Congress Ixnays FIDNET; Prez Finds Money

Signal 11 writes "Congress has shot down the Fidnet project - to read about more details on Fidnet, go the original story about the project. In related news a national jam echelon day is coming up. Unfamiliar with Echelon? It is best to educate oneself. " Well, the sequence of events for FIDNET goes something like this: Clinton proposes computer security group, liberties groups hate it, Congress shoots it down for funding, Clinton attachs it to another bill. So, we won and lost - for more details, check out our recent YRO Story.

Comments

_National_ Jam Echelon day?

[The Apocalyptic Lawn]

Since project Echelon rises above the USA's (official) territory (by definition), why not make it a World Jam Echelon Day? That would really screw their system over.

As a start, you can prepare yourself by extracting the naughty comment found in the (source of) the National Jam Echelon Day page, and on the day itself, put it up in your webpages, attach a conveniently small subset of it to your signature and anything else you can think of (have your browser/squid report itself as something naughty, and every HTTP request may be tagged). Anything you can think of.

Let's hope I won't forget that day myself. I'm notorious in forgetting long-term stuff :(

- da Lawn

jam echelon day

[lance_link]

These "hacktivists" seem to think that peppering their email with naughty words is a new idea. It isn't: "spook fodder" is at least ten years old (take a look at Tim May's 1992 Cypherno micon). The idea that they can "jam" Echelon is incredibly naive; if they're really concerned, they'd do better to encourage people to understand these surveillance systems and to use PGP - spreading misinformation about surveillance and encouraging one-day actions is counterproductive. Some of the hacktivist organizers have been told again and again (for example, by the foounders of Hack-Tic/xs4all) that their methods are misguided and useless, but they never listen. Hacking is about, among other things, understanding technical systems: if you promote misunderstanding, you've got no business calling yourself a "hack"-anything.