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Congress concerned about Echelon
Congress is concerned about Echelon invading the privacy
of US citizens. Indeed, for the first time in its history,
the NSA has refused to supply the House Permanent Select
Committee with documents about Echelon.
We, here in the USA live it the lungs of a "drama driven tragity" created by the media. If it's got blood, it sells, and they can put it on camera. If it's got a minor involve, they can get a shot of a teenager crying, and it sells. If it's weather related, they can play some hurricane footage, and it sells.
There in lies the question, with TV driven media news, they run into countless problems with modern stories. How do you get a good camera angle on "red flag words in encripted messages" when it's not even a meterial thing? How do you get your news anchor to sound interesting in a 10 second advertizement for the news when he is constantly calling a tech for help to retreve his email, and you want him to talk about processor power relevance of increasing encription key strength? How can you do a story that would take the full 30 minutes of the news to explain the background information alone to 90% of the audiance?
Yes, it is big news, yes it is a serious consern for all Americans, and the whole world, yes it really really in important to seperate the myth for the fact. But which one of the "news professionals" who spent 5 years studying english, makeup, and political topics like welfare, which one of these clowns do you pick to try to investigate the story?
Look at the securety breach at LANL, and the impact. That was easily (at least) one of the biggest events in national securty in the last century. How may people saw anything at all about it on the news? And when? The _couldn't_ cover it, because they didn't know how. It got _some minor_ media coverage at least a month after the story broke. Why? Because, it took that long to get a political figure (some thing to put on camera) to make a public statement about it. That's all they can cover, that's all they know how to do. They cover "statements" from famous faces. They don't cover what moves around from one hard drive to another. That story is real, they have facts, and they STILL can't cover it.
How in your right mind can you believe that they can cover something like this, when it's much harder to even figure out what the hard facts are?
(Steping onto my soap box) The REAL problem is that in the USA, the mass mob mentality has no clue what the diffrance between freedom and democracy is. Democracy was a tool to insure freedom, not other way around. Let run rampant, the people can be thier own supressive dictator. Because the "majority" want's things one way, that does NOT insure freedom for all. This is why anyone who really cares about what seperates the USA from any other country in the world is a member of the Libetarian Party where the _goals_ of the founding fathers are supported, not the mob mentality. Freedom is being lost to a political machine that makes the politcal machines in the past (like the whole gerrymandering thing) look laughable by comparison. No other place in the world has given it's people to rise and fall, stand on thier own two feet, and succeed based soley on thier own strength as much as the USA has. Yet, every day, that chance gets smaller and smaller, as we all surcome to the "mob rule by orderly democracy." Think for one minute... "Concensus is the biggest enemy of Truth" Just because everyone agrees, it doesn't make it _right_. Without our freedom, we are doomed to loose everything the USA was originally founded for.
So, HELL YES, this is big news, this is important, this should be on the front page of the local papers and the lead story at least ONE time... But, what can you expect from a country that is govern by a mob who is educated by Hollywood?
What I don't understand is why real (read: more than a handful of readers/viewers) news sources haven't picked up on this? Anyone out there with news contacts want to get the word out? Or explain why this isn't front page on CNN, which loves to complain about the CIA but never says much about the NSA? I really generally think conspiracy theory buffs are usually nuts, but this is the case that might finally push me to their side.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Republic - the form of government in which ultimate power resides in the people, who elect representatives to participate in decision-making on their behalf. The head of state in a republic is usually an elected president-never a hereditary monarch. A republic is founded on the idea that every citizenhas a right to participate, directly or indirectly, in affairs of state, and the general will of the people should be sovereign. The U.S. is a republic.
Really? I wonder about that
65.0% slashdot pure
If the US ever wants to be a true "world leader", the well-being and rights of citizens of other nations has to enter into such debates. Until then, even US allies can't shake the suspicion that US aspirations to leading other nations are simply a result of economic self-interest and a certain degree of paranoia about US security interests.
In fact, programs like this are a symptom of national paranoia in the US. Other countries know they cannot get complete intelligence information or military supremacy (nor would they want to commit the economic resources for doing so), and they cannot have an absolute military advantage. Except for the US, other nations need to learn to develop trust and negotiate. Only the US is trying to maintain an intelligence and military advantage that is absolute, even in the absence of an identifiable foe.
Fortunately, this one has an easy solution: any country concerned about privacy rights of their citizens can simply unilaterally make/keep strong encryption legal. The suspicion that US intelligence agencies use their information for industrial espionage (whether true or not) should provide strong enough incentives. And the argument that a country needs to keep strong encryption illegal so that US agencies can spy on their citizens I suspect won't go over well in even the most friendly allies of the US.
the director of Central Intelligence, the director of NSA and the attorney general must submit a report within 60 days of the bill becoming law that outlines the legal standards being employed to safeguard the privacy of American citizens against Project Echelon...
"This very straightforward amendment...will help guarantee the privacy rights of American citizens
[and] will protect the oversight responsibilities of the Congress which are now under assault" by the
intelligence community.
_____________________________
So some high level officials must submit a report, and suddenly the American people are protected? The NSA regularly violates the 4th amendment. The CIA does the same. And the current Attorney General authorized the unwarranted use of deadly force aganist American Citizens on at least two occasions (Waco, Ruby Ridge) and then lied about it during congressional hearings.
E-yeah. We're safe.
JL Culp
Chairman, Libertarian Party of Sumner County
http://sumnerlp.org
If anyone is interested I have a copy of Duncan Camphbells report to the European Parliament on my site. See http://www.imag inator.com/simon/documentation/report/ic2kreport.h tm Some very interesting reading... s
Also per this page and the next, the NSA budget is classified, and its existence was publicly denied. Maybe that makes it Area 50?
--The basis of all love is respect
All profiling requires a comfortable 'norm' to compare to. If certain activities are going to be suspicious, they must be sufficiently unusual to warrant closer examination. Even kiddie-porn-selling heroin dealers with ties to Libyan terrorists (aren't they all?) are going to use the definite article, punctuation, emoticons;) and other typical email ingredients. The answer, if you want to short-circuit automata deciding how worthy a citizen you are by keywords and avg. word counts, is to make everything suspicious.
... it's also a good place to get NSA t-shirts, mugs, etc. I think there are small signs for it right on Route 32 toward the south side of the complex.
...
Before "Know Your Customer" was tossed out the door (for those who don't know, this was a massively anti-privacy FDIC measure which would have not just authorized but required financial institutions to report to Big Brother large or "unusual" bank account transactions, based on financial profiling) I came up with the idea and promulgated it to the 30 or so fellow columnists I worked with at my school's newspaper.
If you have in your and some immediate friends' bank accounts a total of anything over 10,000 dollars, pool it and start making transactions. Lots of them. Make sudden cash infusions and withdrawals. Demand quarters. Ask for "Small, unmarked bills" three days in a row. Ask furtively about whether anyone could know how much money you put into an account, or how fast you took it back out.
If a huge number of transactions are suspicious (setting off *all* of their bells too, not just one or two) then surveillance in the hopes of catching some nefarious financial or drug-related misdeed becomes a losing proposition.
Same thought applies here. That's why for years I like to toss in some gratuitous mentions of 'bombs,' 'heroin' and 'secrets' into long distance communications of all kinds. Add some random 'danger words' to your email innocuously, and the gub'mint will have a harder time spying on everyone.
There are many thousands who read Slashdot. If some small percentage of them did the same, it might not take up more than a blink of computer time to scan their email ("Oh, we don't scan email, unless it's suspicious" catch 22 vicious circle), but it certainly would take a lot of man hours for the people who must look into computer-generated leads.
land of the free home of the brave indeed! And don't worry, non-American slashdotters: The NSA has not forgotten you, I promise.
timothy
p.s. The NSA does have a great little museum. My dad (retired NSA) took me there a few years ago. Anyone near Ft. Meade MD should check it out. Neat exhibits, a library full of computer and crypto stuff, Purple, Enigma and other code devices from ancient to newish
pps If you have nothing to hide then you won't mind this anal probe
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm wondering if there are spook geeks sitting around the coffee pot bitching about the audacity of the US Congress trying to meddle in something it has absolutely no clue about. :)
It's kinda ballsy to say, "Fsck no!" to Congress tho. I wonder if you can declare an entire agency in contempt of Congress and throw them all in the nearest Club Fed.
Let's all start making our emails seven-bit-clean with "red flag" armor - choose, say, 65536 words like "assassination" or "echelon" that are certain to trip email scanning bots, then map every 16 bits of an encrypted message to the red flag word at that index in the word database.
The irony of thousands of innocuous messages, both encrypted and tailored to fill NSA "suspicious message" databases, would be amusing.