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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."
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.
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...
Do you have a link about this official acknowledgement by the dutch government? Thanks.
Sure:
Dutch government acknowledges Echelon spy network
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.