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Echelon Used to Capture Terrorist
An anonymous reader writes "Echelon was used to track and capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." Ahh, bitter sweet victories. The article kind of explains what Echelon is, and pretty much says that those disposable phones really don't have much security at all.
Did you know that they can track the location of a mobile phone even if it is turned off, as long as there is some charge left in the battery?
I just read "Killing Pablo", about the hunt for Pablo Escobar, which says that Pablo stopped using his mobile phone because he knew it could be tracked. The book mentions how it was possible to turn it on at night when Pablo was asleep, so it's location could be tracked.
So if you find your mobile suddenly turning itself on in the middle of the night, it's time to get paranoid...
To me, if they were tracking him, that tells that they knew where he was. So, why didn't they just use the tracking from Echelon to capture Mohammed, instead of paying out 27 million to someone else also?
To quote Bill Maher:
Khalid Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh, Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh, Sheikh Mohammed!
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
This guy is a fair and legitimate target for electronic surveilance. He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with. If Echelon is used fairly and honestly in these types of situations, then I will not complain one bit about the extraordinary secrecy of its network.
-Shadow
There are some tools with no reasonable purpose besides evil.
While this instance proves that Echelon can be used for good, who insures that?
$25M and a legal visa... terrorism seems to pay well.
Something I've always wondered...
Quite a few years ago, there was a spate of embarrassing phone calls by members of the Royal family that found there way into the press. The phone calls were "acidentally" overhead and taped by amateur radio enthusiasts. There was reported evidence that the phone calls had actually been played repeatedly near the homes of these amateur radio enthusiasts - presumably as a way of leaking the calls without it being traceable back to the leakers.
What has never been explained (or at least I've never come across any explanation in the mainstream press) is who did or might have done this, and why.
In a similar vein, it was never explained how Colin Powell had a transcript of Bin Laden's last taped message, before the al-Jazeera station even had the tape. To me that means either:
1) It was a fabrication or
2) They know where Bin Laden is.
If they "had been tracking him for some time", I wonder why they waiting so long to do anything. I suspect that the human intelligence had more to do with it than the alleged use of Echelon. The last person I would believe is some anonymous, talking-head Echelon apologist. I think there is some FUD involved. Exactly how do you provide oversight over a project like Echelon? I think that the system is probably used more to spy on people whose whereabouts are known than to track down some people in some sort of Hollywood "Bourne Identity" drama. If Echelon was designed to be a lost-and-found device that actually found Mohammed, I think you would hear a lot more chest-thumping from the intelligence community. The rest of the article is the real story. The NSA/CIA/EIEIO paid off some guy who sold his boss down the river.
The counterargument to this is that if you really want privacy, you need to use strong encryption or simply forget about using mobile phones that way. In this era of high technology, unencrypted cellular communications are about as private as shouting across a crowded street. People have such short memories - remember when Newt Gingrich was overheard discussion GOP strategy on the phone by a pair of retirees with a police scanner?
By the same token, we should simply forget about using surveillance satellites. It's when the government really starts to intrude on areas that have always been considered private, or tries to prevent us from using technology that aid privacy, that we should be really worried.
Given what little we now know about Echelon's capabilities, how could you avoid identification and triangulation? Encrypted phones only help so much. They disguise your voice and the content, but they narrow down the monitoring pool, since only so many people in the world will have or use encrypted wireless phones. Echelon can simply triangulate ALL of the encrypted calls and narrow the search to the most likely targets. Using multiple anonymous wireless phones clearly doesn't help; the subject of this article was caught despite their use. Should the you leave the phones connected all the time, and fill the air time with idle chatter? Should you use wireless voice-over-ip in an anonymous setting, such as an Internet cafe? How can you initiate a real time voice conversation with who you want, when you want, without revealing your own identity, location, or conversation content? If I understand the implications of this article, the solution does not involve wireless phones.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
It seems that a lot of people are saying that it's good that the terrorist was caught, but that the goverment should be able to spy like that on us? Shouldn't the government be able to spy on terrorists? If you have dealings with a terrorist (either on purpose or by mistake) you can get caught by a LOT of other means, and then you'll have a bunch of things to explain.
Some weeks ago, the store that my parents own was robbed. They put a gun to my father and mother. They even put a gun to my 4 year old sister. Luckily no one was hurt. They also stole my father's cell phone, and even answered when we called. Do you think that I would be happy to be "tracked" by my phone's location, just so those assholes could have been caught? I sure will.
please excuse my apathy
Well, you see, the idea behind Eschelon is to circumvent the Constitution's protections by having foreign governments monitor US citizens and report back to the US Government (And in return the US government does the same for them).
Did you read the article? They say Echelon "played a key role". I would say that the $27 million they paid to an informant, and the fact that the guy was sick played a larger role.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
9-11 didn't happen because people had to much privacy...
It happened because people were opressed and somebody offered a way out (although arguably not the right way). That is were you have to change things. Preventing somebody from blowing himself up is done by taking away the need for such an act.
Jeroen
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