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Australia Admits to sigint
Eater writes "Doubts about Echelon dispelled. "
Hrm... On one level it frightens me to know that this is going on, but on another level I am comforted by the fact that people already suspected it anyway.
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"Those stations have to be capturing terabytes of data every day and I'm not sure how well the computers can process the data"
You don't think SETI@home is really searching for extra terrestrials, do you?
See subject. (No, I'm not secretly an NSA agent on damage control.)
Why is this such a big surprise to so many ppl? It is part of the mission of the US intelligence community to conduct economic espionage. This mission is not a secret. They put on their web site for kripes sake. How they actually conduct it is, but not the fact that they are empowered to do it.
Furthermore, NSA has two principle missions; signal intelligence (SIGINT), and information security (INFOSEC). This is not a secret; it's on their web site. NSA was established to better coordinate such activities in support of the entire US intelligence community.
A few years ago, the NSA was actively recruiting in the Asian American community. They were looking to hire translators/analysts. Chinese? Makes sense. Koreans? Ditto. Japanese and Indonesians? Hmmmmm...
SIGINT has been around for a while and it is not going away. It is actually worth reading about past sigint exploits. My favorite is about how we got intel about Germany during WWII. Most ppl are familiar with Enigma. What was interesting is that the US got a lot of intel on Germany by intercepting Purple (Japanese diplomatic) messages. It turns out the Japanese ambassador in Germany was a good source of info.
Sure, you can try to fool the program that is scanning for keywords. But this program is only the first step in the filtering. And it is probably not the only thing that can trigger a more detailled analysis of your conversations or e-mail messages.
So if you are not extremely careful about what you write, you might forget some keyword once (remember that we do not know which keywords they are looking for, and there may be much more than the obvious ones). And if some agent spots that message and decides to have a closer look at all your other messages, then you might be caught.
Personally, I do not care too much about what they do for hunting terrorists, because I am not making bombs or selling illegal drugs in my spare time and I do not think that I would get caught for any illegal activities (although I can never be too sure about that). And hopefully, none of these smart spies would have an interest in displaying some bits of my private life in public. But the gathering of commercial intelligence is an interesting issue...
-Raphaël
I mean, sure, terrorism is a big problem, and yeah, the free world needs to stomp out all aspects of terrorism until there are no more bad terrorists around to blow things up.
...
...
But what interests me more is exactly what *ELSE* these spooks consider worth looking for? Terrorism is just a platform to use to sell more weapons, that's all...
So what else are they looking at?
Industrial information? Economic information? Details about UFO sightings? Reports of Lost-technology from ancient civilizations being found in the Australian desert? Someone trying to get the word out that they've found the aliens' fusion reactor, it runs on water, anyone can make one out of an old Coke can, and therefore should be freely available to every human being? The real truth about the Pyramids of Giza?
Seems to me that this Dictionary file should warrant a very large bounty. If ever there is a fun and rewarding cracker project, it would be to get copies of those Dictionary databases
The world needs to know what these spooks are looking for
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Sure, you could dream up ways to defeat any given trick, but the point is that each of these new methods must be interpreted by a human being. As anyone who is familiar with AI knows, interpreting human language is an incredibly difficult problem. Ultimately, you have to resort to tricks with keyword matching and such. So although there are lots of tricks you can play, with complex pattern-matching, no algorithm is going to catch someone who wants to keep his secrets secret.
To use the rot13 example, no computer is going to "think" of checking for that on its own. Someone has to add that to the system. And I can also use "rot12","rot11", etc. I can use pig latin. I can use number-based codes. I can type words backwords. The point is that there are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of such tricks. Combined with the sheer volume of messages that get sent every day, checking every message for all possible hidden codes becomes an impossible task.
There are other problems as well. One is that it is often impossible to track down the "true" owner of a given email address. And even cracking weak crypto messages takes time. And since you can't read a message until after it is cracked, there is no way of knowing which messages will be worth cracking. Furthermore we can easily flood it with nonsense, bogging it down even more.
The point is that computers are DUMB, and no algorithm will effectively sort out the messages that are relevant. The only way to do this would be to have a human check each one, but that is simply not possible considering the volume involved. In short, wide-scale surveilance of an entire nation is not possible with any consistency.
>But remember, if your mind is _too_ open, then everything falls out. (Or any trash can fall in).
Or other people may get in and look around. That'd be more "on topic" :)
It isn't a matter of privacy that pisses me and many others off, it's the lack thereof that the NSA provides so nicely for us. Wether I'm going to outline a new plan for cold fusion or tell someone of a new 100 acre plot on Ultima Online, I sent it to whomever I'm speaking to and not nsa.gov for the simple reason the government doesn't need to know. You're too trusting in the government wanting and being able to protect you. If you think the NSA has you in mind when they start reading emails you're sorely mistaken, they want to protect their assets and give themselves more power over the people with no power.
Support your local anarchist.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The NSA's charter forbids it from spying inside US borders (that's what the FBI is for). The NSA can legally tap all international communications into and out of the US without any sort of warrant, however. Back when all this started up after WW II, there wasn't a whole lot of international telecommunication going on (too expensive for Joe average). It's actually only relatively recently that most international calls became direct dail as opposed to operator connected. Even today, the international bandwidth isn't all that great.
Of course, there are also all the foreign satellite ground stations, the special military-run listening posts and sigint satellites output to monitor. But from talking to people who have worked in or with this "industry", I believe they manage to process a lot of very useful information.
One more thing: Why do you think the government is fighting so hard to prevent encryption from entering common use?
Don't be quite so sure of yourself as to call it an Echelon site. It's not Echelon.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
If interception of my mail by the government can help prevent one tragedy like the Word Trade Center bombing or the bombing of a US Embassy abroad, then sign me up, damnit!
"I don't care whose civil rights we trample on, the ends justify the means."
BTW, email and phone conversations are not "mass media". Television and radio are, but are not under discussion.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
At least two ways around it. The first way: stop sending email. Bad idea. The second way: PGP. Good Idea. Especially a copy (like GnuPG) where you can RTFS and self-verify that there is no back door.
I don't particularly use personal PGP today because it is a hassle, and because I tend not to send email that I mind being overread. At work (where serious paydata flows over the wires), PGP is a must.
The more they monitor, the more we must encrypt. We have the tools. With the GPL'd GnuPG, we have them copylefted, so that they cannot take them away. They can only make them illegal.
And if they did that, they would have to imprison a lot of pissed-off hackers who would encrypt stuff anyway. Considering the tremendous geek debt we're in, that's likely to hit the economy hard. Fortunately, Congress tends to avoid things that hit them in the wallet--as long as they understand that it will.
--The basis of all love is respect
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Oh yes, I don't doubt that "they" can *find out* anything about you.
But that's very different from actively spying on every person (even every criminal) in the world. Gathering latent data after the fact is a LOT easier than collecting and analyzing it real-time.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
To my knowledge it is illegal in the USA even to say words "kill the ..." (I am not even quoting it). You can get to prison for just these words, even if you used them in your Email. One guy did it few years ago, was traced and where he is now?
Happily biding his time in darkness.
*click click click click click click*
;)
Well we had to have SOMETHING for the unemployed Russian spy satellite operators to do
As someone who knows chips...
I'd have to say that it's entirely possible. The actual computational speed of one "dictionary" checking node dosen't need to be all that fast. They just need to have millions of them. If you organized the system to have parts that do specific tasks, like message reconstruction, message dispatch, message ananlysis. It becomes no problem to construct a highly scaleable system that can process millions of bytes of text a second. Sure it's specialized hardware, but it can be built from commonly available chips with little or no problem.
As an example, a checking node could be made with a few simple components. CPU, Boot ROM, DRAM memory bank, Ethernet NIC, a few indicator LEDs, power connecter, NIC connecter and PCB. That would easily fit on a PCB 6"x6" and be rack mountable, or better yet, fit as manny as possible on one PCB that is as large as you can make reasonable, say 18"x18" for 9 per board. Crank out these boards by the thousands. Don't worry if your older boards are obsoleated by newer tech, just redesign around the newer tech, and make another batch of a few tens of thousands.
Now lets go to specialized hardware. Lets make a chip that checks a stream of bytes against a list of words. Lets make it so it can check 1024 words up to 32 bytes long. Well within fab techniques 15 years ago. Place it in an 8 pin surface mount package package for size. On powerup it waits till it's addressed to load a block of words. Then it waits for the message byte streams. When it matches a word it sends out an interupt, and the message is flagged for latter analysis. Being dedicated logic, they likely could process data well in excess of 1 MByte a second. 3600 of these chips could be placed on an 18"x18" PCB with driver and control logic. This gives us 3686400 check words per PCB. More than enough for all languages and future expansions. On each board is a processor that receives messages to be checked, then passes them by the checking hardware, noting which ones get flagged for a match. Now scale this to thousands of boards. At 25 boards per card cage, 4 card cages per rack case. That's only 10 refrigerator sized cases to check 1GByte a second against 3686400 words, Now reconfigure the hardware a bit to make it 100x more parallel in the checking, and we have 100GBytes per second against 36864 words. Now make this a room sized endevor, and you can easily get well into the terabytes a second scanning rate. The really scarry thing is this is with tech available in the late 80s. It should be easily able to be scaled by a couple of orders of magnitude by now.
It's all a matter of getting the right hardware in the right volume.
as idiotic as our 'intelligence agencies' seem to be
Heh. That's just what they want you to think...
Just junk food for thought...
you gotta post the IPs of these AC lamers that keep posting tons of BS such as above
cheers
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
well, if they're doing industrial espionage on behalf of American corps, thereby improving our economy, standard of living, and well-being, why the hell would we want to?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
However, you've got to admit that UKUSA is doing a pretty damn poor job of spying as it is; you'd think that if they were doing anything halfway decent then all terrorists and such would mysteriously "disappear" before the crime was actually comitted.
I hate to break it to you but this is exactally what happens. Do you really think that there are only one or two terrorists that try something in a year's time. The vast majority you never hear about because they mysteriously "disappear" before anything happens.
Do you remember the outrage following the Oklahoma and Trade Center bombings. To the effect that the US Gov't should have "known" and "done something". Well Echelon is the system.
The scary part is their Security through Obscurity. They could start, if they haven't already, going around and doing terrible things and no one would know about it.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
>Minds are like parachutes, they work best when open.
But remember, if your mind is _too_ open, then everything falls out. (Or any trash can fall in).
Most people aren't too worried from a personal
level. I work for a multinational company -- the
kind that could get hurt by a foreign competitor who has access using this kind of information. (We make agricultural equipment.) I would rather not see people losing their jobs because of government sponsered corporate espionage. This will probably be justification for strong encryption.
Mmm. This all assumes, I think, that this program has the sheer computing power to decrypt *everything* that goes through it. Could any encryption experts give a general big-Oh rating for how complex decryption algorithms are? If its large enough(and given the amount of traffic it wouldn't have to be that large at all, perhaps O(n^2) would do it) then it simply wouldn't be practical for the computer to decrypt all the messages passing through it. And while the DoD is willing to spend a lot of money to keep up with the pace, there has to be a point where they simply can't spend anymore.
The moral of this story: if everyone encrypts, then we're pretty much safe:>
This isn't disturbing at all to anybody with any intelligence. If this is news to you, then you're naive in the extreme, my friend. OF COURSE governments are spying on all kinds of digital traffic. OF COURSE they include civilian traffic in their monitoring (that's where lots of important things happen).
More importantly, though, if you've been assuming that all your emails and other net traffic (or even your phone conversations) are blissfully private, then I'm sorry, but that's just plain stupid. Governments are the least of your worries (hell, my _father_ could tap your phone if he wanted to). If you want something to be secure, don't broadcast it unencrypted in the open. This should be obvious to anybody in this day and age.
So you're going to run off and write your "senators, congressmen, lords, whatever".. Hey, maybe you'll even be successful beyond anybody's (realistic) hopes and dreams and get all the politicians of the world to condemn this sort of monitoring and abolish it forever. Do you really think that any governments are actually going to stop doing it? It'll just go deeper underground and be a real secret, which means there will be even less monitoring, and absolutely no control over any of it.
Just look at the information which prompted this discussion in the first place: An official acknowledgement of (at least some of) what's going on by government officials. Countless people in the world are more aware/confident/knowledgeable of what's really going on because the Australian government was willing to inform their public about things like this. Would they have been willing to do that if they'd been previously forced to condemn this sort of thing and promise it wouldn't ever happen? I don't think so. We'd be sitting here discussing some new Linux feature instead.
Things like this are better in the open.
>>This isn't bad sigint. There are a lot of messages that aren't encrypted for one reason or another.
Not in sensitive government or military communications. I don't know about corporate communications, but I had the impression that they're getting smarter.
>> And lastly, there is pattern recognition. Having been in sigint, you should know that who is talking to whom is almost as good as what they are saying.
Absolutely. Traffic analysis is useful, too; just the percentage of data passing through the pacific backbone encrypted is valuable information. But that could be garnered using more mundane means than eavesdropping on satellites.
My point was that Echelon has an unguaranteed tap into a bandwidth that is both enormous and almost completely non-relevant. All the legitimate sigint that can be done in this matter could be done better using other approaches. And so it is valid to begin worrying about the illegitimate uses for Echelon.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
But the point is that no one is going to take the time to decode your messages unless they have a _reason_ to suspect you of something in the first place. If for exmple, I use 40-bit encryption on a rot13'ed file, a computer program will decrypt it, find it is jibberish, and give up. If a human being spent enough time on it, sure they could probably figure it out, but there aren't enough people to decode all of the questionable messages by hand.
So even if you make a modification that makes your crypto less secure, it is still going to fool the _computers_, and that's all you really need unless you're a big-time terrorist or something.
There is not much new here, except that it is being done in a coordinated way worldwide. As has been pointed out, the NSA has been working on all of this stuff with a great deal of success since the second world war.
What is new here is the rather dubious assertion that US submarines are "tapping" undersea cables. Think about the technical difficulties for a moment. Seems a bit farfetched to me. However, US submarines DO place remote listening devices on the ocean floor and have been for at least 20 years. They put them at choke points, like the gap between Greenland and Iceland, to listen for Soviet submarines passing. Works very well apparently.
A proud anonymous coward
Something like what I call Ordered permutation encryption.
The key tells the order for the permutations, the encoding of the characters (7-16 bit), and the number equivalents for the chars (i.e.: 1==a or 4=x).
The only downside is thst it isn't public key.
If it's electronically transmitted, the NSA knows about it. Every time you click open your garage door, a counter somewhere in WV goes up by one.
>>>>
While I'm sure there is some keyword searching being done, I'd be shocked if more thought didn't go into the system.
Surely there's some initial filtering done based on the identity of the sender and receiver-- messages sent between two people with FBI files probably get more scrutiny. Messages that cross national boundaries would also be more suspect, as would be messages the computer couldn't understand.
Assuming a reasonable set of criteria to prioritize messages, reasonable computing power could be brought to bare on "interesting" messages, easily defeating rot13. I'm sure they'd break 40-bit encryption regularly for really interesting messages. At this point, one could also do some interesting things analyzing the words used to try to identify coded messages. Someone from Montana who regularly describes building "watermelon" would likely raise some red flags here.
Of course, with 50 years to develop the system, it's surely smarter than anything we could envision in a few hours...
Everyone start writing in Ebonics... run your text through The Universial Translator.
Clown da guvment.
"I have a cunning plan..."
Heh, you can use tham to get cable TV gratis!! :)
USA is going as nazists in 1933.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
So because of some special circumstances in the apartment building where you lived, you generalized to ALL phone calls by EVERYONE.
We are talking about organized, worldwide, detailed espionage, you are talking about "I happened to overhear someone say".
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Uhh no. The undersea cables are probably no more than an OC-192. Maybe two of them. One OC-192 is ~10 GB/s. Two of them would be 20 GB/s. Therefore, that's all you need to monitor.
For instance porn news groups and mailing lists.
I've worked in sigint, myself. And I find it hard to believe that a system set up to detect key words and phrases in common internet traffic can be useful enough to justify its cost. Nations and security agencies *know* that internet communications can be intercepted, and so they send messages encrypted or not at all. Corporations are beginning to understand this, also. The only messages that Echelon could usefully intercept are personal communication and the rare 'slip-up' of a corporation or agency.
That being said, I can easily believe that it exists. Slip-ups do happen, and I can see a government betting a few billion dollars on the off chance of finding one. But the most frightening aspect is that the Echelon system is just better suited towards everyday unencrypted communication between private individuals...and thus, whether chartered or not, that's likely how it will be used. Thank you, Orwell.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
One capacitor. 250 volts or better, non-polarized, 0.1 to 0.5 uF (this is going by memory, but that will probably work). Put it in series with the red wire on a phone. Connect it to the target pair, pick up the phone, and listen.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Has anyone considered bringing an action in federal court against the relevant federal agencies seeking a declaratory judgment that such monitoring constitutes an illegal search in violation of the Fourth Amendment?
Does anyone know of some legal reason why such an action could not be brought?
You looking to be hired?
OH GOODY!!!! More noise on the net! Remember, bandwidth is FINITE!!!!!! You play into the hands of the very people you hope to defeat with this little trick!
Their mission (if "they" have one) is to MONITOR SIGNALZ...if you noise up the Net, they simply add adaptive filtering ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better than anything you skript kiddiez can come up with! Then they use the filters to zero in on the suddenly very much lessened "intelligence" and true signals that are there.
Remember, we're wher we are today in the computer world BECAUSE of these folks. The "high powered, over-clocked, flame spewing, megazoid, 550Mhz, 256Mb" box on your desk with the 21" monitor is just one of the tiniest of tiny crumbs from their table...paid for by your tax dollarz, so you can sleep soundly every night.
Quit worrying about "big Bro" and get a life!
or watch CSPAN
I realize this is all third hand but the additional details did give the stories an air of creedance (I have forgotten many of the additional details so I won't attempt to guess at what they were). The only thing we can hope for is that there is so much info that the surveillance agencies are on overload.
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
doesn't this mean that they'll start using encrypted emails or something?
Absolutely! They will use the crypto devices and software that has been tampered with by U.S. and other intelligence agencies. There have been reports to that effect.
If you're a terrorist you just write "watermelon" instead of "bomb" and they'll never catch you.
If Saddam Hussian sends a note about sending watermelons to the White House, they'll notice.
Use some ridiculous encryption on the level of rot13 - the computer programs will never figure out!
Yes they will, there is automated codebreaking software.
Learn an obscure foreign lanaguage - I doubt that the scanning program knows Aramaic or Esperanto
The NSA hires Linguists. They can read it.
now, if you Combine all of these... followed up with 16 layers of 4096 bit encryption....
I think the real thing that pisses people off with the UKUSA agreement is that it is used by governments to spy on their own poeple. For example, in the UK it is illegal for the authorities to monitor communicatios without direct permission of the Home Secretary. So they get the US NSA to do it for them. Similarly in the US, the NSA cannot legally monitor domestic communications between American organisations - so they get a bunch of British GCHQ spooks based in Fort Meade, MD to do their dirty work for them.
Basically, having foreign military on your sovereign territory sucks and is open to abuse. I have no idea why Europeans (and North Americans) have stood for it for so long.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
DSD operates under a detailed classified directive approved by Cabinet and known as the Rules on Sigint and Australian Persons.
I don't know what worries me more, the fact that they're spying on us, or that the fact that the list of criteria that they're searching for in their Dictionary is kept classified, so we can't even find out what they're looking for, or where all this information goes to and who's looking at it.
Remember: You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.
"You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
I was reading through the info on that site, and the fact that it quotes Texe Marrs as a reliable source basically blew its credibility.
For those of you unconvinced by the reputability of the reporter, here is a NYTimes report. If you aren't convinced by this report, then perhaps you should travel to Washington and listen to the House hearings yourself.
-B
I don't mind governments spying on each other -- I agree, it's necessary for world peace. I don't even mind my government performing some limited monitoring of its citizens -- I do not break the laws of this country, and I'd like them to catch the people who do.
What frightens me about Echelon is that it appears to be shared data consortium, if you believe the conspiracy theorists. Thus, data collected by Australia/Canada/US/UK are available to them all. I know that I've done things that, though perfectly legal in the US, break the laws of the UK. Next time I go overseas, do I have to worry about overzealous law enforcement meeting me at british customs?
Overzealous law enforcement is a danger here at home, too, if you break any of the unenforced-but-still-in-effect laws. (Sodomy, for example.) I just have to trust that my government doesn't lose its mind and start pursuing such minor crimes. But there's no way I should have to trust other governments as well.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The irony here is that encryption could allow people to vote from home. If I could vote from my web browser I would.
-- Virtual Windows Project
> To my knowledge it is illegal in the USA even to say words "kill the ..." (I am not even quoting it). You can get to
> prison for just these words, even if you used them in your Email. One guy did it few years ago, was traced and
>where he is now?
"Kill the watermelon"?
This is very, VERY disturbing. This is still not "proof" of the eistance of Echelon, but it's pretty goddamned convincing. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is something we need to be very, very concerned about. This direct threat to our privacy cannot go unmatched. Write your senators, congressmen, lords, whatever... this needs to stop IMMEDIATELY. I've spoken out in the past about the rampant paranoia of some slashdot readers, but this case is rather severe.
sKroz
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
According to a recent article, they use OpenBSD to check the routers for intrusion...as far as the Dictionary...I would guess some high-end parallel processing, journaled FS, withg about a jillion layers of authentication and an encrypted kernel
Perhaps I'm strange (I probably am, I've never been able to figure out why people are fanatical about sports teams from their own region even when all the players are from somewhere else entirely, for example), but how does the fact that it may give the US some sort of economic advantage make it right? That sort of thinking seems to imply that all the rest of the world's people are somehow less worthy. How is cheating ok? How is stealing ok? Where does this stupid us/them thing come from in the first place?! WHAT THE *&!$@#$%#%& IS WRONG WITH YOU ANYWAY!!!!!!!
Hello? Dishonest, immoral, and wrong (leaving legality out of it, since justice doesn't seem to exist at that level) is dishonest, immoral, and wrong. It doesn't matter who's doing it to who. It's wrong. There's no way to justify it. What part of this aren't you getting?
Yes, and? This is presumably why this would be a multinational deal. You seem to think that the number of communication channels itself presents a problem. Look at the size of the US federal budget and the number of things the US federal government is openly involved in monitoring.
2) Bandwidth...
Firstly, I think your estimate is off. 100,000,000 computers each saturating a 10Mbps line 24/7? More importantly, though, you're neglecting the fact that this monitoring is not going through a single central checkpoint, but through a whole bunch of checkpoints. We're not talking about one office monitoring 1 Ebps.
3) ...an army of techs/programmers/spooks?
Why exactly would this be a problem? The governments of the US, UK, and Australia already employ tons of people and have access to all the money, technology, and brainpower they might need. Moreover, just because you ask someone to build, say, signal-processing equipment, doesn't mean you tell them what it's going to be used for.
This wasn't "Joe Blow". And perhaps they (the watchers) feel safe because they know people like you will dismiss it out of hand. You're the best cover they could have.
Yes, it is true what you say, the Americans know what the Russians are doing, the Russians know what the French are up to, the French are spying on the Chinese etc., etc. And this is indeed probably a stabilizing factor. But the sad thing, is that the end result of all this deception is that all countries are lying or at least keeping the truth from their own citizens/taxpayers. How can democracy work with poorly informed voters.
Actually, in one picture I can see the shadows. But it's kind of cheating since my uncle used to work at that facility. From ground level you would see immense "cages". Each of those circles contains an antenna that looks much like a round cage about 100 ft high. They're quite impressive. And they're not kidding about that area being the middle of nowhere. Uncle was a Navy Cryptotechnolgist-Interpreter.
That sounds far too simplistic. I would bet my bottom dollar that the simple tapping techniques you describe, could be detected using the appropriate equipment.
As to clicks, that would depend on how the tap was implemented.
I think you are being too generic.
There are very few honorable politicaians, the whole concept of politics is pretty sad i recon
Well to any of those that wonder why the US and other goverments want key escrow so badly here you go.
Such a organisation will *never* be disolved on it's own willing. Some democratic institution, has to.
How abuse of power are prevented, every state agency makes errors. What if nobody can control it ? Seen Ennemy of the State, it looks too realistic to me.
Encryption, in its current form won't solve anything. NSA as the largest number of mathematician working on prime number (at a secret location, on falsified ID...). They may have already found the key.
Elected president and others democratic representant are informed by these agency, they just can't make their own opinion about it.
If we were in a Civilization Call to Power game, I'm sure the current government of US would be Corporate Republic, and Echelon would be "The Agency" wonder.
-reality isn't as boring as we are told to see-
Jean.
To put it further, in Australian daily newspapers The Age is probably second only to The Sydney Morning Herald in its credibility and quality, with Rupert Murdoch's the Australian IMHO coming in after that. It has the sort of reputation that say the New York Times or Washington Post has in the US.
The TV program which aired the allegations, Channel 9's Sunday, is probably second in credibility and quality in Australian current affairs TV to the ABC's Four Corners. Sunday's Web site (sorry, don't have the URL on me) has an Investigative Reporting area where for the last year or so they've been asking for information on Eschelon. In other words, their report has been in preparation for a *long* time.
In other words, this story is coming out from two of Australia's most authoritative news sources.
The Australian government has admitted to being part of UKUSA. They've said nothing about Echelon, although the news reports make it rather difficult to discern that bit of data.
The difference is significant. It's almost certain that they have the capability to monitor all communications that bounce through a satellite. Whether they have the resources to do this is another issue entirely. They might, but honestly, can you really picture rooms full of top-secret cleared agents listening (mostly) to thousands of people calling their relatives long distance?
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Personally, I do not care too much about what they do for hunting terrorists, because I am not making bombs or selling illegal drugs in my spare time and I do not think that I would get caught for any illegal activities (although I can never be too sure about that).
When they took the 2nd amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
When they took the 4th amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 5th amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
Now they've taken the 1st amendment, and I can't say anything at all.
(With apologies to whoever wrote that that I didn't credit).
You should care how they hunt down terrorists, as those same tactics may be used against you some day. Remember 1984? Well, we may not be there yet, but slowly and surely we're heading there. For every law passed that takes freedom from us for doing something that hurts no one else, the hope of staying free dies a little more. Personally, if this type of thing keeps up (the Australian government doing this will encourage the US government to also) I'm going to gather a bunch of people together and we'll go find an island and start our own country.
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
The processing power required to search for some words in a data stream is reasonable and certainly affordable for NSA and the like.
Let's assume that they have a farm of computers scanning for words in huge amounts of clear text messages (encrypted messages are a separate case). You could compare the tasks performed by these computers to the ones done by routers and switches:
- A router or a switch receives millions of IP packets (or ATM cells) per second, and looks at their header to decide on which link they have to go.
- A dictionary computer receives a comparable amount of data and decides if a message should be discarded or not by looking for some pre-defined patterns in the data stream.
The routers have some specialized hardware for extracting the destination address from the packets and matching this against a routing table. Nothing prevents the spooks from having the same kind of thing for pattern matching.If some telecom operators and ISPs can afford to deploy Gigabit or Terabit switches in their backbone network, think about what the spooks can do with their budget. Scanning a few Terabytes of (clear text) data is actually quite easy to do with modern technology.
Scanning encrypted data (including steganograpy) is of course harder to do, by several orders of magnitude. But they probably only attempt to decrypt the "interesting" messages (depending on the sender, receiver or carrier). Also, the simple fact of detecting that you are exchanging encrypted messages with someone is already interesting for the spooks. And if you exclude steganography, detecting encrypted messages in a data stream is as easy as scanning for words, which is reasonably easy to do, as explained above.
-Raphaël
...is here
"The "high powered, over-clocked, flame spewing, megazoid,
550Mhz, 256Mb" box on your desk with the 21" monitor is just one of
the tiniest of tiny crumbs from their table."
Are you guys hiring ?
I always knew FSF was a terrorist bunch, they indirectly admit to it ;-)
(spook)
Soviet FSF PLO KGB Khaddafi colonel ammunition smuggle $400 million in
gold bullion Mossad domestic disruption arrangements Ft. Bragg NSA
supercomputer
No matter how computers develop, current trends seem to suggest that it's always easier to encrypt something, securly, then it is to brute-force break this encryption.
So, any serious terrorists will almost certainly encrypt their messages using a method that's virtually unbreakable.
The security of the messages themselves now depends on the security of the private keys (in a public-key system)
Upon confiscation of a computer, it's reasonably easy to get hold of private keys, thus decrypting previously "snooped" messages.
It's also possible to monitor the EM fields eminating from a computer (wires, screens, and so on). Hence why some top-security government agencies have to have shielded wires, and so on.
So, as I see it, there's three possible realistic uses of these systems:
So there you go... that's my $0.02
--
Phil Stoneman
pstoneman@yahoo.com
"You can find out more by joining the Navy and becomming a CT (Cryptological Technician) or looking around at some museums dealing with cryptologic activities (or by just finding a site with some text and not theorizing off obscure pictures)."
Yeah, but this is much more fun for all of us technothriller types (with reguards to Mr. Clancy)
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
The problem with that approach is that it isn't just what you write, it is what you see, what you read, where you go, who you send email to, who you get email from... all of these things are trackable... perhaps not nearly in real time... but look at it as a method of collecting points like messages here collect points... you and your activity collect enough points, and they may just assign a live body and some serious compute time to you... I am not at all sure that in such cases governments wouldn't feel extreme measures to be justified (at least they would seem "extreme" to me)... sigh - there really isn't much to stop these things, methinks...
:)
One machiavellian scheme gets exposed, and soon a new "black" project is started - these things don't die, they just morph - the trick is to live under the rader and stay out of the way when the fecal matter hits the spinning blades
Shandon
Just a guess, but perhaps they're just cleared terrain. Any ground clutter can reduce the effective angles of operation of a telemetry dish. Since they're spying on satellites (the satellites are not pointed directly at those dishes), they probably want to have a maximum field of operation, to catch more signals.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Not very long, They will just add a positionally dependent kick out that checks to see if it is in the .sig, then kick it out if the rest of the message is benign.
so how long do we have until access to this article is blocked under Austrailia's new censorship laws? better mirror it, quick..
7H3 7RU7|-| 15 0U7 7H3R3! PH33R!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
There's no need to provide proof or even be rational. Just tell your victim to "wake up". Also mention how you "don't doubt" it's happening. I hearby dub this the "Fox Fallacy" named in honor of Fox Mulder.
The capabilities implied by these claims are orders of magnitude beyond any technology I've ever heard of, if not outright mathematically impossible.
The onus is on you to prove Echelon exists, not on me to prove it doesn't.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Ohh, come on, read something on the works of a totalitarian society or just shut up. There may be some filtering going on, but I doubt that. No use doing that for the reasons you stated and much more. What this system is for is to enable them to "overhear" electronic communication of any person of their choice. To make an analogy the sytuation is the same as if all the phones in the country were tapped, so that as soon as some law enforcement/internal affairs/social security agency becomes interested in your personale life ( for whatever reason ) they can get you conversations right away without spendng much effort. Basically it works somewhat similar to the telescreens from "1984", you know that they cannot be whatching them all the time but you do not know when they start or stop whatching them. :)
"1984" is not very far from the truth actually, if you think of it and read the book the right way.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
On a related note, don't forget Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security by William E Burroughs, ISBN: 0394541243.
It's apparently out of print, so you may have to search a library or an older (paranoid) friend's house for it.
I lent my copy out in 1992 and haven't seen it since.
Disturbing? Hmm...I don't know....Some of the SIGINT stuff is pretty amazing.
stop living in the land of the faries! at the moment in the NSA is using 'Echelon' facilities to monitor australians and new zealanders phone, email and possibly others without consent. this isn't just some tom clancy novel. gathered intel is being used for questionable motives.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
The circles aren't in any depression, they are just cleared areas for accessability to the towers. The antenna's themselves are used for direction finding of a signal, a simple geometry trick. Naval Cryptological Technicians work there and there are a few sites like that around the world (I think the one in Scotland got closed down..) They aren't for spying on Satilites (which is kinda silly if you think about it, just impractical, would involve spying from a satilite and satilite to satilite tracking and all ... much easier to spy on ground objects with satilites and planes). You can find out more by joining the Navy and becomming a CT (Cryptological Technician) or looking around at some museums dealing with cryptologic activities (or by just finding a site with some text and not theorizing off obscure pictures).
Saluton!
Actually I am learning esperanto now...
I would bet a system for parsing esperanto and
flagging messages would be way easier than english or anything else.
Think about it...
No irregular verbs, practically all parts of
speach are gramar encoded... all nouns end in
'o' for singular, 'oj' for plaural for the
subject and add an 'n' to that for the object of
a sentance.
should be VERY easy to write a parser for.
Besides...spelling ion esperanto is easier...
less types of spelling mistakes (I am sendink the boms to the wite hoowse)
Oh well...
Since no human could go through all this manually, it has to be a computer program scanning for keywords. Which means the system is useless:
I'm sure you can all think up lots more interesting ways to bypass any such system without ever using PGP (the problem with PGP being that it's easy for the scanning program to recognize it as being encrypted.)
Oh, and lets all put the keywords in our emails:
Bomb, Gun, Cocain, Heroin - hi, mr. spy, I'm a terrorist!
-- http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
We almost tapped one of Russia's undersea cables back in the 1980's. There was a wire run from where it was placed all the way to one of our military bases in Iceland/Greenland (forget which). The only reason we didn't pull it off is because an Akula appeared in the US sub's vicinity about 2 hours before they were supposed to place the tap, so they aborted the mission. I can't remember exactly where I heard about this, but I believe it was a book. If I do remember, I'll post the name
What's most scaring about some of the threads is people minimize these kind of issues to "i already knew that" etc without saying what they feel should be done about it.
Where I live (Sweden) I'm sure that something similar to this is being developed, discussed etc in high government, and the EU is probably accelerating stuff like this forward - but I refuse to accept the direction this world, and all it's so called "technological wonders" have taken us in - I want to come as far as possible away from 1984 - but can this be done without losing all these modern conveniences?
I think so, and I can't understand what goes on these minds that develop and promote this technology - or rather the ones that put it to this kind of use. Would someone I know accept to in their employment implement this? Or is it that I live in a totally naive country where privacy and total freedom expression is still held in high regard?!
Let's hope not... but then again, what couldn't come out of the grand land of the "free".
There you have your so called freedom.
All these people claiming to know all about it, and seemingly accepting it - I feels sorry for you, having come to accept and, maybe now living, in such a reality. Maybe I do too... if so, I'm scared.
"what the hell is the matter with the people
on this planet? have all gone insane?
the stigma of industrial progress killing us
over and over again" (bad religion)
/ i got real good bongo drums
does anyoneone know if they're using a linux cluster?
"Serving the Dark Side: Linux pulls heavy duty for THE MAN!"
Now that I am being narcisisstic enough to follow up my own post: I suspect Echelon does exist, I also suspect that the folks who have pointed out that the volume of data is such that it is impossible to "big-brother" everything are dead right.
The NSA relies a great deal on how little is known about them (you should see the speculations people get into about them -- evrything from their changes in the S-boxes of DES to their initial resistance then sudden silence about PGP). NSA is a very smart bunch of people with a lot of computing power and a lot of know-how, but they can't do the impossible.
Most of us have the best defence of all: We're boring.
They'll just tell us they are doing it to stop terorism, child pornography, second-hand smoking; or use the latest excuse to take our rights.. school shootings.
The american public will be more than happy then to give up their rights, so the government can _protect_ them. Just as long as they don't interupt the sitcoms or football games to do it.
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
/. account and posted this in your name.
Good lord, Bruce. I'm hoping someone cracked your
Just a capacitor to tap a phone? Keep in mind that if you have to be in the same house as the tapee, the tap is moot...
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Surely the point is that we all know it goes on, and for most of us, tracking illegal/security activity is not an ethical challenge.
What *does* excite neural activity however is the military making economic/commercial information available to business competitors.
Surely that *is* a problem?
Uhmm,..
Just what makes you think ANYTHING you do is sufficient to prevent a motivated intelligence agency from seeing it?
You really think that *__YOU__* have something they can't hack/crack?
Economic espionage is a very real and dangerous ax to wield. Good espionage doesn;t rely on your cold fusion theory, it relies on lots and lots of little pieces of information that add up to make a larger picture. Thousands of pieces of data useless by themselves can be extremely powerful when put together in the right way.
The potential for abuse makes my stomach turn. To think that the bastion of capatalism has no intention of allowing a fair economic playing field for makes me doubt that I have any real freedom here at home. Truely sad.... our forefathers are rolling in their graves.
whoops I wasn't supposed to tell... damn, I think the cops are outside
Read more!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Terrorism ground up in the people, and only people can defeat it. I know it, living in Italy. Also
terrorism is often founded by the government, to kill who can gave problems at political level.
He wrote a piece for a UK newspaper saying that the ISP Association (ISPA) and the police were holding secret meetings to allow the police to inspect the logs of all UK Net users activity (news pages read/written, Web pages browsed etc). The ISPs were supposedly agreeing to keep logs specially for police use and allow them free access.
Demon (a UK ISP) responded that these meetings were not secret (any one could attend at £60/day), and were primarily concerned with formalising the limits of what the police could ask for, and the evidence that had to be submitted to the ISPs along with the request. A request would have to include prima-facie evidence of a crime, plus supporting details of when and where the electronic side took place. These details would have to match the ISPs logs before any information would be released. The police had asked for wider access, but the ISPs turned them down, citing UK privacy law which makes the ISPs liable for releasing private information to the police without good reason. Many of the police requests (e.g. web browsing logs) were technically infeasible anyway.
Now its possible that Duncan Cambell was right and Demon are spinning a line here. But Demon were the pioneers in the ISP business, and have firmly resisted attempts at censorship (e.g. blocking the porn groups) in the past. And the legal argument about liability checks out. So I'm strongly inclined to trust Demon on this one.
Now DC has moved on to bigger things. He claims there is a whole big sigint organisation dedicated to listening to you. In the referenced article he takes a few quotes from an Australian politician as evidence that he is right. But go back and look at that article. Note what was quoted, and what was written by DC. Big difference.
And the report for the European parliment was ... also written by Duncan Cambell.
Meanwhile a new law to require european ISPs to provide the police with a dedicated line into their systems was passed earlier this week, rammed through the EU Parliament after 10 minutes debate. Fortunately its not binding (the EU Parliament has comparitively little power), but its still worrying. Where is Duncan Cambell when you need him? Quoting Australian politicians in an attempt to play Fox Mulder!
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Check the photos again. There is *no*, repeat NO shadow on those circles. If you don't believe me, check the terrain around it. I would guess that the photo was taken mid-morning or mid-afternoon. That would make them flat. Cleared land (water??). As far as having towers in the center for sigintercept, possible, but not likely. Again, no shadow. A tall, skinny tower would produce a tall, skinny shadow; easily visible. Same with a large MW tower. A very small, short tower *might* not cast enough of a shadow. Maybe.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
Wonderful... they know all about my boring life.
Incidently, most "tap detectors" detect changes in line capacitance, which is exactly what would come up using a telephone tap you describe.
Never tested it myself, though. What? Did you want to hear my conversations about my thoughts of Episode One or something?
-Dean
The US constitution guarantees free speech, weapons, fair trial and other cool stuff. It doesn't have any passage on information though. Shouldn't I as a US citizen know the details of the going ons of my governement? How can I be an informed voter without such information? Confidentiality has no place in a democratic state. If the government feels it can't tell me something then something is obviously wrong. Let's all write our local congress person and demand an amendment to the constituion. The right to be informed.
That would kick ass.
To me this is not news. I really have had no doughts about the existanse of echelon, but reading this makes me sad. No - it makes me mad. I'm _really_ pissed off at these people. Personally I don't feel very theatened - I have nothing to hide. But somehow I really can't tolerate the idea of economic espionage. Economic espionage == breakint the law for money. Money - The worst reason of all. It literally makes me sick.
I know this redundant and will propably get moderated down, but I just had to get it out of my system. Thank you for your patience.
According to DSD director Martin Brady, ``to ensure that (our) activities do not impinge on the privacy of Australians, DSD operates under a detailed classified directive approved by Cabinet and known as the Rules on Sigint and Australian Persons".
And yet somehow censoring the internet is allowed. I find it amusing that these two stories came out on the same day.
Another excellent book is "The US Intelligence Community" by Richelson. This book has undergone several revisions with the latest just released this year. What is good about this book is that it presents a pragmatic view on the workings and history of the intelligence community.
The Puzzle Palace was the seminal book on the NSA, but it might be a bit dated by now. However, it is still worth reading. And here's a little factoid: NSA employees can now have business cards (well some of them, anyway). I also have a NSA ballpoint pen that someone gave me.
Some good Communications Security Establishment information can be found here
News for UW students
It doesn't need to monitor *every* message. Just those messages from "suspects" or target lists. You don't need to troll the whole ocean when you know where the fish are.
And the FBI has been granted rights to wiretap ISPs and cell phones without a warrant. They merely have to "suspect" criminal activity related to drugs or personal danger. The only thing keeping this from being implemeneted today is the costs. The phone companies/ISPs are expected to foot a lot of the bill. This was passed in 1996 and was supposed to be finished by 1998. Earlier this year or late last year the deadline for compliance was moved back to 2000 IIRC.
And FWIW, if you read the news you'll have noted that the NSA has worked with Netscape, Microsoft and Lotus to guarantee exported software can have a "backdoor" built in precisely for economic intelligence spying.
As for the "army" of people you really only need to keep people contained in their knowledge. You don't necessarily tell them the whole project and you keep the knowledge well insulated. Similar to resistance cells in warfare. Remmeber how the reporters got onto the base and discovered it was all automated? The sad thing is Australia and other junior partners do some of the work and then have no say in what info is used or how it is used!
This whole thing is an octopus with many components that overlap and not the responsibility of a monolithic group.
I have a vague idea what this story might refer to, but only because I read this site daily.
How about a little context for those who don't?
Well, driving is not that hard a skill, really, and you don't have to be a genius to make a nitrate bomb. After all, the men accused of bombing the World Trade Center in New York were caught because they tried to get the deposit back on the rented truck they blew up. Somehow, that doesn't strike me as the actions of someone who'd know enough to use 1024-bit encrypt.
mahlen
I want to be clear about this. I am not happy that privacy will cease to exist, but I see it as a technological inevitability. Given that the technology for spying (eavesdropping, sigint, video monitoring, etc.) is becoming ubiquitous and cheap, people will start to want covert devices for personal safety, for watching the babysitter, for snooping on their children, etc.
(Aside: I can't believe how teenagers are wanting to own cell phones! Aside from the fact that these are duffable whenever they are on, I think it won't be long before they know where they are and will be queriable. "Going to the movies, eh, junior?")
Governments already have some of these capabilities. I don't presently fear this (here in the United States). Just look at how much the police know about many crimes, most of which goes unused by rules of evidence. I will only start to fear when the courts stop letting people off on "technicalities" (which is code for legal rights, dangnab it!).
I don't like that privacy is gone, but I like even less that the only people who can invade it are governments, banks, and creditors! And only banks and creditors are allowed to act on the information.
So, my view is that given the technological inevitablity of total access, we should make the whole range of such devices fully legal for ALL to use.
Why should the fact that I am being listened to stop me from talking (understanding that I live in a country which protects speech rights and not a country where free-thinkers are "people who need psychiatric treatment"; And yes, of course I worry about McCarthyism, and J.Edgar Hoover and a buch of other potential abuses, but which is worse, a world where only government can spy on people, or a world where everybody can spy on everyone, including citizens on the government)?
When we are able to stand outside the Senate offices and see, perhaps, that Senator Exon takes his famous "blue book" with him to lavatory, perhaps we will become a more open, honest society.
When I say our defence is that we're boring, I don't mean that we are poor coversationalists. I mean that we are self-serving knuckle-dragging apes who are all ashamed of the same stupid things that everyone does and nobody admits to. We are interested in peering into other people's private lives because we cannot easily do so. I'm suggesting that the best way to restore privacy is to lose it completely and wait for boredom to set in. It will, I promise you. Because we are petty, grubby little animals all, and that gets boring.
Yeah! lets waste all the bandwidth we can!
Cool down. There is no new information here. All developed countries have highly developed and capable agencies that intercept electronic communications. That's the way the world works and neither you nor I (nor all /. readers) are going to change this. Get used to this.
If you find the situation personally objectionable, use strong crypto. That's what it is for.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Thats not a million miles away from the mellissa virus and look what happened to him !!
Something tells me there's more to it than what Australia is letting on. I get the feeling it wants out; something big is going on that they're not telling up about, but Australia doesn't want anything to do with it anymore. They cloak it in this impractical crap like "you have to strike out the names of Australians" to make it sound credible, but what they want is to destroy the system. No better way to do that then to drag it out into the light and let the public get outraged by it.
Frankly, if it destroys the system, I'm all for it. To be honest, I never trusted the government, but I never thought it had gotten so bad that a revolution was necessary. I'm still no revolutionate, but now I am no longer so certain that this government isn't bad enough that one is uncalled for. This is simply going too far. But at least now we know the real reason why the governments don't like crypto. It won't hamper future snooping; it'll kill current snooping.
However, you've got to admit that UKUSA is doing a pretty damn poor job of spying as it is; you'd think that if they were doing anything halfway decent then all terrorists and such would mysteriously "disappear" before the crime was actually comitted.
I hope that the UN takes UKUSA to task and raises hell about this, perhaps even to the point of punitive action (as if the UN's punitive actions have ever had the desired effect, if any at all). Then again, the UN's probably in on Echelon too.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
They are only interested in the communication channels that can be intercepted easily.
Ummm...yeah. That'd be real useful. While we're at it, why don't we arrest only those criminals that happen to wander into jail cells.
Assuming Echelon exists, big criminal/terrorist/whatever groups would know about it--and use unbreakable encryption. Which leaves only nobodies for Echelon to spy on.
Well, that particular Joe Blow had some reasons to know about this, given his position.
I didn't ask "how did he know", I asked "why was he allowed to reveal". If Echelon is so secret, they presumably want to keep it that way. So why not discredit, deport or even kill Joe (Whistle-)Blow?
Don't you love all these conspiracy theories?
No. I think falling for this kind of thing betrays a shaky grasp of technology, not to mention logic.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
I had my doubts about the existence of Echelon before this. Like, how could such a massive thing really be kept under wraps by agencies as idiotic as our 'intelligence agencies' seem to be. And, how could they process the massive amount of information gathered.
Well, this is pretty convincing. I wonder what made them want to go public? I find it hard to believe anyone in the 'intelligence' game could have anything like a conscience. Maybe they were tired of being junior members.
I am going to write my congress-person, senator, & my local paper. This is outrageous, our governments blatently spying on their own citizens, most likely slipping certain tasty tidbits to favored companies (the bastards probably own stock in). It is unconstitutional, immoral, and sadly, completely what most of us expect from our governments these days
I urge everyone to help get the word out about this. We all know people who love to pass things on via email (hi Mom) so tell 'em. Then call and write your representatives. This has to stop.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
CAME TO LIVE IN EUROPE :) No more stupid NSA.
Right on. And I think one of the main points to be made (and I haven't yet seen it) is that they don't even believe that their methods do catch terrorists. But saying that is how they get funds appropriated and how they get idiots to say
instead of hollaring in pain and outrage. Even if the present administrations of US, Australia, and on and on are all benevolent people looking out for our best interests, the next won't be and you'll be sorry you permitted the no-privacy infastructure to be set in place. "Sniff...But, but I was ascared of terrorists." Don't be children. This high power stuff is most clearly not for terrorist catching. I beleive there have been some very bad governments in just the last sixty years, in the west alone. You don't think it can happen again?Although the analogy is funny, it is not correct. You will probably never see a criminal wandering into jail, but it is very likely that you are using unprotected communication channels most of the time: fixed or mobile phone, connection to the Internet, etc. If any link between the sender and receiver can be easily tapped, the whole conversation is not private anymore. Do you know which links your phone company is using, and how secure they are? Do you know if they are using buried or aerial cables, microwave links, satellite relays, and so on?
So even if the spies do not have access to the switches of the telecom operators (which are the easiest and best source of information - but would not be unnoticed), they can already gather a lot of information by eavesdropping on a few selected links.
It depends on the purpose of the system. If Echelon (or whatever exists) is designed to identify suspicious communications and analyze them further, then the simple act of using encryption can already put that criminal group on the suspicious list. If some people are known to exchange encrypted messages regularly and none of them are involved in electronic commerce or banking transactions, then the spies could have a closer look at them. Of course this depends on other factors such as the location of the parties, the frequency of these exchanges, and so on...
If you are trying to hide something, then the best thing to do is to act like if you had nothing to hide. So if I were a member of a criminal group, I would try to avoid encryption because it would draw the attention on me (steganography is a different matter, as I explained in another message.)
But a system like Echelon can be built with today's technology and can be used to scan an enormous amount of information. As someone else explained in another thread, even the technology from more than 10 years ago would be sufficient to scan a fair amount of today's communications. Not all communications, but enough for all practical purposes.
Note that I am not sure if such a system is really existing today, and used to the extent described in various articles about Echelon. (And frankly, I don't really care.) But I think that I know enough about computers and telecommunications to be convinced that such a system can be build, and would not even be extremely expensive.
-Raphaël
It's quite simple really...
If this system intercepts great volumes of traffic, it must intercept some pornography, and then provide it to human intelligence agents. Thereby breaking the new Internet Censorship law.
That's why it was outed, they must plan on prosecuting.
Not likely to be either.... Domes 300m across would get noticed.
What's more likely is just cleared ground around an antenna array of some kind. From the top, any towers are going to be mostly invisible
Yeah, but if we really wanted to fight this kind of spying it would be very easy if people cooperated. Drowning the signal in a sea of noise would be trivial given some basic assistive technology (mailer demons that send and receive randomly generated "noisy" messages designed to trip up spy computers... everyone just starts up the demons and suddenly the whole world communication infrastructure is flooded with decoys)
Your newspaper, senator, congressman doesn't care. The whole reason this is allowed in the first place is that no one cares. Anyone in support of the project in some way benefits from it so they aren't going to stop it. Anyone opposed to it is regarded as a conspiracy theorist and dismissed just as easily. And people who don't care ignorethe conspiracy theorists and usually listen to the supporters because they dislike conspiracy theorists.
Support your local anarchist.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
: Sugar Grove, WV. station
: This isn't that far away from me. Perhaps it's time for a field trip...
Don't do it unless you want to get shot. Those military types take this security thing rather seriously.
IMO what the reporter in Australia did; sneaking around with a video camera and step ladder was incredibly foolish, he is lucky the station was not manned, because if it was he would be dead now.
Of course no one would ever believe me, but I'll post it anyway. The fact of the matter is, I've worked at CFB Leitrim, and I've seen these "Echelon" stations. They are all computer-automated, but require monitoring, and periodic maintenance, and it's a lot of UNIX servers so that's where my skills let me into the picture. But don't kid yourselves, this isn't sci-fi -- this is for real, and I know cause I've seen it. Every Fax, email, cell-phone call or other communication is intercepted, processed, and archived. Truckloads of burned CD archives of intercepts are made everyday and buried in an archive site near the Carpe Nuclear Shelter site (Just west of Ottawa, Ontario -- where CSIS and CSE national head quarters are located).
:)
It's scary to see the people work there, beacuse they violate our constitutional rights every single day "in the interests of national security" and are accountable to absolutly no one. There doesn't seem to be any consideration of the moral and legal implications of what goes on here, and people who make policy regarding SIGINT and COMMINT (Signals Intelligence & Communications Intelligence) look the other way IF and when the moral question is ever raised.
For those that care, take a peek at the movie Enemy of the State, and then realize that about 90% of the interception in that movie actually happens every day! Sleep tight
They are not trying to cover all the ways people could communicate with each other. They are only interested in the communication channels that can be intercepted easily. In this case, "easily" means anything that does not require the cooperation of the sender, receiver or carrier of information. Radio transmissions from satellites are an obvious candidate, as well as signals from any cables that are not usually accessed for maintainance (e.g. the cables that are deep in the ocean). They do not want to be detected when they are spying on us, so they are only scanning a few communication channels. But that is already a lot of information.
Obviously they do not want to have any accomplices. That's how they keep the secret. So they do not spy the communication channels that would require the cooperation of any third party.
Well, that particular Joe Blow had some reasons to know about this, given his position.
On the other hand, the fact that the Australian Government is willing to admit this publicly might imply that there is some bigger secret that they are trying to hide by "revealing" a secret that they could not hold for much longer. Don't you love all these conspiracy theories?
-Raphaël
This is slashdot, NOT an AOL chat room.
One thing that I always seem to laugh at about the "Conspiracy Theorists" is that a lot of the stuff they consider a "conspiracy" is actually done out in the open.
After the nuclear weapons fiasco this week, the years and years of encryption regulation, and the news from Australia, you didn't really think your emails were going across the backbones uninspected did you? A certain fraction of all our email is going to get inspected, no way around it.
isn't that book with the blurb on the back, "Nuclear Weapons for sale to the Living Dead"?
This is an official report in the EC. It covers sigint and comint, what is done and how, in quite some detail.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. --Kosh
Ooh, ooh, ohh! One more thing:
Except for the several wars the US has waged upon Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia and many others. Plus covert or economical battles against El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala and more.
I am talking about global war. While I share the belief I infer you have: war is immoral, I do think there is a very clear difference between every one of these wars you mention and an event like the Second World War.
In Freeman Dyson's fascinating book, Weapons and Hope, he plots an interesting chart of European wars by year and number killed. This chart shows an exponential growth curve until 1945, where it knuckles down dramatically.
I think we got too good at it. The next point on that curve would finish us all. It was only due to the limits of technology and geographic accident that WWII didn't wreck civilization.
While the evil in us lives on, we shifted our conflict to a different level. A level of "low-intensity conflict" (meaning "killing people in the third world") and "cold war" (meaning keeping secrets and stealing secrets). That's what I'm talking about.
You will never, ever, hear me argue that the world is a good place where people act with love, compassion, and integrity. A few do, but I for one am right there with Hamlet:
"I, myself, am indifferent honest, and yet I could accuse me of such things as t'were better my mother had not bore me." (quoted as well as I can remember it). Hamlet and me: Were both dirty, grubby, knuckle-dragging animals. Who wish we were better...
If you want to see some of this kind of stuff in action, visit the national cryptologic museum
in washington dc. I was there a few weeks ago and
they have some working displays (enigma, radio decoding, etc.. you can play with the enigma!).
There are some very courteous tour guides (mine
had worked in asia for 25 years) who are retired
from nsa.
the museum web site is at http://www.nsa.gov:8080/museum/
the contents of the museum are a hell of a lot more impressive than the building it's in..
they have a cutaway of a cray, some examples of chips from their own inhouse chip fab, copies of intercepted and decoded russian radio transmissions.. military radio and radar sets
going back to the biginning of time...
sorry, i'm rambeling.. it's a really cool place to check out.
deacon
So whose idea did you really think it was when Intel put that new "feature" (sic) in its PIII?
Who did you think was really behind those little ID'ing features in MS Office documents?
Just some "food for thought"
Posted by Thomas Hoad:
:)
One of the main problems would be having the sheer computing power necessary in order to process all those message.
What you really need is some kind of distributed processing effort. They could always do something like save chunks of traffic, and then get unsuspecting computer users to download and process it for you. How? I don't know....maybe tell them they are actually helping the SETI project and are searching for exterrestrial intelligence? Just a thought.
What? Me paranoid?
Some of you may find www.menwithhill.com amusing/disturbing. The scary thing is that I live fairly near this place... 'Spose I ought to expect a loud knock on my door tomorrow morning.
The question is how much processing capabilities do those dictionary computers have? Those stations have to be capturing terabytes of data every day and I'm not sure how well the computers can process the data.
Then again a big farm like at Fermi can handle quite a lot of data, so it's not inconceivable that they get enough processing power from their computers to handle it all. However they have to get quite a lot of data so they probably can only search for selected things rather than just go "fishing" for terms like CIA. nuclear bomb, etc.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"Yer honor, some guy in Australia says HIS country sometimes spies on people. Therefore, please make Unca Sam give me $1,000,000,000."
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace is an excellent, though sometimes dry, account of the formation of the NSA, and includes a chapter dedicated to the USA/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ cooperative group UKUSA. The book is old -- published in 1983 -- so it's somewhat out of date. It's fascinating stuff, though the book can be boring at times, but if this spook stuff interests you, it's worth a read.
--JT
A spammer writes a script that generates email addresses, sends out thousands of mails and the one to my address doesn't bounce back. Now he's got my email address. He goes to deja.com and checks to see if I've posted anything - an instant list of my interests. He put's my address on a cd and sells it.
Spammers actually worried about who receives their spam? And for a while there I believed you...
I miss Meept.
OK, I think we can take it for fact that this is real. My question is what do we do about it? We can talk about it here at Slashdot for a million more threads and nothing will stop it. If the US/Canadian government just admitted to it, I would be put somewhat at ease. But my goverenment does whatever the states tells them to do, and the US is sure not going to come forward. I think I can bet money this story never hits CNN. It will be brushed away and quietly dispelled as paroid fruitcakes taking themes from the movie "Conspiracy" and the X-Files.
And to those who say "why do we care"? Where in Russia are you from? My point is that NO ONE has the right to my personal life. Even if I was a bomb making ted-wanna-be Cather In The Rye reading freak, does that give the Government the right to invade my privacy under the blanket of "protection' and 'National Security'? If they really have National Security then how come the trade centre bombing wasn't prevented?
Or am I just really tired and need some sleep?
Dan.
It seems that the goal of this release was so that the Australians could limit which Australians the UKUSA nations could tap. If they didn't fulfil some special requirements (foreign agent, criminal suspect, etc.) they would have to be "Australian national" rather than the actual name "Crocodile Dundee" :) This will obviously not work, as the story points out. Australia, to my knowledge, is not the biggest member of this league and saying "You can't spy on Australians anymore" is pretty useless. I'm sure America and UK spy on Canada. We spy on everybody, including ourselves, and I doubt the Australian government, which isn't in too much of a position to make demands, is going to be able to convince any of the other countries not to do it.
What this does accomplish is defeating the whole point anyway. When they say outloud, "We're spying on Japanese trade ministers, Pakistani scientists, and North Korean government officials." doesn't this mean that they'll start using encrypted emails or something? I know everyone suspected those were the people they were spying on anyway (though the Japanese economic people was news to me), there was at least some doubt before. This guy went and spoiled it for everybody!
for the uninformed '/.ers' it's nice to see a whole wad of american tax payers money spent on useful stuff like euchelon, spying on *cough*allies*cough*
the saddest part is the DSD agency (in aus, NSA is accountable to us gov) is not held accountable in australia..what a bloody joke!
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
They only cover "foreign" non-domestic communications right? um. uh. hmm.
Number 3 has some additional points: If this conspiracy is so vast, evil and secret, how come Joe Blow from Australia was allowed to blow the whistle?
OK. I'm not claiming to know what is going on about anything. But I will say anything is a possibility.
Echelon was big news for a couple of days in NZ 2 or 3 years ago. The main beef wasn't so much that NZ was part of a spy ring, but that we didn't even use the info ourselves - we gave it all to the states! Shock horror!
I don't doubt that the technology exists to do this kind of spying, I also don't doubt that it's going on all the time. I do doubt whether most of the info collected is ever actually looked at by anything other than software or if anything is done with it.
Anyone who thinks they have any amount of real privacy should wake up.
my blog: good times, man, good times
read these links....
then ask yourself these basic questions...
want any more reasons why/how/what these tools are used for
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
And FWIW, if you read the news you'll have noted that the NSA has worked with Netscape, Microsoft and Lotus to guarantee exported software can have a "backdoor" built in precisely for economic intelligence spying.
Please don't repeat this myth.
It's public knowledge that US companies can only export 40-bit encryption. Lotus, Netscape, and Microsoft have gotten around this by exporting 64-bit encryption and escrowing 24 bits with the NSA. All of their products are advertised as 40-bit. True 64-bit encryption is of course avaiable for US customers.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yes, sex drugs and Rock'n Roll ... problem is the existing programmes can analyse the text enough not to fall into that trap.
... 1998. For the ones who can read German a bit go here ... c helon
Minor note, the first article about Echelon I know of is from the 1st of January
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/search.shtml?T=E
...
Admitting to things such as this is no big deal. The mass public is still too ignorant of what goes on to get what this really means.
F /...
It really means they have something a hell of a lot better already working or right there in the wings. Why do you think the US goverment let us all know about Stealth tech? Because its child play compared to the real secret stuph they have going on now. They give just enough to pacify the mass populace and keep people content.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I KNEW I should have gone to Washington and Lee University... :-)
Seriously though, with the resolution provided from the overhead, it kind of hard to say whether that is sphere or a depression. My instincts tell me sphere, since you could either house one mother of a dish in those puppies, or several smaller ones in an array. But, on the other hand, I can easily see on that greyscale how is could be inverted to a depression. If we know the time of day those were taken, then we could use the shadows as a guage. Hmmm... I do live in Tennessee, though, and I have always wanted to go to Snowshoe , so maybe a side trip isn't out of the question...
Does some actually know if those are spheres or depressions? I for one want to know for sure...
-G.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
...since we are talking about DOMESTIC intelligence.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Yeah right! Like the Europeans don't do this stuff either? Get a reality check Dude!
Disturbing? Hmm...I don't know.
If you find it disturbing, know that those big NSA geostationary sigint satellites are partly pointed at the US, too. They pick up all sorts of fine stuff like Cell phones, microwave long distance trunks, etc.
Tom Clancy talks about how this stuff might actually be used in his books...
Certain pieces of info get tapped for further prying, either from the people involved in the transmission, from the location the message was sent to or recieved at, timing, and content.
there is just too much to watch every word, listen to every voice. But all one needs to do is filter some stuff for saving and further analysis.
Some of the SIGINT stuff is pretty amazing.
that the Cell phone companies can track your phone, if it's on, shouldn't be too amazing. Not so nefarious with regular analog cell phones, because the "cell" is such a big area. But with CDMA PCS, for sure with its smaller cell area, and the newer "microcell" stuff being proposed, it gets easier for the dudes with the vans with all the RF detection equipment to find you out...
This is assuming, of course, that you're a math major with a talent for encryption algorithms? Just making a simple change to some code is not goign to make your message more secure, in fact it could make it *less* secure. There's a *reason* that cryptology is a hot area in mathematics, people:>
This isn't bad sigint. There are a lot of messages that aren't encrypted for one reason or another. If you are talking to one person or organization frequently, then you can agree on a common encryption scheme, complete with the keys necessary for it to work. But otherwise, it is just to much hassle.
And if some of these messages are recorded, then you have the ability to do a more thorough search later if you suspect something. Even if something is encrypted, you can have the experts at the NSA do their magic. Encryption can slow down governments, but it isn't foolproof.
And lastly, there is pattern recognition. Having been in sigint, you should know that who is talking to whom is almost as good as what they are saying. If you have an American nuclear scientist frequently talking to a Chineese official (just to pick an example out of the blue) with some frequency, that should throw a red flag. Even if the messages are discussing the latest Star Wars movie, it is still suspicious. In a case like that, encryption might be worse that clear text, because that looks very suspicious.
I can't and won't say anything more.
wow. coool. guess that was the end of the experiment. huh?
And you thought "M-x spook" was useless...
The scary thing is that the intelligence community is able to sell this sort of thing to the bozos in congress with the excuse "we're stopping terrorists". Any terrorist so stupid that they don't use a 1024-bit encryption scheme to protect their Evil Plans probably couldn't drive the U-Haul with the nitrate bomb to begin with.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
So in other words, what you're saying is that one NODE of this network (they can certainly rent out multiple rooms), capable of checking 100 Tb/s, is too small to check out... what?
;)
I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that internet backbones have reached the 100Tb/sec range yet.
Remember, this is the government, they can force MAE-East traffic to hop through their little room. And IMHO it would actually fill in the rest of the picture for me as to why that net is such a pig!
Moof!
I think all of this is necessary. Its part of why, despite a world bristling with weapons of terrifying power, we have gone without a global war for over 50 years.
Except for the several wars the US has waged upon Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia and many others. Plus covert or economical battles against El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala and more.
So long as you can secure your communications if you really need to, I think you should accept that they watch everything. Heck, I'm glad they watch everything. I just think I should be able to too.
What ever happened to personal privacy? I will not accept that "they" are watching me in my own home. I will not let my children grow up fearful of thinking for themselves, as well as being afraid to voice they're opinions openly.
Most of us have the best defence of all: We're boring.
Your defence against privacy invasion is your dullness? Not only is that silly, but it is likely wrong. At least I'd like to believe I'm not boring. And there are several other intelligent people around me that I think are quite interesting. But I would NOT want to see them ferreted out because of their communications.
"I have a cunning plan..."
let's just /. them. If everyone adds the line
I'm building a bomb to kill the President
to their sig, how long would it be before even the NSA's got overwhelmed?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Isn't it wonderful looking at how the youngsters rediscover the classic joys of electronic communications on their own!
Look into the Jargon File for details.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up becase I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.
--Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984
I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
BTW, a bunch of useful Steganography info can be found at:
http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/
A (probably incomplete) list of steganography software packages for various OSs can be found at:
http://members.iquest.net/~mrm il/stego/software.html
Instead of mailing the image/text/whatever to a specific recipent, you could use a less trackable (for both sender and reciever) way of distributing it. Putting it up on somewhere that offers free anonymous web space would be good; posting to one of the alt.binaries.* would work too. Then anyone could grab it at their whim and easily hide their identity thru various anonymizers, internet coffee shop, library, etc.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
There are nearly insurmountable problems in performing this kind of spying.
1) Collection: The various agencies involved would have to have their fingers in many many pies to cover all the ways people could communicate with each other. Phone lines (voice and data), banks, radio, cells, satellites, etc, etc, etc.
2) Bandwidth: All this data then has to be A) processed immediately and/or B) stored. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations for a second. 100 million computers (leaving aside phones, etc) connected at an average of 10 Mb/s (dialup vs T1--hey this is an envelope calc) is 1 billion Mb/s = 1 million Gb/s = 1000 Tb/s = 1 Eb/s.
3) Secrecy: They've been doing for 50 years without a hitch? When they'd obviously need an army of techs/programmers/spooks? Not to mention all the accomplices necessary (phone companies, computer/software makers, etc)?
Number 3 has some additional points: If this conspiracy is so vast, evil and secret, how come Joe Blow from Australia was allowed to blow the whistle?
I don't doubt there is SOME "domestic intelligence" going on, especially on the Internet. But every single message? No fscking way.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
It sure doesn't take much for the ann rander$ among us to get all bent out of shape from questionable reporting from a may/maynot be quality source. I'm in no way implying that the gov't is listening, however if ya want private comms encrypt your messages. Everyone else who wants privacy does the same. I enjoy reading these 'fud'dish articles.
BU.
Nothing useful from AltaVista? You should try Google then - with just "when they took the" it found me these:
..."
"... The Casolaro thing really got to me though because I remembered the quote about how when they took the Jews, I was silent, when they took the Gypsies I was silent, when they took the homosexuals, I said nothing, and when they came for me there was nobody left to speak for me.
(no longer on the Web, apparently)
and
"When they took the fourth amendment,
I was silent because I don't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I said nothing because I don't own a gun.
Now they've come for the first amendment,
and I can't say anything at all.
---- Tim Freeman "
at http://www.daft.com/~rab/liberty/quotes.txt
the NSA is the main buyer of Cray supercomputers. They have a great many of them, and continue to buy more. The question to ask is not if they can process all the information, but if their processing is effective. I'd wager its pretty good, considering the amount of brainpower employed there.
The enemies of Democracy are
They may have gone public as a reponse to
a detailed article in Fortune magazine this
week (that's the version you can get in the UK).
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Even assuming your calculations and information are correct, 1 Tb/s plus "a couple orders of magnitude" is still 10 times too small.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
> Use some ridiculous encryption on the level of
> rot13 - the computer programs will never figure
> out!
*Exactly.* If you use PGP or Netscape or whatever _everyday piece of software_ to encode your messages, you can bet money that it'll be decoded by someone else. You DON'T need 128 bit encryption to be private... what you need is 'foreign encryption'... an encryption method that does NOT follow a standard.
If you simply take someone's encryption code, and make a slight modification to it (rot13 as suggested, or whatever), you've got yourself a completely private method of communications. And if you're small fry, you have absolutely no worry that they'll ever break it until long after you are dead. (Save for things like "traffic analysis" and such.)
REMEMBER: Security through obscurity.
Don't trust the security of your phone!
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If you don't beleive, download9 /may99.htm#news
6 499/execsum.htm
0 04
http://jya.com/ic2000.zip
Read it and be scared. Very scared.
You can also check out the authors home page
http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/
it has other interesting sigint stuff.
The link on his homepage to the report
seems to be overloaded.
See
http://www.europarl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/news/199
if you doubt the authenticity of this document.
Also,
http://www.europarl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/publi/16
mentions the USAUK and ECHELON.
Finally, this link was appeared an an earlier
/. item:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990518S0
Title: U.S uses key escrow to steal secrets.
Y'know, one really shouldn't get one's shorts in a bundle over this. This has been going on ever since the second world war. My father was a grunt technician non-com in the US Army Security Agency when he served in the Army. He couldn't tell me anything really about what they did, saw, or read but he assured me that the "powers that be" were well up on who was saying what to whom all over the world and this was in the 1950s.
What I think FDH Americans (FDH -- Fat, Dumb, and Happy) fail to realize is that national givernments all over the world do this routinely. Spying on one another is a stabilizing factor in international relations. What would have happened between Pakistan and India if India wondered if Pakistan had nuclear weapons? The first-strike temptation might well have become overwhelming.
The process of discovering, keeping, and disclosing secrets is the shadowy part of international politics and diplomacy.
I also know that even back in the 1950's various security agencies (including the domestic FBI) have had broadband recording equipment and they systematically record vast swaths of the RF spectrum for later analysis. Heck, the FCC has vans that do this with the not altogether inimical objective of finding and eliminating what radio amateurs call QRM, man-made radio interference.
In your own neighborhood, I'd be willing to bet, there is at least one person who comes to the window every time there's a loud noise in the street. We love to snoop.
If you want paranoia, consider that intelligence services have to consider whether intercepts are planted to ferret out information sources! The people who work on these things will sometimes weigh the importance of information against the importance of assets in place and might choose NOT to use an intercept.
Consider also that they can figure out a lot just from seeing the number, freqency, and endpoints of indecipherable communications. You can glean information from the pattern of messages, even if you can't read the messages.
I think all of this is necessary. Its part of why, despite a world bristling with weapons of terrifying power, we have gone without a global war for over 50 years.
My concern comes in when governments have this power exclusively. So long as you and I can watch the watchers, I think things are reasonably safe. If the US government succeeds in forcing Clipper and Skipjack on us, I think we have something to worry about.
I think the second amendment should add crypto to the right to bear arms as a defence against tyranny. I'm not a gun not, nor am I a crypto nut, but I think the right needs to be there just in case.
So long as you can secure your communications if you really need to, I think you should accept that they watch everything. Heck, I'm glad they watch everything. I just think I should be able to too.
Finally, I don't think it matters much what the government does or does not want us to have. Computing power is becoming nearly free (Beowulf), cameras, recorders, microphones are becoming ubiquitous. It will not be long before everything has a net address (your car, your home, your wristwatch) and GPS will know where all of them are all the time.
Privacy will cease to exist. In fact, it largely already has. Now I think we need to make sure that everybody knows everything or else it will just be governments and marketers. There's a world I don't want to live in.
Go to www.gb.nrao.edu and click on "Quiet Zone". I used to work at NRAO (about 50 miles away), although I didn't know the Navy had an Echelon site down the road at the time. They have a van that drives around and tracks down stray emissions like old faulty microwave ovens or ham radio operators. The NRQZ was apparently established in 1958, so this has been around for a while. I don't know if the Echelon site or the radio observatory came first.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Civil rights? Pfffft on you! Who's civil rights have been violated? Last I checked, information gathering had nothing to do with civil rights. It's when the information is *used* against you that your rights can be violated, not before. This system has been implemented for 50 years by most accounts, and I can't recall a single news item, ever, that outlined someone's rights being violated by any government with information obtained through it. I challenge any of you to point me to anything indicating such rights violations have ever occurred.
Do any of you people eat tuna? When the commercial fishing boats go out to catch fish for tuna, they put big nets out, and basically catch anything that they can. Some of the fish isn't fit to be made into tuna. They also catch many other creatures that you wouldn't want to eat, so they are discarded. Killed. They weren't fit to be tuna. They died so that *you* could get good, safe tuna. It's the price you pay for good tuna.
If you're worried about Eschelon, then don't be a tuna!
-mattyj@cts.com
If you want some background info on Pine Gap and Alice Springs and the whole UKUSA/SIGINT bit, check out:
The Puzzle Palace : A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, by James Bamford. Its an older book, but you'll learn quite a bit. I actually ended up having a lot more respect for the NSA when I had finished reading the book.
Another book you may want to check out is Pine Gap : Australia and the US Geostationary Signals
Intelligence Satellite Program. It may be harder to find this one. Its ISBN is 0043030025.
You can always look them up on Amazon.com
Here is one URL on Echelon to get you going.
By the way I think its very silly for Australia to openly or honestly admit this stuff in any fashion or form.
This isn't that far away from me. Perhaps it's time for a field trip...
Some 3 years ago, while working at a bank client's site, we were asked to do some research into network security. We looked at all sorts of methods of getting the data, from physical access to PCs, connecting to the LAN, current clamps (inductors) and using other listening equipment. To see how feasable some of this was, we decided to find out about getting parts to make some listening devices up. Later on in the day, after ringing around various and numerous electronics and security companies, we recieved a very unpleastent call from the GCSB (NZ Govt. Commnunications Security Bureau)!! "Did we know this was illegal (!), what were we doing"...
All communications should be considered to be broadcasts. If you don't encrypt and carefully protect your key, you must assume you're being listened to.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Can't get to the story due to a workplace censorproxy; can someoen summarize?
According to the former Canadian agent Mike Frost, it would be ``nave" for Australians to think that the Americans were not exploiting stations like Kojarena for economic intelligence purposes. ``They have been doing it for years," he says. ``Now that the Cold War is over, the focus is towards economic intelligence. Never ever over-exaggerate the power that these organisations have to abuse a system such as Echelon. Don't think it can't happen in Australia. It does.''
Australia sure looks like a bad place to be given the day's news, but this is going to be the game everywhere. Ever read The Invisibles by Grant Morrison?
I'm not sure what is fiction and what is real anymore. This whole article just makes me cynical. And they say that part of the decision to be open about this is to reassure Australians that its domestic spying activity is strictly limited and tightly supervised.
Anyone feel reassured?
How can democracy work when no one votes?
Just my $0.02.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch