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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."
... by secrecy, I wouldn't instantly arrive at the conclusion that any of this interview (with a somewhat elusive subject) is valid. :p
Do you like German cars?
Why arn't senators\congressmen worried about being blackmailed by this thing?
What if there was a watergate-esque break in to echelon?
ok, so i just read the article... if this is all true, it implies that the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Administration (in cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies) actually spy on communications including email and voice? and that they use computer systems to do it? and they even have a code name for it? WTF???!!!
why weren't we kept informed about this?
The company that this guy works for -- iJET -- is fairly interesting. I'm surprised to see that they have a service for regular travelers. For $8 per day (1 week minimum), you get an international cell phone or satellite phone, as well as text alerts "of any major developments that may impact your trip, such as civil unrest, labor strikes, severe weather, disease outbreaks or transportation delays." The info comes from the iJET database that is somehow similar to Echelon.
The service is called WorldLink. It sounds like a pretty good service to me, especially if you don't already have a cell phone that works internationally. For more info, this is the product web site.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
I seem to remember that when the US was the only one with surveillance satellites, countries like Ruissia got very very nervous and upset about it, claiming the violation of airspace, etc.
With the advent of the first Russian spy satellites, things got a lot easier. and dealing with the Russians was easier, because they could verify things with their own spy satellites. They didn't have to take the US word on things.
You didn't have a situation of someone saying "Trust Us"
I wonder if a similar situation will exist with other forms of surverlliance as they develop. Countries tend to get nervous when there are a lot of secrets involved, especially their own. While countries probably can justify secrets, I imagine that life will be easier when there is some sort of parity.
This would be especially interesting in seeing about the average citizen getting some parity with his/her/its government.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well, I don't know what to think of this article. Actually, I do: I don't believe any of it.
:-)
l on/prechel on_en.htm
I've somewhat followed the entire echelon story, and you quickly end up with a lot of speculation, conspiracy theories etc., which is of course exactly what THEY want
Anyway, more reliable information can be found in the official reports of the european union, in their investigation of the echelon system. Look on google for Duncan Campbell and his first reports for the european parliament. Scary stuff, and definitely more trustworthy than some interview with the supposed creator of echelon, containing no evidence of anything whatsoever.
Here's a link to get you started:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/tempcom/eche
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
Umm yeah, nobody thought it did that.
Think about it, it listens in on everything we say and type. I know it must be automatically programmed into the SAC/NORAD so it can automatically launch offsenives if it monitors a phone call or email warning of an impending attack. With all this "human", "unfiltered" knowledge going through it, it shouldn't be long before it becomes self aware and after listening to umpteen gazillion phone calls that are so incredibly mundane and banal, it realizes that humans are hardly worth the carbon they're based on, then decides to take over the planet.
Here is a mirror site.
The evening of Sept. 11 I was watching the news--ABC, probably--and some senator from such and such intelligence committee was on for a few minutes. The anchor was asking him about the plane crash in Pennsylvania, which we all knew very little about at the time.
The anchor said, "There are reports that some phone calls were made on mobile phones from the airplane shortly before it went down. Do you have any more information about this?"
Senator XYZ [matter-of-factly]: "Well there were several calls made and I can't comment on that right now, but we should't have any problem getting the recordings on those."
The anchor moved on to the next question without realizing the impact of what had just been said. But if that wasn't an admission of clandestine listening of routine telephone traffic in the U.S., I don't know what is.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
"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.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you'd be transferring ANYTHING you did *for* the NSA...you might take something you did for the NSA and implement a similar solution, but you're not just going to grab a project and run with it.
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."
And you need former KGB, NSA, etc agents to check the weather...?
This whole interview strikes me as a little off. Something's not right in Denamrk, here folks.
Twinkies sure taste good for something that is 68% air.
A book by James Bamford called "Body of Secrets" (booksamillon.com) contains tons of info on Echelon... yep they are spying on us and everyone else and they put into one large database which has the NSA's own version of Google ontop. Also governements around the world have access to this database - Bamford shows an example of how someone got blacklisted in various countries due to humor error. I'm not saying the whole deal is a bad or good thing... not until I get my hands on it. *grin*
Read the book... it is awesome.. you'll never look at our government's security system the same way again - we have a powerful system. He covers the whole thing from the start in World War II till now. Has several interesting bits in there - one on the U.S.S. Liberty (background info) incident which is fascinating really - Israel really screwed us over on that one.
I merged with the Helios A.I., so all of this is very exciting.
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.
Echelon is the largest contributor to the exasperation that Europe feels towards America. Essentially, Europe is happy to back the US line on everything as they, too, stand to gain from the promoting the fantasy of a free market that puts the rest of the world at a permanent disadvantage.
What stuns European leaders is the fact the US is just as enthusiastic about screwing them: using this incredibly sophisticated spy network, lavishly funded by the American people, to undermine European companies, all the while evangelistically talking up the idea of Free Markets.
And the kicker is that, in order not to rock the boat, the European leaders have to pretend they don't know that Echelon exists! So far only the Netherlands government has officially acknowledged what everyone already knows.
Here's an article describing the growing concerns of America's most important partner. The main problem is that the contradiction between the Free Market talk and actual actions such as Echelon threaten to stoke a widespread antipathy towards America.
BTW, I'm so tired of the way in which any post that in any way examines American foreign policy gets modded down. If we're discussing Echelon, of all things, we should be able to discuss it's real implications without feeling that someone is attacking the American Way of Life.
How do we know if they are abusing the power of Echelon? Easy.
One of the scary facts of Intelligence is having to intentionally not act on it.
For example, we broke the German codes during WWII. We knew way too much. But yet to act on that info (saving Allied lives in the process) would tip our hand, the Germans would change encryption, and we would lose our advantage.
So what advantage did we have? The Big Picture. Which allowed us to "randomly" take advantage of weak points, etc. Allowing us to win the overall objective: National Security (and win the war).
So how does this relate here? If the NSA et al actually used this massive field of info to help small, pathetic things (saving an individual life, helping an individual company, saying "tsk, tsk" about naughty e-mail suggestions to your secretary), that would not have survived any other way, then the NSA would be giving up their hand.
By not caring about day to day affairs of people and the world, they are free to inform heads of government about grave threats to national security and then play the chess game which follows.
If the NSA began abusing this power, eg, a lot of NSA employees making it big on the stock market, or the guvmint coming to your door asking about e-mail sent to your tailor in the middle east, etc. There would be huge public outrage.
The truth of the matter is, the intel weenies aren't hitting it big on the market. I have not been harassed for getting hand-tailored suits from the middle east (I was stationed there btw). And the average joe isn't getting harassed by NSA for copyright infringment, etc...
Just my 1/50th of a dollar.
The USA Patriot Act is another matter entirely.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
From ./'s blurb:
From the article:
Aren't most architects involved before something is built? Is it really that hard to get this kind of thing right?
Cheers
-b
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...
I wrote to my congressmen about Echelon, only one replied. He said that he was on a congressional committee charged with investigating Echelon which repeatedly questioned the military and has repeatedly been stonewalled, publically told that it does not exist. He was genuinely pissed about it. This is positive proof that parts of the military are no longer responsive to government. (I wonder what happens when all of it is unresponsive?)
The European Parliment is also upset about Echelon. Germany has strong evidence that german Echelon stations have been used for industrial espionage. I recall that Japan was upset when it was learned that their private calls between negotiators were being spied on during high-level trade-talks.
I have no doubt that the information yeilded from the system has been used for good purposes, like preventing terrorist attacks and such. It ihas also been misused. It is my opinion that you can not use fascist tactics in defense of democracy.
A good source of information on Echelon is the ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/faq.html The ACLU even have a simple way to send your congressmen a fax about it. http://www.aclu.org/action/echelon107.html
Let them know. Use your vote or you may lose it.
=brian (a coward, but not an anonymous coward)
And how do you define "the right" people?
Did you see in the news the 100th innocent death row inmate getting released? How many have been put to death by the state for being "the right people"?
Abolish the death penalty. Right now.
The state shall have no power of individual's life.
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.