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The Hardware Behind Echelon Revealed
Whispering Bob writes "Techworld has got an interesting article on the technology behind the Echelon spying networks run by the US, UK, Cananda and Australia. Apparently the super storage and analysing technology used in the US is sold by privately owned Texas Memory Systems. It can deal with one trillion floating point operations per second. Now that's some technology."
"A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second." Uhm... that would be teraflop... morons.
Not THAT amazing.
.. what if this system were a -public- resource rather than a secret one? Imagine the possibilities for rock and roll!
I don't give a fratz about fanboix 'trainspotting' about this computing system. It means nothing that its 'not cool'.
Just the fact that it 'only takes' a computer in the 200's region of the top500 to spy on a massive human population is impressive.
Not fanboix whiney trainspotting. Think 'culture, eating itself'.
Moving on
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
What do china, north/south korea and other protective countries do about this?
And does this listen on to the internet communications (modem beep beep blonk sounds) also?
And finaly, what do they use this information for? Would the use it against a politician if it posed a threat for them (aka blackmailing them) or someone else?
The world is more and more terrifying every day.
I know that this has been talked about before on Slashdot but I think the most disturbing thing about Echelon isn't the hardware (although I'd bet there is a great deal more to it than the current article talks about) but the fact that it is used to spy on whoever it happens to pickup. A certain keyword in a communication is all that it takes to get Echelon's attention and then you are in it's grasp.
If you happen to be a U.S. citizen or resident, it is unlawful for the U.S. government to monitor your communications without a warrant. This is no problem for Echelon, the Canadians or the Brits will do it for the U.S. It is one giant loophole for the governments involved to spy on their own people as well as anyone else.
I don't really have that much to hide but I do value my rights and my privacy so that bothers me. I know that the powers-that-be justify this as being part of the defense of the free world, that this is a necessary component on the war on terrorisiom and that such draconian measures are justified to keep us safe. But, if I have to give up my rights, my privlidges as a resident of a free country, I can't accept that explaination. Simply because the tool has become a tool of a different kind of terror. It is a took used by a represive government, used against it's own people.
I fear a repressive regime in my own country far more than I fear Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen.
So many of the changes made since 9/11 have played into the hands of terrorists. The changes have made the way we live, the way we travel, and the way we do business much more restrictive and expensive. Airport security is probably the most glaring example of this. We aren't anonymous travelers just getting from place to place anymore. We are electronically monitored, our travels documented. Those TSA agents and airport police aren't free - every traveler and every citizen pays for them.
Echelon is worse than that in some ways. We don't know if or when our conversations and other communications are monitored. It is hidden from our view, shielded behind a digital curtain of secrecy. If it is used against us, we will probably never know.
Some people probably say: "What's the big deal if it is also used to catch drug dealers anyway? They are just criminals." I can understand that position but have to say that it is a pretty narrow view. The truth is that you can't make two wrongs make a right. A regime that turns it's military against it's own people isn't very far from being the enemy. This is the kind of thing that the Gestapo did in Germany. It is just wrong.
I'm glad to think that I live in a free country. I'm just not sure that we are as free as we think we are. I'm afraid that we already have our own version of "secret police."
OK, we all agree a common time, dial a friend and utter the phrase:
"George Bush, the President of the United States, would never assasinate an infidel World Leader with Semtex or a radioactive nuclear dirty bomb"
and see what happens!
Chew on that Echey baby!
AT&ROFLMAO
According to Wikipædia: "ECHELON is the largest electronic spy network in history, run by the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, capturing telephone calls, faxes and e-mails around the world. ECHELON is estimated to intercept up to 3 billion communications every day." It raises a very serious question: How on Earth do they manage to get 3 billion warrants every day?!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What I'd like to see is the list of numbers blocked from processing. White House? Kremlin? Saudi royal family? Raytheon executives and mistresses? Don't tell me everyone's equal under this scheme.
I'm curious about why they mention floating point performance at all since it would seem that integer performance would be far more useful for just about anything Echelon needs to do.
Anyone know if there is a reason for the floating point reference other than just as a 'gee whiz' number?
Not for text matching, but for numbercrunching. Numbercrunching as in RC5-72. I think you get the idea...
Excuse me? floating point operations to run RC5? I don't think you get the idea..
How is it we can get exact specs for Echelon, but not for Google?
Just a thought. If it had been prevented, something else would be the largest attack on US soil. So maybe it already has prevented bigger things?
Mod point free since 2001
You left out one major item. Economic espionage, which is why the EU investigated the program in the first place.
A lot of european contractors kept finding themselves underbid or business stolen from them- when everything was secret and there was no explanation except eavesdropping. Further, it was only US businesses that seemed to benefit from this mysterious information-providing god.
Please help metamoderate.
They're trying to spendour money as fast as possible, not save it. That's one reason that Echelon is secret. Until it becaue ludicrously futile to deny it, Echelon officially didn't exist. That makes it easier for huge corporate welfare projects to spend money on political bribers^Wcontributors' projects, without any oversight or criticism. Running up a $5T debt isn't easy with Congress and the public butting in all the time.
--
make install -not war
... right after 9/11:
"The terrorists win only if they change us, only if they make us change who we are and how we live."
By that standard, I'd say "Game Over".
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Violating my fourth amendment rights and eroding my civil liberties is a much greater threat to my national security than any WMD is.
I read something everyday that makes me want to quit being an American.
Using FPGAs for an Echelon type system where maximizing GB/s is a primary goal? Unlikely.
I work on digital system designs clocked in the 150MHz region. No problem at all meeting the timing constraints on a typical 0.13um ASIC technology. We use FPGA's for testing and validation, however, and the latest and greatest FPGA's are maxing out with our designs at around 90MHz.
Now look at the clock speeds on the x86 you are using to browse this page. 3GHz maybe? How fast would this design run on FPGA (assuming it would fit)? Unlikely to reach even 1/10th the speed. Why not say to Intel/AMD/TI "You still use ASICs!?!"
In terms of speed, current FPGA technology cannot get anyway near the performance of a well optimized ASIC design (even with the same core process technology).
How about a new type of slashdot effect... we pick a few random bad words and slashdotters make sure to mention them several times in all phone conversations.
I'm going to sell you this elephant charm. It will protect you from wild elephants, and you can be sure it works! Do you see any elephants around here?
Some simple math shows that it IS impresive
The 1 Tflops statistic is for a set of 5 rack-mount units, each 3U high. Essentially half a rack of equipment. Presumably, they would buy more than one set. In fact, one person suggeted that ASICs only make sense when purchased in quantities of 100k. With 24 ASICs per box, and 120 per 5-units, that's 1200 ASICs per full rack.
If they order 100 racks, you get 100k ASICs, and 100 TFlops of processing power.
THAT is impressive.
actually, you've pretty much hit the nail right on the head.
There's one program out there that turns a normal message into a spam message based on the textual content, and can be decoded by running it through the same program. However, this doesn't go far enough to a degree -- if you create such a message, there's only one way to distribute it effectively and subversively, as to not be detected and your agent compromised:
spam.
Simple steps:
From this, the message is completely lost in noise, and is theoretically disregarded...with all the spammers out there, the noise volume is enormous.
The only problem with this scenario is that your recipients have no measures to contact you again, but you can set up a web log or forum where you talk about kittens or someshit and they'll be able to place padded messages back, or whatever you want to do.
Now -- hopefully, if the national governments hadn't thought about this before, we'll see a "war on spam" where they'll drop a few bunker busters on a few spammers out there :D
1 Tflops would place it anywhere between place 240 (if it were sustained) or 500+ (if it were peak) on the current top500. Not THAT amazing.
That's 1 Tflop per cluster of 5 boxen - I expect they use many such clusters:
"A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.
A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second."
A classic example of Steganography. The more noise, the easier to encode a useful signal. Usenet, radio signals, newspapers, and ebay are all great candidates for hidden messages. Cable television isn't such a great candidate only because it's highly regulated by either media conglomerates or governments.
Was "believed" put in there because somebody wants it to sound Really Scary(TM) because it's "believed" rather than "publicly known", or was it put in there because somebody was unaware of SELinux?