Cringely On Electronic Tapping

sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely, the PBS one, has an editorial discussing electronic wire-tapping and the Big Brother concerns. There isn't any new information in the article, but he does a nice summation of the state of law enforcement today. This may be a good article to show your family, friends and congressmen."

Comments

Re:There are others?

[hedronist]

Yes. Robert X. Cringely was an invented name for a column in InfoWorld (I think). When the guy who was writing the column left the paper after many years, he took the name with him. Lawsuits followed, etc. He ended up reatining use of the name, but so did the paper.

The "PBS one" is the original RXC.

Re:WASTE, Encryption, Trust

[StringBlade]

Encryption is already limited by governmental law. I believe 1024-bit encryption is the current limit according to the FCC and other federal bodies. The government doesn't want people to be able to communicate using an encryption algorithm that they cannot already break. IIRC, IBM had developed an incredibly strong encryption mechanism many years ago and were forbidden by the US govenment to implement it without relaxing the strength of they cipher. If I only had a link...

Outdated and Missing Information

[Shackleford]

From the article: "CALEA represents mid-90s thinking about electronic intelligence, but now we have the Patriot Act that goes so much further. And we have a program at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency called Total Information Awareness."

The article was quite informative, but there are a few problems with it, related to the above quote.

"Total Information Awareness" has had its name changed to "Terrorist Information Awareness." Cringely gets this fact wrong and so one has to wonder if there are other inaccuracies in it.

The other problem I have with it is that it mentions the Patriot Act, but doesn't go into much detail about it. It went on for quite a while about CALEA, and understanbly so. But I think that more about the Patriot Act and its implications should have been included.

Re:WASTE, Encryption, Trust

[Troed]

Lucifer, by IBM. Later known as DES - when the keylength had been lessened but the characteristics of the cipher had been strengthened against differential attacks (then unknown outside the NSA).

Foreign spooks using US wiretapping tech

[SysKoll]

From the article: Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too. They have used our own system of electronic wiretaps to wiretap US, because you see that's the problem: CALEA works for anyone who knows how to run it.

And not just CALEA, either. There are other pieces of telecom software and equipment that have been hacked in the past. Some of this eavesdropping by foreign spooks acquired a lot of notoriety due to its interception of highly sensitive traffic.

But it's safe to assume that there was much more eavesdropping that wasn't reported or even discovered.

If this goes on, it will be faster to call the Mossad or the FSB to fix a phone problem in DC than to call the local phone company.

-- SysKoll

Re:This really isn't anything new ...

[Gallowglass]

Dang right! Most western police ofrces have an exercise during training where some other police officer comes in and does something loud e.g. points a banana at the instructor and yells "Bang!" After he leaves the rookie cops are to write down what happened. The resulting reports are never consistent across the class or even between individuals.

The RCMP classes even warn them that this is going to happen so that they will watch carefully. Same results. No one remembers all the details correctly.

The objective of the exercise is, of course, to let the rookies know just how un-reliable eye wintess testimony is.

(I recently saw a story on Discovery about memory research that confirms this, but I'm just about to leave work, and I don't want this post to cut into my beer-drinking time ;-)

Re:Big Brother 1.0

[DaBunny]

Okay, I take it back. You weren't ignoring what was said, just deliberately misinterpreting it. Just like you did with my post.

There have been 3 people declared enemy combatants. As you say, 2 of them were US citizens. That's 2 out of 3, which kinda makes my points, doesn't it?

And many Moslems who were locked up were not illegal immigrants. So I'm not making some goofy PC "arrest a diverse group" request. I'm saying that innocent Moslems should not be jailed for long periods of for no reason.

sources

[zogger]

I do my research. I don't post bs, on slashdot or any place else. Pensacola trains foreign national pilots, same as various other US military bases train other foreign nationals: Here ya go:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/629529.asp?cp1=1

Google has 804 more links with the search term, hijackers, pensacola

For anyone who wants to do some more research into government involvement and prior knowledge of 9-11, here are some URLs

http://www.911timeline.net/

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main /t imelinebefore911.html

http://911citizenswatch.org/resources.shtml

http://www.infowars.com/resources.html

there's hundreds if not thousands more, these links take you to more links

Here's a transcript of an interview with david schippers, and his frustration of trying to warn the government of the upcoming 9-11 attacks, prior to 9-11. Schippers has definete "street cred" in the federal LEO community:

http://www.infowars.com/transcript_schippers.htm l

There's just so much more. What is the real flamebait is this administrations and the past two administrations lies and coverups about "terrorism" in general. Propaganda and disinformation of the highest (new world) order. The US people were manipulated.

Here is the latest on the US government and the apparent interferring with the 9-11 investigation. this is nothing new, I along with millions of others, sat through the old bogus "warren commission report" on the assassination of JFK. Nothing new here, same old junta members faking out the people, it goes back decades.

Take yer pick,79 current news links on the 9-11 commission

Here's a link to the "northwood documents", a set of plans to use phony terrorist events in order to manipulate the US public. This "terrorism" a la reichstagg fire type events is a tried and true classic political manipulation technique.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/join tc hiefs_010501.html

I will copy some of this here:
By David Ruppe

N E W Y O R K, May 1 -- In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Secrets
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

"The whole point of a democracy