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What's the Government /Really/ Classifying?
Nachtjäger writes "The Federation of American Scientists has an entire section of their site devoted to US Government secrets, including the lately hyped Echelon stuff. " Interesting project - it's an interesting chronicle of the declassification of massive amounts of papers.
Back in 1994 I called my congressman. I asked
for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on.
Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".
This was 2 days before it was to be voted on.
A quick search of that site turned up this: http://209.207.236.112/irp/pro gram/process/echelon.htm
Pretty entertaining stuff.. Neat site.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Would it not be wonderful if all of a sudden, rathern than scanning a billion (or whatever the current number is) of daily emails in plaintext, they'd have to sort through a billion encrypted messages. This would be the best way to get back at them; if nothing else this would make scanning all mail traffic next to impossible (unless they can break encryption almost efforless, something I don't quite buy).
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Now why is it that there's this big fuss about Echelon in the US and here in Europe nobody seems to give a rats ass (or even know it exists). I think us Europeans can learn something from our American friends here: political activism about these things is imortant/essential. I really wish us Europeans would have the political tradition of writing/complaining to your congressmen about things you don't like. As far as I can tell, Europeans are more complacent when it comes to interacting with their chosen representatives
As a Marylander, I have several friends who work (or worked) for federal agency sub-contractors. Most of the random projects done by "the government" are doled out to Beltway Bandits (this is the actual term used) like them. At the usual cookouts they would often trade tales about classifying documents.
As far as my friends could tell, the most common reason their companies would make an official Secret is so that the low-ranking bureaucrats in charge of their funding would be unable to read exactly how little work had been accomplished. And obviously all this Classified work must be much more important than some public project that any commie or Iraqi could read about in the paper... In other words, 100% pure Dilberting.
I asked for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on. Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".Cute, but I'm sure that bill was never classified, it just wasn't available to anyone outside "the Committee". That's all about stupid congressional politicking (is there any other kind?). More of an Open Source issue, really.
If you were actually able to see what's there, you'd probably find laundry lists, chinese take-away receipts, autoexec.bat files, Doctor Who short stories, even restroom graffiti.
Let's be honest, here. The US Government has far fewer REAL secrets than it wants people to believe. It's showmanship, pure and simple. What is said about guys with bigger cars is just as true for guys with bigger vaults of secrets.
Yes, I'm not underestimating the level of real paranoia on the Government's side. They're just as susceptable to that as everyone else - perhaps more so, given their jobs. They probably are hiding things of importance. But so what? Does it really matter if they're scared witless of their own shadows? Does it -really- matter, in the overall scheme of things? Not really. They're only significant because we choose to make them so.
As for Echelon - I believe it's real, but there's no way in hell it's keyword-driven. Check EVERY word in EVERY message on ALL national and international lines in 52 countries? I don't care HOW fast a computer they have - that's TOO SLOW and would yield FAR too many false positives, and FAR too many false negatives. Neural Nets and GA's are where it's at, not SuperGrep!
Fact is, we don't know what the Govt is doing, and all that's happening is that people are projecting their fears to fill the vacuum. It's arguable as to whether the vacuum should be there, but that is a seperate issue to the fact that people are projecting at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think you're quite correct that the secrecy ratings in the US would be more appropriately named "Slightly embarassing", "Mortifying", "PR disaster", "Political dynamite", etc.
:) This attitude that all new work, be it law, a product, or source *will* be flawed and needs wide and open review to become efficient, should be emulated in other fields than programming.
This can prevent public reaction from heading off a bad policy early. As we know, it works better to expose mistakes and fix them, or at least avoid repeating them. Can a people really control their own government if they aren't allowed to know what it's done? It's really important that government be open to review and inspection in a democracy. Like source, not many *will* review it, but the fact that someone *could* keeps people honest and on their best behavior.
You said it yourself in your comment, hiding mistakes is gross incompetency and shows a lack of professionalism. Yet our government, military, and corporate power heirarchies are extremely unforgiving of errors. Screw up once and those upward promotions really slow down. Is it any wonder people try to hide mistakes? Many parents demand the same sort of perfection from their kids, much to their and our detriment. It's time to lighten up a little, people make mistakes. Sometimes the best person for the job is someone who has already learned from all the mistakes.
I think programmers learn very quickly that denying the existence of bugs doesn't really work, and that all new software has bugs. Kernel oopses and bluescreens remind us if we forget
I don't deny there is a real need to keep secrets concerning covert operations and military missions. I suspect a very very small percentage of the secrets in Washington actually fall into the category of operational secrecy though.
The first of the show was fascinating in its own right - what happened to Thresher and Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that were lost in the 60s with all hands aboard. Remember the guy who spent a lot of time hunting for the Titanic and didn't find it the first few times? Part of that was a cover story; he was actually examining the wreckage of Thresher.
That was pretty amazing (short version: You don't want to be in a sub experiencing a catastrophic failure, but if you saw "the camera in the sub" scene in Trinity And Beyond, a movie consisting largely of similarly-amazing declassified footage of nuclear tests, you already knew that), but the second part of the show totally blew me away.
Those of you who are old enough may remember Howard Hughes and his plan to "mine the oceans" for manganese nodules. I remember hearding about this on a NOVA documentary many years ago.
That entire business plan was a cover story for a CIA op. Hughes was asked to come on board as the ideal cover - "Only Hughes would have the money to try mining the oceans, and it's so zany the public would have no trouble believing it as a Hughes project". The real goal was to retrieve - not "examine the wreckage of", not "send a 'bot into the sub to look for neat toys", but to retrieve, intact, a lost Russian nuclear submarine from a depth 17,000 feet.
What Hughes ended up building was pretty far out, even for Hughes. Imagine a large ship with a submarine-shaped bay ("for holding the manganese nodules") in the middle of it. Now imagine a huge contraption that resembled the business end of salad tongs, but was roughly the length of a submarine.
Now drop the contraption 17,000 feet down on long poles, grab your sub, and raise it. Once raised, pop into the sub to get all the codebooks, communications equipment, reactor design info, and for bonus points, three nuclear missiles. The ultimate prize in the Cold War.
Unfortunately, they scraped bottom on their first attempt, and rather than raise the entire thing up to inspect it thoroughly for damage, they went ahead and picked up the sub anyways. About halfway up, three fingers on the "claw" broke off, leading to structural failure of the sub. The bow, with the bridge and all the intelligence information, along with the nukes, went back down to the bottom and was destroyed on impact. All that remained in the stern were bodies and/or parts thereof.
The only official acknowledgement ever made was that a tape - showing a funeral at sea for the Russian sailors - was eventually sent to the Russian Premier when the secret leaked.
Some of this footage - of the wrecks of Thresher, Scorpion, and the operation to retrieve the aforementioned Russian sub, has only recently been declassified.
Finally, one plan that didn't get off the ground, but was hinted at in that "Interception Capabilities 2000" report - the placement of taps on underground cables. Seems the Russian Northern Fleet used to communicate via undersea cables around the North Cape, and it further seems that "since the cables were undersea, they were secure", and the communications were sent unencrypted. The plan was to use a different type of sub to place a listening device in the sand beneath the cable, (Russian navy inspects cable, sees no tap on cable, lays cable back down on top of buried listening device!) and then to string 2,000 miles of new cable to Greenland, where a satellite uplink would provide the US with real-time intel on the Northern Fleet. Apparently, this plan was scuppered when a mole inside NSA compromised it. It would have cost $2-3 billion dollars -- but what's a billion when you're talking about the possibility of having hours, or even days, of advance notice of World War III?
I have a hunch that 20 years from now, we'll be discovering some similarly audacious things from today's era.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. NSA and CIA have better things to do with their time than worry about you.
In the meantime - for anyone who's ever wondered "why would geeks ever want to work for the spooks", that's probably just the tip of the iceberg of why. Yes, most of the work is probably mind-numbingly dull, and made even duller by government regulations. But the chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime "moon shot" operation, and to play with or develop technology that's beyond the state of the art, is probably a significant motivating factor.
If there's anyone out there reading this who's built a quantum computer or some other piece of technolgy the rest of us haven't even dreamt of yet: "Cool hack, dude! 20-30 years from now, I hope we get to hear your story too."