboys. There are rules, you know, that stipulate what they are allowed to monitor, and they definitely don't ignore the laws of any individual countries. Not American laws either. This poses somewhat of a challenge, of course, but after they get a court order, they can do just about anything they please," explains McIndoe, who emphasizes that he is no expert in these matters.
In 1998, Computer Science Corporation took over Bruce McIndoe's company - and with that the Echelon contract with the National Security Agency. Shortly afterwards, Bruce McIndoe co-founded the company he now works for. A company where he makes great use of his experience from working with the largest espionage system in the world.
AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION
"Tell us something about the company you work for now."
"Okay. In short, we have transferred everything I did for the NSA and other services to a private company that then sells intelligence to businesspersons. We get information on everything from local diseases, outbreaks of malaria epidemics and local unrest to strikes, the weather and traffic conditions. Our customers are large multinational companies like Prudential and Texas Instruments. We also work for institutions like the World Bank and the IMF."
"Your offices resemble a command post at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters?"
"Yes, exactly. Our staff are also former intelligent agents who have either developed or run espionage operations for US intelligence agencies or people from the UK, South Africa and Russia."
"How does the NSA feel about the fact you're applying the same technology in the private sector?"
"A lot of the technology developed at the NSA will sooner or later find its way into civilian life. Things like word spotting, automatic translation, language recognition and so on. But since we don't try to hide our work and primarily use open sources, the NSA doesn't complain."
Yet the architect for Echelon II indirectly reveals some secrets to us. One of the ways Echelon works is by using words and voice recognition, as well as automatic translation.
not to karma whore, but...
h tm
mirror: http://www.gothicasfuck.co.uk/temp/echelon2-arch.
http://www.ijet.com/about/management.html
-beme
1971
The Danish newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, which apparently got that story isn't exactly the most "respected" (sorry, english isn't my primary language) newspaper in Denmark. Actually it's quite the opposite - it's one of the least frivolous papers in Denmark and I generally don't take much of their writings too seriously.
Here are the automatic mirrors: http://www.eu.cryptome.org/echelon2-arch.htm http://www.nl.cryptome.org/echelon2-arch.htm http://www.at.cryptome.org/echelon2-arch.htm
Slashdot needs to figure out some automatic mirroring scheme to avoid shutting down useful sites. Make it available to subscribers only if you have to.
This interview is definitely a fake. He throws around real sub-contractor names in an effort to sound believable. However, NSA doesn't contract out the honest-to-God engineering and research work. They contract out the IT-sorta stuff. Thus, there's no way this could be true. How do I know? Mostly because I'm friends with people who work at CSC and NSA. -Erwos
No offense, but you have no clue what you are talking about. NSA contracts research out to companies like Mitre, and they fund academic research as well.
Hope you're not using the public key algorithms in PGP and GnuPG if your paranoid about the NSA. Consider that the NSA typically is 15 years ahead of the academics in security (hence DES' security against differential cryptanalysis). Recently there's been some talk about being able to factor 3x as many bits just as quickly; imagine what factoring breakthroughs the NSA has made...
If you want something really secure, exchange keys privately and use a secure private key block cipher in CBC mode, and pray that the NSA hasn't broken your block cipher...
'ekstra bladet' is a very tabloid newspaper willing to print anything that will sell issues. one of the first newspapers to include a pinup model every thuesday. read with caution
HERE
Bruce McIndoe was the founder & CEO of CSSi, an Inc.500 and four-time Washington Technology FAST 50 company that developed intelligence collection and processing systems for various national intelligence organizations. Bruce was one of the lead architects for the National Security Agency's Echelon II program, identified as one of the most productive intelligence programs in the agency's history. He was also a major contributor to the Future Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Systems Architecture Program, several major Communications Security (COMSEC) programs and numerous technical programs. After successfully growing CSSi to 150 people and $17 million in annual revenues, Bruce sold the company to Nichols Research Corporation where he became VP Enterprise Applications and then VP Sales & Marketing with Nichols InfoTec. Prior to joining iJET, he was President of B2B Web Solutions specializing in supply chain automation using the Internet and XML technologies. Bruce holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is a trustee of Allegheny College, where he received his B.S. in Physics.
Do you have a link about this official acknowledgement by the dutch government? Thanks.
Sure:
Dutch government acknowledges Echelon spy network
the DoD (Department of Defense) has funded voice recognition and automatic translation software for over twentty years; where do you think babelfish comes from, seriously? the origins of this software can be traced to systrans, who had DoD contracts during and after the vietnam war.
the european reaction to echelon stems largely from the americans' usage of this technology to overturn an aerospace contract with a middle-east airline awarded on the basis of kickbacks and corruption. this was the first exposure of the potential of this technology. i'm sure the outline of this story could be framed with a trio of google queries; its pursuit is left as an exercise for the reader.
as regards sigint, the french are the only non-echelon (US,UK,Aus & Nz) that have any capability to rival that of echelon, due to their island-based listening stations(think the caribbean and the south pacific, as well as brittainy for transatlantique).
the only significant task remaining is recognition algorithms, seperating the wheat from the chafe, via compression, streaming, and the application of fuzzy logic to voice data.
anonymous? are you kidding?
all those orgs counting the innocents being released have been desperatly trying to find an innocent person who had been executed for the last hundred years and they haven't been able to come up with a single case.
Might that be because they're too busy working on current death penalty cases, which have a "deadline", so to speak? Most death penalty opponents seem to focus on a particular case with the aim of saving that person, and once he's been executed, there is little urgency to continue. Keep in mind that in the American system, there is no such thing as 'proven innocent'. You can try to overturn a sentence after someone's dead, but courts are unlikely to hear your case, as they're also busy dealing with current cases. Examples such as the Sam Sheppard case(though not a death penalty case) show that even high-profile cases will not get reviewed by the courts if the defendant is dead. The closest you usually get are things such as these:
In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state's witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero's death is probably the clearest case in recent years of the execution of an innocent person. (from the ACLDU).
If you want more number than that, how about this:
A study published in 1982 in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 23 convicts were executed; others spent decades of their lives in prison. In a 1996 update of this study it was revealed that in the past few years alone, four individuals were executed although there was strong evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were condemned. (from the ACLU
Okay, simple question: how does killing these people make society safer, if they're already convicted and sitting in jail? It seems to me that taking a "life means life" approach, where a life sentence means you spend the rest of your life in jail unless your conviction is overturned, is the most reasonable approach to murder and violent crime.