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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."
Do you editors even READ this stuff?
Hm.
9 9940.nsa_2_.xml.pdf
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.
Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).
Btw: Remember the story about the 5MW wind-generator a few weeks ago?
The company cant sell in the us because echelon was used to sniff fax messages that were later given to a us company (kenetech windpower) which made a patent. Complete with the original tying errors. (who was it again who said "whats good for boeing is good for america"?)
(story from ZEIT, titles "treason between friends", here http://hermes.zeit.de/pdf/archiv/archiv/1999/40/1
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
> In about a minute or two somebody will post a coral cache and
> it won't work either. Why slashbots insist on linking to these is
> beyond me. Have they ever worked
Two in about the 20 times I've tried. it's Just Not Big Enough.
Funniest bit is some of us are mirroring sites on home DSL/cable links, and they stay up longer than the coral cache.
Not all the governments involved in this had confirmed its' existance. I think Canada, Australia and New Zealand did, but not the US or UK, or something like that anyway. If it's not confirmed, and is certainly still quite secretive, how can Techworld even know about this stuff? Also, why are they allowed to print such possibly-damaging text?
What ? The US spy department still relies on ASICs ?
Don't they heard of FPGAs ?!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
linkification extension for firefox for copy-and-pasting impaired.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
If enough people made phonecalls that were dilliberately saturated with keywords (say a few million at once)
Would it be possible to effectively slashdot their supercomputer? >:P
Wondering just what Echelon is looking for?
The word lists used by Echelon are highly classified (which of course makes sense if the goal is to keep people such as terrorists from knowing what words to avoid using). However, this also means that public oversight is impossible. Some information does get leaked to us outsiders from time to time, but always as unconfirmable rumors.
Here's a few of those that seem likelyest to have at least a grain of truth.
1. Echelon lists include lots of specific words that are used by people with training, and few general words widely used by the public. Words such as "Explosive" or phrases such as "Blow Up" won't get a hit, but more specific terms, i.e. "PETN", or "Semtex", may be on the list.
2. The list is updated, both by a general review board every few months, and immediately if a particular concern warrents it. (This rummor is apperently the only thing about the system that has been officially confirmed by testimony before congress in an open session).
3. The list is largely focused on detecting Nuclear weapons tech. It looks for correct technical names of bomb components, among other things. Lately, this has been expanded to focus more on bio-weapons.
4. The list includes names of some public officials. Rumor has it that Attourny Generals and FBI and CIA directors have had their names placed on the list to help protect them. Janet Reno was supposedly kept on the list for a year after she left office because of concerns right-wing U.S. domestic terrorists were especially likely to target her. People running the system are reluctant to put public figures on the list, because they get too many false positives to wade through.
5. The system looks for multiple hits and grades them algorythmicly. Several entries in the same phone call, particularly entries that are logically related, will add up to a conversation that crosses a critical threshold and is brought to the attention of a human supervisor.
It's easy to see some ways this could be abused. For example, it could be used to help protect all the presidential candidates in an election year, but just looking for the candidate's last names would generate billions of fales positives. So, in order to 'protect' all the candidates, it would be necessary to monitor for less well known information, like the names of various campaign advisors, private addresses, or other such info, which would give the people running the system a lot of leeway in listening to calls made by the opposition during their run for the office.
Who is John Cabal?
It looks like they just used custom designed hardware to take care of all the processing. That also makes the calculating speed look pretty good (not top500 good though), but it can only do one thing, analyzing speech and text.
Echelon is doing pretty good, they are *a lot* of stories about how echelon was used to give us-based companies an edge over their competitors in countries not involved with echelon. Makes you wonder why the EU is still on speaking terms with the USA.
I read the FA.
It doesnt say so exactly, but it looks like those dsp systems could do large-scale speech to text conversion.
And there (with all those FFTs, ect), FPops in general and DSPs could be useful.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I'm curious, what Echelon can do with Freenet? Or SSH traffic? Or IPSex? Or SSL? Or GPG email? Does it work only on clear-text communication? I suppose not because that would be utterly foolish. With VoIP it's now trivial to have encrypted voice communication all over the world. What can Echelon do about such traffic?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Why 9/11 could happen ? Maybe because someone inside US wanted this to happen in order to justify that war against terrorism, Irak and Afganistan. It was know by CIA and Echelon may have helped somehow but someone indeed, did not want to act against it to happen.
Léa Gris
Reminds me of a solution from a decade ago when the airport security thing was just getting serious. Some people were planning to go through airport security at Orlando, FL during the Chistmas season (lots of kids in the airport) wearing metal underwear. ("You want me to take it off? OK" {flash!})
Only after a couple of years, it is used when it is found convenient.
Probably the bankers are guilty as hell, as all bankers are, but I'm not comfortable with handing someone to USA just because someone there thinks they are guilty. What will happen when someone in USA's state department decides that I'm a threat to USA? Will I be shipped over without even being able to argue against their case?
Actually, that wouldn't do a thing. Since the system has to scan all if its traffic in order to hit on something anyway, then you haven't increased the load on the system. Having more hits only means more items are flagged for analysis. And unless the system is undersized, it will simply continue to process up to the maximum capacity of the public telecom networks on which it's listening. A hard limit, that can only be increased by installing more hardware, or more efficient utilization of that hardware by the telecom companies. Either way, the upper limit of flash mobs is the size of the infrastructure on which they play.
On the other hand, if you're talking about the analysis of hits, you have another set of problems. If I were designing such a system I would qualify possible hits with a correlation of some sort. We know, for example, that through Beysian statical analysis a correlation exists in natural language between certian types of tokens within a given communication. Detecting threats should be very similar to detecting spam, once the analysis engine is properly trained. Implement that training in hardware, and you have a very fast analysis engine.
"White Yankee" should be "Yankee White", which is an old codeword for "for the president's eyes only"
In the late 1970's I worked for a defense contractor that built specialized signal processing computers. The NSA was a major customer. We tried to find other applications, like oil and gas exploration, but nobody else was buying.
My job was to write microcode assemblers and then write the microcode that handled I/O. My description of the hardware is here.
Up to 24 voice grade channels (8K samples per second each) arrived time and/or frequency multiplexed onto a single data channel. The system detected the presence of the subchannels, determined the type of modulation being used, and ran them through the appropriate demodulator algorithm. I don't know what happened to the data after that.
We didn't use custom chips. A cabinet full of Schottky MSI chips was enough for a three processor system. The system's speed was due to parallelism, not high clock rate.
By the way, one of our computer rooms was built inside a big metal box that was suspended from the roof on cables. When it mattered, all external connections except for power were unplugged. We were too cheap to pay for a shielded air-conditioning system, so tests lasted a maximum of 20 minutes.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Don't tell me everyone's equal under this scheme.
some are more equal than others
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
The article was published in "Techworld" which is an affiliate (one of many) of InfoWorld Media Group, which in turn is a limb of IDG. .
IDG is one of those earth-flattening corporations which dominates everything. Look at their track record. Interestingly, they're not just interested in owning all the computer publications in the world. They also have their fingers in Brain Research. --Which looks on the surface to be a bit of PR angling, but 350 million worth? Whatever. Creepy.
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Huge publishing conglomerates have mandates and agendas, (whether they realize it or not), so IDG publishing articles about Echelon is interesting to say the least.
By contrast. .
Slashdot is owned by OSDG. (Open Source Data Group)
From the OSDG website
OSDG is in turn owned by VA Software
VA Software appears to have its morals lined up nicely. That is, their goal appears to be data sharing and the facilitation of collaborative creative efforts. As the much maligned, (and biblically misrepresented), Christ advised, "Judge the Tree by the Fruit it Bears." This is one of the most outstanding bits of advice I have ever heard. Flowing all the way down this particular chain, Slashdot allows peculiar guys like me to speak my mind in forum on taboo subject matter. I have an enormous amount of respect for that.
Here's an article written by Carl Redfield, a guy way up at the top of th
If we have stuff like :
=> Encrypted communications using GPG.
=> Encrypted VoIP using GPG
wouldn't that make it a LOT more difficult for echelon to crack? They'll have to first crack the encryption.
We need some kind of open-source organization that concentrates on safe-guarding privacy and that helps in the development of such tools and their widesperead adoption.
See, the thing with OSS is that it can be used to overcome tyrannical elements - MS is one...maybe invasion of privacy is another? What do you think?
I mean, if this could be done on a large scale with network communication secured by default, with VOIP secured by default, with email encrypted by default, wouldn't that significantly reduce the effectiveness of Echelon? Wouldn't it also result in more fairplay all around?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
It also tells you roughly when that version of the list was created. Because Furbies contain embedded electronic devices, and because Furbies communicate with each other, they fell under the rules for bringing in portable electronic communications devices -- and were declared a no-no in secure areas. (Which makes sense; someone could hide a bug in a Furby and it would be nontrivial for the Furby owner or the security personnel to detect it on visual inspection.)
The fact that I remember that story in the context of the word "Furby" and "the list", probably makes me a threat too.
Here's an interesting game we could play someday: Flash every item on that list, one item per second, to the subject. Using {mumble, if it's not on the list, it's an old version of the list} technology, count the number of times the subject recognizes a term. The more keywords you recognize in the context of the list, the more of a potential threat you are.
Even if the keywords are bogus, it indicates that you've been reading things you shouldn't. (Which would make for an interesting metagame: someone who hits on only the .mil/.gov keywords might be legit. Someone who hits on only the tinfoil keywords can be fed any disinformation you want. Someone who hits differently on the .mil/.gov keywords and the tinfoil keywords can be fed disinformation, and is potentially far more useful, but you've got to be doubly careful about what kinds of disinfo you feed him.)
This is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to the implementation of freedom-crushing systems like Echelon.
Our forefathers understood that there are some things in life than are more important than life itself. I don't need or want my life to be saved by deluded do-gooders like you who seem to think that a false sense of safety and security justifies severe restrictions on my freedom.
Here's a couple of well-worn quotes for you to digest:
and,