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.

Comments

Re:I ain't scared

[skullY]

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.

Of two minds

[evilpenguin]

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.