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Results From "Jam Echelon Day"
snotty sent us linkage to a USA Today story talking about the results of Jam Echelon Day. We mentioned this a bit earlier. Sorta a depressing followup I guess, but worth a read.
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geeknews.com is the best computer/geek/LINUX stuff........yah and it kicks BUTT big time.
Why would the government build a spy network, only to leave it unable to withstand this?
Odds are that Echelon, if it even exists, probably has a failsafe or something just in case. At the most, what would J.E.D. do, make them reboot their machine?
An idea would be interesting to see is like with distributed.net, only slinging triggerwords around. With that kind of speed, the only problem is that people like me with a very crappy connection would be eating all their bandwidth up.
If anyone has comments on that, id love to hear them.
icq:=22921393;
I'm DARKANI and I'm a DUMB JERK.
Echelon doesn't exist either.
I agree with precisely one statement in the Salon article:
On the Internet, where conspiracy theorists flourish
Echelon is an urban myth, fueled by a constant flow of conspiracy theorist assurances and counter-assurances. As far as I'm concerned the only thing conspiracy theorists have less of than facts is brains.
No, I do not work for the NSA, and no this is not intended as flame-bait. Just one person's opinion.
The Fourth Amendment (1791):
The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be searched.
******
Ok, first point. These all refer to physical search and siezure. They didn't have electronic communication when the Constitution was promulgated. It says nothing of the right to search non-physical things. Laws regarding wiretaps and such are an interpretation.
Additionally, the courts have held for awhile now that you have little to no expectation of privacy on the internet (unlike the telephone).
Furthermore, the key word is "unreasonable". Is a computer which only flags threats to national security reasonable? I think so. As it stands now the post office does inspect mail for drugs and what not. The police have been setting up sobriety checkpoints in many states now for sometime now, this too has withstood the challenge. What is the difference?
The specific issues in the 4th Amendment that I was addressing, however was not the wording of the 4th Amendment. It was the basis on which it was written. It is based on experience. Based on long experience, you'll never have a perfect situation like I described. They simply realized that you had no assurances of "fairness". Which is why the Constitution is written the way it is written, with balance of power and all that. My machine only exists in a "perfect" world, the Constitution does not.
This device just means that you can't say you're going to build a bomb and mean it. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Commercial speach (eg: ads) is not unregulated. The FCC regulates what you can say on public airwaves. You can't make threats to kill the President. You can't slander/liabel. You can't threaten to kill someone. Why should you be entitled to saying you want to blow DC at length? There are limits as to what you can and can't say. Deal with it.
Strong cryto can be stored, then worked on later, once the key is obtained by other means. Why waste time, when 99.999 of sites can probably be got in and compromised, or openly by lawful means. If you were going to bug somebodys phone, then you would be selective about it. There must be a list of hot list ip addresses, so you would spoof them with garbage. Then you would use delay times to filter out 'troublemakers', or determine hotter addresses. The key would be how to make your address hot. Getting an encrypted, or badly spoofed reply from a hostile foreign country regularly should do the trick;l with the occasional burst of 600Mb of utter crap. IF everyone sent the same message, a few similarity checksums would automatically dispose of the crap that was sent. Now an automatic generator is an improvement but... we need names from a whos who of military wantabes and their henchmen. You need to draft an automatic letter, with a rich set of buzzwords, with real names, on hot topics, via hot, exotic ip addresses. I suppose using an xxx forum to discuss missile stuff, would see the whiteshirts having to eyeball it daily. If you want to do stuff like this, figure out what the other guy would do, so that only the good prospects get forwarded for stage 2 treatment.
Not totally meaningless either....
"...place to be searched..."
and
"...people or things to be siezed.."
I am surprised and disappointed by how many otherwise intelligent slashdotters are buying into this urban legend. I expect this kind of "millenialism" from the religious fanatics as we approach 2000, but I thought the Linux community was a more intelligent bunch. You guys have watched one to many X-files episodes. This is the same U.S. intelligence community that couldn't tell a Chinese embassy from a military target in Serbia....that couldn't tell a pharmaceutical plant from a chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. There is no "smoking man". The truth *IS* out there, but none of you bozos would recognize it if it bit you on the ass. The truth is, there is no Echelon. Moulder and Scully are FICTIONAL characters. Aliens are not living among us. Some of you folks need to read Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". Free your mind of this gullibility. This Jam Echelon thing was one big chain letter email hoax...not too different than the ones the AOL kiddies keep spreading.
-----------------------------------
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
...and I wish you people would quit sending me email.
-----------------------------------
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
No, I am not an advocate of Echelon for the previously mentioned reasons (eg: logistical and abuse factors), perhaps devils advocate. The machine of which I describe is subject to neither logistical nor abuse concerns. It may strike you as a subtle distinction, but its a hugely significant one nonetheless. The ONLY thing i'm advocating is the right to investigate those who intend bodily harm to our citizens -- all others pass through unmolested and unrecorded as specified.
Give me something other than a gut reaction
that this is evil "just cuz" or "because the Constitution says so".
I highly doubt what you say about the border is accurate, but it doesn't change much. The fact of the matter is that if you want to come back from Mexico, you're subject to search. You don't have a choice. Besides you're not always made aware of what they're searching for, or how.
What is the difference between your package being "scanned" for drugs and money, and your communications being scanned for ACTUALLY illegal content. In both cases, only the guilty are impinged on (in theory). You can call it whatever you want, but in practice its the same thing in my opinion.
How about sobriety checks? Those have cleared constitutional challenges and are very similar.
My speach shames you? That is kind of ironic for one who supposedly supports the Constitution. It should affirm your believe in the country that I can utter essentially unpopular views, and live to tell about it.
Why not just do it in "promiscuous" mode. That interferes with the data not my son.
I'm so glad our government is looking out for us :)
Don't you mean:
I'm so glad our government is out looking for us!
:)
http://www.bullnet.com
In other words, just participate in Usenet as usual. ;)
Posted by Nr9:
alexnews.com is the best computer/kung fu/observant/lefty/ALEX OS site.
Talking about lefties, wut do u think about lefties?
Posted by Nr9:
lefties are inferior
there is a reason that there are more righties. humans are made to be righties
latin for left is "sinister", which obviously has a bad connotation.
latin for right is "dexter", which obviously has a good connotation.
Actually, the world was aware of Pakistan's nuclear capability for quite a long time before the test blast. Quite a few nuclear countries -- eg. Israel -- have never officially announced that they have nukes, which lets them avoid IAEA inspections and trade sanctions, but they've allowed the fact to leak out, so the nukes can act as a deterrent to enemy attack.
What caught the spooks by surprise was the actual test, which they should have been able to spot by watching troop movements, etc. Still embarrassing, but not quite as bad as you're making out.
Cheers,
-j.
do u think slashdot people are all lefty or they are all ambdidextrous? and do u like those new Cereal Commercials'??? they are so good? and alex's observancy is good too. andre wneeds to fix his motherboard and thomas chen is djumb.
I agree with you, that it is a slippery slope. I see two seperate problems with Echelon (doubtfull it exists to the extent many seem to think):
a) False positives. If this thing returns no false positives, then innocent people simply won't be affected. "Bad" people will. However, I have serious doubts about the ability to filter out false positives. If it returns even the smallest percentage of false positives, the human managers are going to be deluged with mail to read -- the system can't work.
b) The potential for abuse. Its real enough. Though I don't believe the NSA is evil, there are some legitimate concerns that they could start using this technology to further domestic interests. Or political, or what have you...
If you really do intend to blow up the capitol building; don't expect a great deal of sympathy from me. If you mean it jokingly, I would hope that the NSA would be able to detect it. Or they'd investigate on it discretely. They could see that you neither have the technical expertise, nor the political leanings which would make you likely to do such a thing. However, if the individual is a PhD in EE. with a couple million dollars, and connections to the Russian Mob who just happens to hate the US and is asking for plutonium....then perhaps you'd want them to investigate. And maybe even "deal" with them, though I doubt the NSA makes a habit of this.
No again. Strong crypto can't even be deciphered by the NSA, so if they can't analyse it to be a weak crypto, they won't even bother.
Best would be to use DES on everything. If they don't have a backdoor (which is highly unlikely), it is estimated that cracking DES still takes the NSA several minutes. IE, possible enough to try, but still takes a lot of power.
-
This is exactly why I think privacy protestors are very foolish to argue from a position of "but your filtering/monitoring method is not accurate". Accuracy is irrelevant. The point is that nobody, whether Echelon, FBI, local police, my neighbor, or my cat, should have the right to listen to ANY of my communications no matter what.
For instance, let's say Echelon's software operated like this:
Now let's assume as you say that it finds those and only those types of communications it has been configured to find. What happens when the also add "political agitator", "IRS resistor", "gun owner", "free speech advocate"?
The point here is that there is no class of non-convicted individuals that it is OK to invade the privacy of.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I would like to encourage you once again, because you seem very intelligent and the content of my last post is very difficult to surpass in a rational way (plus I am drunk now -- I was not before).
[(Sheesh, I live in college town -- this is pretty normal. I would hope that you look past it, and see what I am truly trying to say. TRY IT!!!, PLEASE!!!)]
of v. exact
this is a very important distinct'n
Sounds like a gnab gib.
Why did a non-encrypted html email with a naughty keyword block come through with all content garbled/encoded like this, no low or high ascii?
"PEEgCkhSRUY9Imh0dHA6Ly93d3cubXNuYmMuY29"
What are these variables--"Spy, computers, spammed,
Subject: what it is =?UTF-8?Q?Spy=20computers=20=E2=80=98spammed=E2=8
It has managed to get the "conspiracy theorists" into the news again, which cant be that bad. :)
The trouble with this kind of action is theres no way to tell wether is worked or not, the NSA sure isnt gonna say "gee, they managed to break our computers by sending loads of spam", and you're not going to look over some secret airbase and see smoke rising from a computer centre. I would have contributed more, but I didnt send very many mails that day
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
How did these variables(Spy=,computers=,spammed=) get tagged on to a naughty-keyworded email on Oct 21?
Subject: what it is =?UTF-8?Q?Spy=20computers=20=E2=80=98spammed=E2=8
All the content of that email was garbled/encoded with no low or high ascii, like this--
"PEEgCkhSRUY9Imh0dHA6Ly93d3cubXNuYmMuY29"
Let's think about this. Supercomputers with more bandwidth than we have...I am sure my PC can contibute enough emails to flood anything... geez
...wrong game.
I'm so glad our government is looking out for us :)
Although it's doubtful that echelon experienced any adverse reaction to "Jam Echelon Day", the real result was a partial success.
Most people don't have a clue as to what echelon is, or even if they did, perhaps they perceived the concept in a positive light. By having this type of protest, there was at least some media exposure. While there doesn't seem to be as much exposure as this deserves (hence, a partial success, imho), any is good. It may provide the avenue by which people can get a good wack with the cluestick.
Greater general awareness cannot be a bad thing, if nothing else, the NSA and their echelon conspiritors will have to tread just a little more lightly, and may even (God forbid) produce some answers to congress.
The media may be useless in many regards, but sometimes the blunt method of getting any information to the masses, is very useful. I'd rather have a slightly misinformed public than a totally uninformed one on matters like this.
http://caq.com/CAQ/CAQ59GlobalSnoop.html
1 2-echelon.html
http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
"Using data profilers, torturing states have used these systems to compile death lists. For example, the
Tadiran computer supplied to Guatemala and installed in the control center of the national palace.
According to a senior Guatemalan military official, "the complex contains an archive and a computer
file on journalists, students, leaders, people on the left, politicians and so on." Meetings were held in
the annex to select assassination victims. A US priest who fled the country after appearing on such a
death list said, "They had printout lists at the border crossings and at the airport. Once you got on that
- then its like bounty hunters."24 Within Europe, systems, such as that produced by Harlequin, allow
the automatic production of maps of who phoned whom to show friendship networks. Other
companies such as Memex described above, allow entire life profiles of virtually anyone in a state
having an official existence. Photographs and video material can be included in the record and typically
up to 700 other databases can be hoovered at any one time, to extend the data profile in real time.25
Significant changes in the capacity of new surveillance systems can be anticipated with the advent of
new materials such as Buckminster Fullerene, which will lead to minaturisation of systems by several
orders of magnitude.26 "
http://online.guardian.co.uk/technology/9053603
qubit
Until you speak against the government, they duplicate your DNA stored from your last blood test and frame you for a crime to remove your threat. Sure, it may seem unlikely but there's a very large potential for abuse.
We live in a very different age today. When the Constitution was promulgated, one man (or a small group) could not kill thousands. They had no nuclear bombs, no biological weapons, no chemical warfare, hi-yield explosives, automatic weapons, etc. The only way to kill vast numbers of people was to assemble an army. There was no need to read mail, if someone wanted to raise arms you'd know soon enough.
And back then, if one man wanted to sink a ship, he couldn't have lit a barrel of gun power( remember, they were wooden ships)? And one man couldn't start large fires in populated areas? What if one man decided to poison the town well? Or one man decided to taint a bunch of meat? A small group of men couldn't subvertly wander from town to town murdering people in the night or starting fires? What if they burned down crops just before winter?
Today, I can communicate securely and instantaneously with other like minded wackos in milliseconds without ever leaving my home. Conventional spying methods wouldn't even know I exist. Information is key. If there really is a way to safely analyze and trap this information before it does harm, we have an obligation to do so.
200 years ago people could meet at my house so we could discuss the sinking of some ships in the harbor without stirring the eyes of the government before hand as well. Should we have listening monitors everywhere, including our homes, in case someone may have a friend who lives near them who may want to conspire to blow something up? Should we not be constantly monitored just to weed out a very small amount of bad eggs? We'd better monitor board rooms "in case some corporation wants to put it's interests before the interests of our citizens" too... What happens if the listener is a friend/relative of a competitor? What if a family values politician shows some un-family like attribute( and the people watching don't like him/her )? What if someone who is conversing with someone else about being gay and is still in the closet, only to have it announced by the monitor?
The point being, when speech is monitored the possibilities for abuse far outweigh the probability of catching someone. Monitoring one or several forms of communication doesn't prevent another method of communication from being used... so it could go unnoticed. So, we have a low probability for catching someone, combined with the possibility to harm anyone for any reason the montior sees fit. Do you put enough trust in everyone else out there to not harm you? If not, why trust the monitor? If so, why have a monitor? The government and it's monitors all are operated by people who aren't necessarily any better than people who physically seek to harm you( just because they pass a security clearance doesn't mean it's completely impossible for them to want to harm someone ).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Not much else to say - the subject says it all. How did we expect to find out the results of such an attempt? Any slashdotters working at the NSA?
They had poison and low yield explosives. All which were relatively hard to obtain. Terrorism was a totally unknown concept then. The availability of massively destructive weapons was certainly a large part of it.
I'm not saying we SHOULD have Echelon. I'm playing devil's advocate for Echelon, but only in a "perfect world" where the machine works exactly as described and there is no potential for abuse. Many people still say this is intrinsically wrong. I disagree. I don't have any problem with a computer (read Magic Black Box) which will only trap/acton content with plans to kill thousands of people.
Unfortunately, this civil disobedience thing was ill-conceived from the get-go. If we really wanted to jam echelon for a day, we shouldn't have been peppering our email with supposed keywords, we should all have encrypted *everything*.
If you really want to bring the computers at the NSA to a grinding halt, make them spend all their cycles on decrypting your shopping lists, your notes to your girlfriend, and the access logs from your web server.
Imagine, even if we all just used gzip, crypt(*), and uuencode, think of all preprocessing the NSA would have to do before they could scan the email and realize that all it said was "Cheezy poofs, ice cream, ciderjack".
(*) Yes I know that crypt is totally insecure. I'm not looking for security... I'm just looking to waste cycles on some poor schmoe's machine who's going to find httpd.log when he's done "cracking".
Better yet, why don't we all just use GPG, every day of the year?
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Theory and Practice ARE different, I never said otherwise.
I wouldn't say it is the least bit complex. I'm employing my intellect, not using the Constitution as a crutch. This machine would ONLY be triggered by ACTUAL plans to kill thousands. Such speach is NOT protected by the Constitution.
Oh well, I'm still going to leave up my mirror of the Echelon-encoding CGI for all you conspiracy theorists out there.... :)
Auditing those other groups would simply be an abuse of power.
Ok, lets narrow Echelon's theoretical objectives down somewhat (quickly). Let us say that its sole objective was to find people who INTEND to set off a nuclear explosion in DC in the next 3 days. If it does this with 100% accuracy (no false positives), then I have no problem with "invading" their privacy. As the ability to kill millions of people is not a right.
If innocent people merely pass through the machine and nothing further is done with it (no logs/databse, no flags, nothing), I don't see the problem. How does this differ from having your mail not read? The problem is the logistics and the potential for abuse.
http://www.paracel.com/html/textfinder. html
First, the temptation for Echelon (or anyone in their theoretical position) to abuse their power is just too high. For instance, if they are sticking right to their agenda of "terrorists" how can they not also add "people who want to shut down Echelon"?
But let's assume they are perfectly moral. I STILL object to my email be read and my keys being cracked by them (assuming they can do this). Their agenda does not take precendence over my right to privacy. I am not allowed to exist at their sufferance. They have no more rights than I.
The 4th Amendment supposedly protects me from search and seizure without due process. Where is the due process in Echelon's method? Sure, they don't seize anything of mine or yours but they sure do search it and they seize things that belong to nominal terrorists.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I saw a documentary on the Discovery channel that hinted that Canada has a very similar system to Echelon, and that they trade information with each other. Thus, the NSA still spies on the USA, just indirectly.
Therefore, even as a US citizen, I am troubled by the power of the NSA wrt Echelon.
-TomK
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
First of all, if you're really that paranoid about who is listening to your cell phone conversation, then you shouldn't broadcast it in radio to begin with. Aliens on Mars could potentially receive it as well.
As for bombs, do you have any idea how many bombs this system mostlikely has prevented? Also, according to the Constitution, planning a crime means there's intention to commit the crime, which is illegal. Therefore writing an email planning out how to blow up the Whitehouse is illegal. So they really aren't two seperate things. Writing an email planning out a bombing is not only illegal if you're intending to carry it out, but unless your psycho, you wouldn't be doing it. There are exceptions of course, like a child's pranks, etc.
Do you know what the intention of government was when it was written? Its intention was to provide a military and necessary protection and order over its citizens. Therefore, the NSA has a direct, immediate financial and safety issue to handle. They operate off a budget designated by Congress (which hey, we voted for, go figure), and their sole intention is to gather as much information as they can to provide it to the government to serve and protect. What half of you people realize is that the NSA is there to protect YOU (if you're an American citizen). I guarentee the minute it becomes the least bit intrusive into the lives of citizens, congress will shit all over it. Believe it or not, you still do elect your senators and representatives. Hell, you can even RUN for Congress if you want!! Unless you feel there's a deeper conspiratorial plan being laid out, there's nothing you should worry about.
You haven't been reading lately. L0pht have been busy on some very nice promisc mode detection routines. Ok, they're not foolproof, but it just might work.
Remember the furor over "the Beast", the rumoured super-computer in Brussels that was alleged to control all the world financial markets?
Echelon doesn't exist either.
The one thing I agreed with in the Salon article was this:
On the Internet, where conspiracy theorists flourish
Sometimes I think the only thing conspiracy theorists have less of than facts is common sense.
Disclaimer: I do not work for the NSA (nor the Trilateral Commission).
Lee Kai Wen
Lee_Kai_Wen@hotmail.com
You mean the people who are trying to limit the first and second ammendments? The people who steal my meager earnings because they think they know how to spend my money better than me? Congress cares about the citizens about as much as any major corporation.
Believe it or not, you still do elect your senators and representatives. Hell, you can even RUN for Congress if you want!!
Yep... You can run. But, if you don't have previous experience your opponent(s) will use that against you( even though the founders intended average people( ie, non career politicians ) to run government, we seem to only want experienced politicians. ) And of course, I can't run for Congress as I'm only 22, thus not old enough yet( because everyone under the age of 25( house ) or 30( senate ) obviously is too ignorant to run government( see how congress handles technology issues because they're all too old and out of touch to understand them )) Then there's that little matter of financing, where an average House run still costs over a million dollars, Senate runs are $5million + and Presidential over $40 million.
--
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Are you trying to be argumentative, or are you just not listening? I'm not arguing that we should attempt to build such a device. It is ONLY the intrinsic nature of it (as described) that I concerned about here. Ignore the fallibility of the creators and the honesty of the administrators for just a second. Ask yourself IS this device wrong? I think not, period.
If you fail to see the relevancy of such a question, then you are just hopeless.
Not to be flamebaiting, but I feel the same about your posts. Even if you are just playing devil's advocate, you seem to ignore the possibilities for misuse.
Ignore the fallibility of the creators and the honesty of the administrators for just a second. Ask yourself IS this device wrong? I think not, period.
If we had a magical little scrying device which could pick ONLY terrorists out of thin air without invading the privacy of non-terrorists, it would be find. Something like this wouldn't be feasible as something to build with what we know today. The best we could do today is create a system that's modifiable to search for anything the controller wants, including extremely sensative non-threatening personal ( relationships, financial, etc ) and business ( financial, intellectual ideas, etc ) materials. It's completely impossible to ignore the ( possible abuses of the )maintainers of the system because they are the ones who control the system. Would a device that allows anyone to destroy someone else( for any reason ) be wrong? Most certainly.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
"If we had a magical little scrying device which could pick ONLY terrorists out of thin air without invading the privacy of non-terrorists, it would be find (sic)"
Yes, I think so too. This is all I've been interested in. If you had read what i've said many times over in this thread, I stated repeatedly that such a device is impossible to create and administer in the real world. Such I am not advocating it.
I'm only 22, thus not old enough yet( because everyone under the age of 25( house ) or 30( senate ) obviously is too ignorant to run Yes, you are ignorant. You're very, VERY ignorant, and I'll tell you why. What experience did Jessy Ventura have when he ran for Governor of Minnesota? None. I'm sure you could do the same if you'd get off your lazy meager-earning ass and do something instead of complain. As for the government stealing your money, go move to an indian plantation or leave the country. Nobody is forcing you to stay. On another note, do you vote? If you don't, then you have no right to post a comment about how governement sucks because you're too lazy to do anything about it (or for those of you who "refuse to participate because ", you're just as lame). As for age restrictions, thank God they're there, because otherwise there would be millions of people voting for such a noble 22 year old as yourself. Your words match your experience. Enough said about that.
This is almost exactly the same sort of thing that happened with Windows Refund Day. It's a great -- and noble -- idea, but one that's hampered by the facts.
On Refund Day, loads of people went to microsoft with the intention of getting their money back, despite the fact that the EULA stated clearly that it was the vendors who'd have to fork out.
Here, we have lots of people using sentences like "My dog is called fatwa, and I put him down with an AK-47 in the name of Allah" in an attempt to crash the NSA's snoopers.
One difference is that in this case, most people realise that the attempt is ineffectual, and it's being done solely for the publicity. However, I fear that the result will be the same in both cases; it's looked on as a bunch of zealots who don't really know what they're doing.
As well as laughing at everyone, I suspect that there are some spooks who were delighted to see this sort of paranoia discrediting valid attempts at openness.
One FreeBSD p100 running perl scripts wouldn't be enough, but if they had, say, 5000 of them...
My question is: If this really exists, couldn't it be detected in some way? Let's assume they're tapping some major points in the backbone. So they'd just pick out all packets on port 25. Some router doing that would quite probably have quite some latency I'd assume. There must be some way to detect that, and similar things. Anbody got any other Ideas?
This is ridiculous! Civil disobedience is disregarding a law on purpose in an exemplary yet harmless way in order to provoke legal consequences and generate martyrs to expose its perceived injustice; it's about taking personal risks. Neither is the case here.
The only way to undermine the tapping efforts of the NSA an its partners is to make encryption ubiquitous, which is sucessfully defied by US crypto regulations: While it is still possible to get strong crypto for everyone, it can't be made part of the default installations of mainstream OSs (at least if they are developed in the USA).
A real civil disobedience campaign would be e.g. if a significant part of US websites mirrored an easy to install package of free encryption software together with a note stating that this is known to be in contradition with US export laws and naming the responsible persons. But since this would mean real commitment and real risks for the activists, it's not likely to happen.
Does their perl script understand: "Atoombom" (Dutch word for nuclear bomb...)
Doing this doesn't make sense, if you ask me...
And they've hopefully gotten their systems back in normal working order:
***BEGIN ECH*EL0N F0DD*ER! THIS TEXT IS OUT OF CONTEXT!***
Our militia group reports that our wiretap of the FBI complex in Maryland has
produced something: the terrorist group we dealt with earlier has plans to
assassinate United States attorney general Janet Reno of the Justice
Department, and then hijack a Boeing 747 and fly to Cuba with three
suitcases full of cocaine as well as the fissionable plutonium obtained from
the Chinese espionage agent in exchange for nuclear technology transfer
funding. Our associates in Iran are very interested in using the turncoat Navy
Seal in their Jihad against the United States government. One of their agents
will be transporting a small nuclear device aboard Pan-am fligt 5325 on
Tuesday, you provide cover at the airport and bring the suitcase of gold
bullion. If we're careful, the ATF agents won't find our cache of firearms,
and we'll be able to go forward with the attack against Nuclear Plant One as
expected. The nuclear reactor will be your team's target. Bring enough C4 and
nitroglycerine to get the job done, and contact Detective Smith with the state
police and make sure he's sure about his part in the plan. The Communists have
been diverted to Israel where they await further instruction, while the
revolution we're attempting to incite in Argentena seems to have fizzled out.
It may be time to use force. Our Glorious Leader has ordered the overthrow of
those governments, and we're going to get it done!
Hail Bill Gates!
*** END EC*HEL0N F*0DDER ***
You want to c0nf00ze echelon? Just insert a couple of echelon-esque words into random locations in your articles. That will have a better chance of tripping up the search engine. The blatant trolls are just wasting their time.
And did anyone see a new datacenter near the site of the cut?
Heh, heh... yep put that email (or a slight variant) on your sig file!!! Everyone! That'll show all of those evil NSA fiends! Muh-ha-ha!
I'm a gnu world man.
The Black Box machine you described is theoretical, and yet you pretend that in practice it would work. The implication of your claims is that theory and practice are the same.
The Constitution protects all speech (except that which poses an immediate threat to the public well-being, such as shouting fire in a crowded theatre).
Since your intellect seems to be failing you, please try your intelligence.
I NEVER ONCE ADVOCATED FOR ACTUAL USE. Not once in this thread. Get this through your thick skull.
What I WAS doing was setting up a theoretical situation to discuss the intrinsic nature of this device. eg: Is this device (if it behaves exactly as described) itself good or bad -- ignoring all the extraneous situations? Many think it wrong. I disagree. This is all the justification I need. You're bringing nothing but extraneous material in, stuff that has already been covered mind you.
The Constitution doesn't require you to wear blinders when discussing liberties. Just because the Constitution might not allow it in law, doesn't mean that you're not allowed to consider the possibilities. In fact, laws are that much stronger for it.
Futhermore, your understanding of the Constitution is both incomplete and incorrect. It is a dynamic document and it is open to interpretation. Laws regarding wiretaps and such happen to be an interpretation. Also, a hell of alot more speach than just "immediate threats" have been restricted. You need to read up on your history, not to mention law.
This is the last time I'll respond to any of your comments, as you obviously get your jollies off on it. If you can't see beyond the pathetic little box that is your life, atleast try to be a little bit less catty.
There's no need to get into a shouting match. I'm sorry I was wrong about your intelligence. I make mistakes too.
My standard for justification in this and all things human is evidence. Since your machine exists *only* in fantasy it is rather fruitless to be discussed. You should have made this clear in your original post on the topic. You could have saved me and a lot of others a lot of time.
Regarding my use of extraneous material (which I'm sorry you are so bugged by), my replies are to what you have said and nothing more. I am not attempting in my replies to cover or not cover any or all of what has been said in other threads about this topic.
Please, if you might be so considerate (I have done the same for you for nearly all of your arguments), explain to me what parts of my Constitutional understanding you have found to be incomplete and/or incorrect.
If you do not wish to reply, do not.
For my satisfaction, I will consider your lack of reply a formal retraction of your libelous (and baseless) claims about the quality of my life.
Have a nice day.
I realize I didn't mean that. Please disregard.
I Love my American Freedom and will defend it to the end of any thread.
...we have all your names on a list now.
Game Over.
Let's say that every day at some random time an NSA agent broke your front door down (no knocking) and searched your house. If and only if they found bomb-making materials you'd be hauled off to jail. As they leave they replace the door with an exact replica. How exactly are you adversely affected by this?
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I just thought I'd drop you a line about this whole Jam echelon thing... Ok, first of all, lets assume Echelon exists.. This system would have as inputs every single piece of email on the net(Among others).. This is a HUGE data set, am I right? Do you see where this is going? If you take a minute to think about how you would design this system, you would realize that you are going to have to distill this down to the few emails that really are important, which will be forwarded on to real humans. Now if you assume that Echelon works, (i.e. they get ANY useful data out of the system at all) Then I think you can make a few educated guesses as to how the system does/not work. First, (If I was designing it) I would ignore any long strings of "NSA FBI BOMB NUKE" etc.. It doesn't follow any particular grammar, In other words rating an email, based on the number of keywords, isn't gonna get you anywhere.. Second, as up to date as you might be on the latest conspiracy theories, you (a normal person) don't know any really good keywords.. Another way to think of echelon is an large number of real humans reading Emails.. Which given current AI techniques isn't unfeasible.. (I'm not just some yokel spouting off, I've actually gone to school for AI)... So if a human being reads an otherwise normal email "Hi bob, don't forget we are gonna watch the game tonight..get some beer" followed by: "Oh yeah jam echelon!!! FBI NSA etc" It's gonna toss it out.. And in the end, the final stack of suspicious emails grows no larger.. But perhaps I've missed the whole point of Jam Echelon Day... Perhaps it was more of a public awareness stunt than an actual attempt to cause trouble with the system itself... -JD
Are you for, against, or indifferent to Echelon-style monitoring?
I do not understand why writing or sending subversive materials should be grounds for punishment. It may be that being a United States citizen I have lived under and hold dear the right to free speech as part of our Constitution. Though there are many here who are indifferent to, even against, such freedoms, and often the U.S.A can behave in police state type fashion (particularly outside our own borders). . . .
Segfault is only reliable source of news these days. Again, they have published the truth while others give you government fabricated lies. In reality, Jam Echelon Day was a huge success, see this Quote: "We couldn't even telnet in to kill the process," wrote an anonymous NSA sysadmin. "We unplugged it from the network but it's got a lot of mail buffered, and it's going through it all."
...Jam Echelon Day did do something? I doubt it would bring their computers to a halt, but it might give their human analysts a bit too much to work with.
And let's say this did happen. And this other really-bad-oraganization knew it would happen, and took advantage of it. The article mentions that we might possibly find out what effect Jam Echelon Day had, say 10 years from now. What if 10 years from now, as a result of Jam Echelon Day, the world as we now know it is no more, all because we couldn't differentiate between a real message and all these fake messages.
It's not a question of whether we would regret what was done, it's a question of how much.
I assumed the whole concept of "jam echelon day" was a big joke to begin with, and people put those keywords in their email out of a sense of humor.
Of COURSE it won't have any effect on the NSA. Sheesh...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
With the current situation I don't consider it as invasive as the theoretical Echelon would be. This is because I have other ways to travel besides by air. Echelon is supposedly monitoring ALL communications making them impossible to avoid.
In any case, the situations are not parallel. Air travel security is a bottleneck between a trigger and a non-linear effect. For instance, one person can use one small bomb to bring down millions of dollars of aircraft and kill many people. One email does not do the same thing. (One email can PLAN it, but planning and doing are two different things)
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OK, so just change the details of the experiment. Let the agent come in while you (and your spouse) are gone to work and the kids are off to school. They still break down the door, but remember they are replacing it with an exact replica so you don't notice when you come home. Now what do you think about it?
My basic point is that what I say or do is absolutely no one's business but my own unless and until I committ a crime. That's exactly what the 4th Amendment is all about: the "due process" generally involves showing a judge that you have "probable cause" that a crime has been committed.
Your first objection is going to be "we can't wait until after the terrorist strikes to put him in jail". We don't have to: conspiracy to commit a crime is also a crime. But, and this is the crux of my argument, Echelon (or whoever) has to have probabe cause BEFORE listening to my communications. The listening itself cannot be the probable cause.
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I am NOT advocating Echelon. I think the potential for abuse is high, maybe too high. Much the same reason why you wouldn't want these other things.
The case I was trying to setup is a Magic Black Box Scenario. Where it only marks content which threatens national security, everything else is left unmolested. I don't have a problem with this explicit scenario. But I'll be the first to tell you that this is virtually impossible.
I, for one, don't have a problem with a DNA database as long as its only used for to match criminals to violent crimes (not abuse).
Police searching your vehicle and the like, is totally different. Here you're clearly being inconvenienced. Not to mention the cops aren't gauranteed to behave properly. How about instead of searching your car, they merely use a highly accurate machine (or dog) at the border to sniff for drugs? Oh wait, they already do that. Is this wrong? Or mail? They inspect that too. If you go to the airport, they X-ray your baggage. Sometimes they sniff it too.
We live in a very different age today. When the Constitution was promulgated, one man (or a small group) could not kill thousands. They had no nuclear bombs, no biological weapons, no chemical warfare, hi-yield explosives, automatic weapons, etc. The only way to kill vast numbers of people was to assemble an army. There was no need to read mail, if someone wanted to raise arms you'd know soon enough.
Today, I can communicate securely and instantaneously with other like minded wackos in milliseconds without ever leaving my home. Conventional spying methods wouldn't even know I exist. Information is key. If there really is a way to safely analyze and trap this information before it does harm, we have an obligation to do so. But, I reiterate, this doesn't mean I advocate Echelon. It just means that I think we should THINK about it, not just dismiss it offhand.
Question: Think Columbine for a moment. Does it occur to anyone that if Echelon worked that it night pick up on these kids, who DID send extensive emails? Sure, no n00ks, but talk of blowing ones school up should trigger SOMETHING..
As has already been pointed out by many people, Echelon probably has filters built in that will seperate out simple lists of keywords, which is what most people were sending. Or even emails with too many keywords (at some point it becomes obvious you're just trying to draw attention to yourself. A real threat would be more likely to have only one or two keywords, if any). Someone mentioned in the original post about this topic that this list may even have originally been released by the NSA, and is peppered with false keywords that would indicate a specific message should be ignored. Even if it wasn't actually released by the NSA, they certainly heard of it, and likely adjusted their search algorithms to adjust for it (such a system would unlikely be static. What particular words constitute threats must change on a daily basis).
This kind of thing may actually do more harm than good. Assume that this prank actually did have some effect. Do you think the NSA is going to say "Its obvious our system doesn't work. Lets give up!" No, they're going to put billions of taxpayer dollars into improving the checking algorithms.
The NSA is not stupid. They've got some of the best people in the industry. And they'll be able to learn from any mistakes that they do happen to make. Jam Echelon Day simply provides them with a proving ground for their system.
If you want to throw it off, you better have a .sig like --- I indend to shoot the president today at 5pm. --- I set the detonation timer for 30 minutes. --- translate it into a bazillion different languages with someone who actually knows the language not babelfish mutilation. Hell that'd throw it off real good.
In an excerpt from the NSA's web page of facts and figures, Here
I don't have a very good idea of how many computers that is, but it seems like an awful lot of power, including the backup generators.
--
steve
C-x i ~/.sig
These examples are entirely different. In my example, you'd never even know unless you happened to be a criminal. In yours, they're breaking down your door and generally interfering with your life. Also, I'm not saying they should haul you away. Just that if there is a way to extract and prevent bombings without affecting innocent people, I don't see a problem with it. FallLine @ another terminal
If the NSA did know how to break strong crypto quickly, they would probably try to hide that fact by vocally opposing any attempts to make its use more prevalent, thus encouraging the belief that it's secure. Just like they're doing.
(Question for crypto gurus and math geeks: obviously not all 1024 bit numbers are products of two large primes. In fact, most of them aren't. So how many (approximately) are there? Are there few enough that it might be feasible to actually find them all and just store them (in a compressed format in some multi-exabyte database)? My guess is that there are way too many, but I'd like to know for sure.)
Well first of all if searchtools are doing such a crappy job how well do we actually think echelon functions, also it may help to throw off echelon if its name isnt actually in a comment.
They describe some of their supercomputing systems: http://www.nsa.gov:8080/programs/tech/tech/compute .html Signal processing capabilities: http://www.nsa.gov:8080/programs/tech/tech/sgnlpro c.html etc. etc. I mean... Really... The publish this kind of stuff on their web page. Just how stupid do you really think they are?
Deleted
While I agree that the NSA routinely does the "Cannot confirm or deny" tapdance..they do seem to have some semblance of a PR department, at least they have a spokesperson who was directly quoted in the article.
You did read the article didn't you?
I wonder why no telecom companies have spoken up about this
.sig
sort of thing?
maybe they haven't spoken up because the NSA would "dispose" of them and their familys. That would be enough to persuade me to keep it shut.
matisse:~$ cat
Those who would trade safety for liberty deserve neither safety nor liberty.
False positives. If this thing returns no false positives, then innocent people simply won't be affected. "Bad" people will.
That assumes that only "bad" people are targeted in the first place. Lack of fales positives only indicates that they're nabbing the ones they intend to nab. There were no false positives in the FBI Files scandal a few years back, but that doesn't mean innocent people's rights weren't trampled.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The employment page on NSA's web page (http://www.nsa.gov:8080/programs/employ/index.htm l) states: "NOTE: Employment is for U.S. Citizens ONLY." The net result is that they probably have the best US citizens of the world :)
Now the next question is to know if there are any special "accelerated process" that extremely talented non-US citizens would benefit from if someone at the NSA decided they are to be hired?
Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
The NSA does not have a PR department. That "spokeswoman" is probably a person designated for this specific instance. Her job otherwise is mostlikely something completely different. I know for a fact however, that the NSA does not have a Public Relations department, or any such department to deal with the public or media. In this case reading the article, which I did, is completely irrelevent to this fact.
First of all, my thought experiment specified that the agent would only haul off those that had bomb-making equipment. No subjectivity at all. If you think the humanity of the agent makes a difference, just pretend they send in a robot. Or that the agent takes in a digital camera and a computer does the analysis later.
I notice that you keep evading answering my thought experiment with irrelevant objections. Might I suggest that this is because your position is untenably inconsistent?
Secondly, I already have told you what is so evil. I am a free human being. My life is not subordinate to anyone, much less a secret organization. It is not sufficient that I be able to speak my mind AFTER it has been OK'd by someone else. I require free and private speech period.
I'm not advocating that we throw the Constitution out the window. But...
Seeing this sentence in conjunction with the beginning of the next is always scary.
In any case, yes that is exactly what you are advocating. The 4th Amendment says I am immune from search and seizure without due process. My belongings (letters and emails have an automatic copyright) are being searched without due process. End of story.
how exactly do you propose we stop lunatics from conspiring to build bombs?
Despite your claims, bomb-making is not any easier because of the Internet. Talking about it may be, but actually building a bomb still requires physical materials. If those materials can be used for bombs and nothing else (for instance, uranium) then the owners of those materials should keep an eye on them. If the materials have multiple uses (for instance, nitrogen fertilizer) then other means will have to be found (blabber-mouth co-conspirators).
In any case, you can't just toss the rules out the window when they become inconvenient. Let's say there was no other way to find terrorists than to read every email and snailmail and listen to every phone call. Then the people in charge of that need to come out and say so and make a change to our existing laws. I wouldn't want to live in the country that did this, but at least it wouldn't be secret.
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That would also allow you to detect the use of cyphers in images. An image would have a very different type of information content, depending on whether there's a cypher there or not. At this point, you wouldn't be interested in knowing what the cypher said, or where it was, only in knowing that it's there.
Once you've pre-screened (using much the same techniques as SETI does every day to sort out intelligent messages from the noise humans make), you've only messages with genuine information left. 99.9% of that will be irrelevent, and you can screen it out by checking source, destination and degree of encryption. If the source or destination are known places to watch, or the message is encrypted heavily (ie: the apparent randomness is much higher than you'd expect, given the determined level of information present), then you've got a message that's likely to be of interest.
Encrypted messages could be broken (provided the method of encryption was known), and then I'd imagine the messages would go through a final filter. Routine messages (ie: anything not indicative of bahaviour flagged as of interest) would be archived, and anything else would be sent to human operators for final analysis.
If Echelon uses anything even vaguely close to this, the "Jam Echelon Day" would never have passed the first filter, as it's not keyword-based, but information-based, and random spam is very low on information. Even keywords in meaningful messages'd be rejected, as it would fail on the source/destination test.
This would also solve the VPN problem, and the volume of information on the Internet as a whole. By operating on a EXCLUSIVE basis, rather than an INCLUSIVE one, the volume and the protocol become side issues.
IMHO, this seems a likely aproach for something like Echelon, but how it would be implemented is anyone's guess. The fact remains, though, that exclusive systems can't be jammed by trivial means, and it's naive to assume the NSA would leave themselves vulnerable to trivial junk.
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)
make jam echelon day everyday-and double your efforts.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
My 17000 mails probly did very little to their system in it's self, but a combinded effort at least will force the humans to get pissed off and work overtime for the next month. We have mentioned that this system has a i-net conection, why DoS them with mail when we can hack them directly??? Also, you realize that sometimes a conventional hack is not what is needed, some times a cut phone/power/oc60 line is just as effective if not more for the awareness end. I system hack useually is dismissed as techie stuff where a cut oc60 line gets a lot of attention.
The government are inside my head... here's proof!
If Echelon is as good as many seem to think it is, why raise all the fuss? If mere key words can't trigger it, and its actually able to tell pick "bad" intent out amongst all the other noise, what is the problem? eg: assasinate president in the name of allah, blow DC up, blow airplane up, etc etc etc.
Unless this thing returns a significant number of false positives (which it might); I, for one, am not that alarmed by this. If only terrorists and criminals are affected, I couldn't give a damn.
The issue is when they use this technology to audit anything they don't like -- abusing the power. I suppose this is a legitimate concern, but many advocates of "Jam Echelon" bring nothing but FUD to the table. They ought to give a coherant and rational argument as to how it could affect decent citizens adversely.
I was this over on HNN a while back, related to Echelon and a patent the NSA has for "document retrieval" which would, according to the information on their site, ignore the type of stuff people were sending for "Jam Echelon Day".
Basically, it can figure out what a document is about in spite of things such as keywords being planted in the document (ala the Jam Echelon plan), and is not dependant on the language of the document. It works by relating the document to a database of other document fragments, they say.
The NSA's website has some information about it, and this is the patent itself.
If this stuff exists and works, then Jam Echelon was a waste of time on the technical side - but I think the main point was to raise awareness, and that it has done.
I also can't see the NSA throwing compute resources at every single Email message with image attachments (unless they just have a statistical analyzer that tells them if a given image might have been dicked with to embed encrypted text).
Overall, I'd say that Echelon is now pretty much stuck with three classes of analysis:
Given the above and the fact that almost no one encrypts phone converstations, I'll bet Echelon gets quite a bit, but it would be easy to move data through in the noise in such a way that it would be almost impossible to detect, much less break.
How would I do it? Probably by setting up several VPNs which constanntly move random data. I would use several encryption technologies, and occasionally move small chunks of the real data over arbitrary subsets of the pipes. The real data would, of course, be encrypted once re-assembled using yet another scheme. Just to muddy the waters, I would also move chunks of the newspaper this way at least once a day.
Of course, I would only do this if I had something to hide, but these days, every business has something to hide, because you never know if your competition is bribing some lacky at the NSA to get your Email. Sure, that would be hard. Just look at the excellent security that the DOE was maintaining....
These days businesses can't affort to not be paranoid. And, yes, I know there are several simple flaws with the above, but if I told you exactly what I'd do, someone would write an engine to detect it, and that would defeat the point.
If I look at my email headers I don't see 'echelon.nsa.gov' anywhere in there.
Precisely how, physically, is this thing supposed to intercept the messages?
Confused.
One huge problem is the abuse of the system. Someone could simply set up the knowledge base to go fishing for some secret industrial data, well someone already did.
The story of the german energy company Enercon is a good example here. In short it describes how a german company finds their own invention already patented in the US, by the US competitor Kennentech, with papers bearing even Enercon logos! It sounds funny until you realize that Enercon lost 100 million DM and 300 people lost their jobs, as Enercon was not allowed to sell their products in the US.
So if you are looking for some adversely affected 'decent citizens' (though not US citizens) throw the words 'Enercon' and 'NSA' at your preferred Searchengine. I did so and got some coverage of the case here or a little down the page from heise. German readers might want to look at a script for the "plusminus" show or a "Spiegel" or "Zeit" article. While digging up the case i also stumbled over this nice collection of slides concerning the NSA.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Where I work the paranoia level is pretty high. They monitor our emails, have an x-ray machine in the mail room (to detect incoming mail bombs), and we carry badges that record the times we enter and leave the building. There's also security cameras mounted in the ceilings all over the place. We're not even doing classified government research or anything; we're in the financial industry.
I don't think the NSA could know this much about me if they wanted to. I feel a lot more ill at ease from what I know that my company is doing than from what the NSA may or may not be doing.
I'd like to see a "Jam HR" day. Perhaps people in different companies should coordinate this, so that our HR departments will be scared by seeing all kinds of email between competing companies.
Here's an idea: send mail to your friends that work at competitors to your company. Always make the subject field say "Resume" in it somewhere.
As a little subversive act, I used to carry on my security badge a quote from an article in The Village Voice on workplace surveillance:
Communications professor Carl Botan documented these effects in a 1996 study of workplace surveillance. Employees who knew they were being surveilled reported higher levels of uncertainty than their co-workers: they were more distrustful of bosses, their self-esteem suffered, and they became less likely to communicate. The result was "a distressed work force."
this is a link to an article at wired about jam echelon day.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I realize you're not going to agree, no matter what I say. Your example is different in many ways, because its physically invading your domain. Where as mine is strictly bits, which you have no direct attachment too.
I just want you to answer one question. WHAT is intrinsically wrong with the described machine? Pretend the 4th Amendment does not exist for just a minute. The 4th Amendment is a law based in fact and EXPERIENCE, not a shield from private intellectual thought.
You're sending messages via RF out into the world. The RF is intercepted and processed, unimpeded on its journey. You never hear, smell, know, or are affected by it, unless you happen to actually be planning to kill many people. It never enters your house. Only what you communicate with others is readable by this machine. Only messages in which you intend to harm a great many people are reported or acted upon to anyone. Many tragedies could be avoided with such a device. Where is the evil?
In reality, I have serious issues with building such a machine. Because such a machine simply can't be built. Nor can we necessarily trust anyone with such a responsibility. This what the Fourth Amendment speaks to, the practical considerations. But within my described scenario, I don't see the issue.
Send random messages around....
"I require free and private speech period." Your freedom and privacy is 100% intact, unless you happen to be building a bomb. I hardly see how anyone can have a moral objection to a computer processing your data (as described). As it stands now, your packets are already being processed by many machines before it reaches its destination. Not to mention the chance that someone else may be sniffing it. Or it may end up in the wrong mailbox. Or end up in root@'s mail. You name it.
I suppose I require a lower level explanation, as I don't regard freedom from computer parsing to be a fundamental natural law, or what have you.
...the real point of this, and any protest day, is to RAISE PUBLIC AWARENESS. There really isn't much that can be done by wearing a ribbon, or all one color, or not doing a certain action, or doing a certain specific action...but when thousands of people do this collective and it gets media and natural visual exposure, well...that's much better than people sitting alone in front of their computers complaining about problems and doing nothing and reaching no audience. Don't you think?
what would happen if the fed actualy caught a group of people [w/Echelon] whose intention it was to bomb a building/flight/town/etc...and *you* were to be there. Would you still say that this is wrong?
I hate the pigs probably more than anyone here with good reasons...I am just curious how many people here would be thankful they were saved or would rather be a martyr to the cause.
Do *you* have the balls to except death in the name of what you believe? I do, but I doubt many of you do.
You seem to be to busy letting everyone else know how smart and right you are.
-paul (wariac@hushmail.com)
It would be like letting cops just do random searches of anyone on the street. They just stop you for no reason, see if you have drugs or a gun or whatever, and if you don't you're on your merry way.
It's a dragnet search and that's total crap and totally violates the 4th amendment.
Downtime: about 45 seconds before he could plug in new keyboard.
Damages: A $20 keyboard and a slightly burned lap.
I also found sending wordlists over the internet a little too naive an approach, sure a system capable of word recognition will have enough speech recognition or even a match against a simple knowledge base to sort this out. They even had enough time to test these features, since some people always appended an echelon trailer.
... even if not, at least it's fun with spy vs. spy games.
Also the system probably looks out for context patterns (e.g. sender recipient relation/distance), so if you send your spouse the trailer appended to the shopping list, the message will probably not even be looked at. If you really want to bring the system to a grinding halt, i think you shouldn't try to exhaust machines (though 'encrypting' (aka gzip, uuencode) enough stuff might slow things down a while but in the end will only be an argument for dedicating more computing power to echelon) but humans. Thus one should make up messages that must be read by humans, even better engage in longer email conversations.
Maybe the best and most fun way to do so would be playing 'conspiracy games'. Maybe you know the games where you can 'poison' other players by attaching some post-it note to the bottom of their coffeecup saying 'poisoned'. I heard after a week of this you become really paranoid. Now play this thing in teams, do the coordination via emails (best by forwarding around ca. 3-4 email accounts), discuss tactics with other players etc. etc. And hey it's fun, so you don't do it on one 'Echelon day' (well know by the NSA) but in your own 'paranoia week' (or whatever). Even the context pattern will look more 'catching'.
If you get humans pondering over a lot of these messages, needing at least some seconds to figure out if that's a real bomb or just an empty cokecan you want to attach to that car and if there's enough people having fun with this then one might see some effect
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Okay, we have a government that barely manages to sqeek along in its daily functions without coming to a grinding halt. We have law enforcement agencies that spend more time busting people with a taillight out than it does looking for murderers, and we have an intelligence agency that, and get this, didnt know a country had nuclear weapons until they blew one up.
So where exactly are these geniuses coming from who built and maintain echelon and all of the other supposed government conspiracy centers? Either the government has technology a few decades beyond the rest of the world or they've got a beowful cluster the size of NY city hidden away somewhere to monitor the sheer volume of net traffic out there. Sure, they dont need to bother with actually scanning 99% of it, but they still need to filter every bit sent and decide if it's part of an email message and then store it and process it if it is. Now think about how much data is sent per second over the US's data networks. Remember when those 4 lines got cut out in ohio or wherever? Me and some friends of mine sat down the day that happened and figured out that those 4 lines transmitted the equivalent of a filing cabinet full of cd's every 3 seconds. That was 4 lines out in ohio, can you Imagine the volume of traffic there exists to monitor?
Beyond the sheer amount of crap they need to monitor, lets look at this supposed filtering software of theirs. Not only does it decrypt every form of encryption known to man on the fly (it would have to be since there's no way theyre going to store that amount of info for later processing) but it also scans for intent in the message. Nothing does this. So far as I know there's no software anywhere in the world that anybody has written that can figure out what a person meant from what they wrote. If it were even possible with current technology dont you think there'd be a program out there somewhere available for spell and grammar checking documents using something that wont try to replace people's names or come up with such ringing substitutions as "in the african american" (yes, i know that was a hoax, but you get my drift)?
And all this from the same government that spent millions trying to figure out if the president was getting his knob polished by his secretary. Dont get me wrong, I'm an american and I quite like my country, but I also realize that our government is really rather corrupt and generally inept most of the time.. i truly cannot imagine that same government not only having a network like echelon supposedly is, but also keeping it secret from everyone except the UK..
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
It isn't about one person sending one email. The idea is to have thousands/millions sending many more emails. Not necessarily putting a strain on the system, since no one knows exactly what computers and bandwidth they have...but at least stuffing thousands/millions of pieces of junk to have to sort through.
And obviously this event has brought the Echelon system into the mainstream more than it has gotten otherwise. Which is a GOOD thing. It isn't on headline news, but it's much more discussed right now than it really has been before. That's the same idea behind "Buy Nothing" day and days you wear different colors. It brings out more awareness than it would otherwise..even if it only reaches one or two new people worldwide.
It's said the only thing more annoying than people who think they'll instantly change/save the world with a few actions, are those annoyingly jaded and complacent people who sit back and complain about those people trying to do something.
We're dealing with the best in the world here. The money ensures that.
No, what Jam Echelon Day did was accomplish the only thing we outside the system could have hoped to: raise awareness. The only way that this sort of crap goes on is because people don't know about it. Jam Echelon Day got press coverage, and that's ultimately what spooks like the NSA fear.
This is the part where we see a feature on '60 Minutes' about how the Big Bad Government is reading all of your 'private emails' (no matter how oxymoronic that term is). You'll see Mike Wallace walking past a row of Origins and talking incredulously about how our rights are being violated using our own tax dollars. He's good at that. Then, a couple of the higher-brow talk shows will include Echelon in their next 'CyberScare' episodes.
Then the congressional hearings start. That's what we can hope for. Hopefully, the violations of the rights of American citizens will be so bad that they'll dissolve the NSA or at least put it under some sort of realistic oversight.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Crypt is insecure, and not noticable.
:-) (OK, take your garbage, since it isn't *really* random compress it, strip off the header, etc. But send garbage.)
No, if you want to waste cycles, send complete data. It looks just like encrypted data, but there isn't anything to find.
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
and all he found was a load of supercomputers running quake 5. Pity, there were no big explosions (other than the ones on the 2' flat screen displays)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Really? how about the POint about Roger eating his Paper and getting arrested and sent to juvinille for beating up his dad.
Echelon was never even going to intercept these mails IMO. It is more likely to be scanning mails that cross US boundaries, or partner boundaries than those within. If this is wrong, surely the Oklahoma bombing would have been detected via a phone conversation or two.. Has anyone stopped to think why the Australian government acknowledged the existance is possibly because it does not have a very high success rate? To me, this makes sense if you think that they are BOUND to be a part of it and yet it is not giving the results they would expect for them? There maybe billions and billions of communications going around this world every day, but not all of them are from/to multi-trillion [insert your preference of dollar/pound/euro etc]companies or pretargetted 'terrorist' (quotes because who defines terrorist?) organisations. After all has SETI found intelligent life yet? There's billions and billions of stars, and there is evidence that extra-terrestrial life exists but... Okay, terrorist activities are slightly different as we have the pictures of destruction but there is evidence that future terrorist activity exists... Maybe the technology is there, but the software hasn't been written yet. Perhaps crackers/hackers are being targetted so that they can write the software! ;8-) Either way, despite supposedly living in a world of free speech, this seems to prove that perhaps the politicians are just a smoke screen to who is really in charge. Colour me chilled. Mash.
"I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them" Picasso.
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but I still think it's BS. I don't exactly see all the other amendments being held up so well either.
I think the amendment is pretty clear on what is allowed, and I'm pretty sure that stuff like that isn't.
Want a better way to bug the hell out of the NSA? Get an easy-to-use email client to use a low-grade DH cryptosystem and make it a standard. This'd be good in many ways; it would discourage casual email browsing, and it would mean the NSA would have to crack every single email to search for their keywords. Even using a 40-bit crypto algorithm would make it thoroughly impractical. Further, there's no reason one can't send high grade (PGP or other) encrypted messages, and run this through the same low-grade crypto. This wrapper would keep people from knowing (unless you've already been targeted) that you're passing important data.
You are advocating Echelon. I wish you would stand up and take responsibility for what you have said.
... its sole objective was to find people who INTEND to set off a nuclear explosion ... If it does this with 100% accuracy (no false positives), then I have no problem with "invading" their privacy.
Ok, lets narrow Echelon's theoretical objectives down somewhat
So, some rebuttals to your examples of present-day Echelon-esque policy:
[1] Border searches are allowed for the simple reason that at the border one is no longer within the United States of America and Constitutional laws do not apply.
[2] U.S. mail is not opened and read. Sealed packages are scanned for currency in large amounts, controlled substances (i.e., drugs), agricultural hazards, biological hazards, and explosives/weapons.
[3] X-rays at airports do not read the communications contained in your luggage. They do search for pretty much the same things as the U.S. mail.
In these 3 cases, a person is able to know in advance what they and their belongings will be subjected to. A person can opt-out in advance. In the case of Echelon, the government will not admit whether or not it even exists. So a person cannot even know whether or not they should avoid sending messages on the Internet.
We live in a very different age today. When the Constitution was promulgated, one man (or a small group) could not kill thousands.
I'm sorry, but this is bullsh*t.
If there really is a way to safely analyze and trap this information before it does harm, we have an obligation to do so.
Your support of censorship shames me as an American. Information does not do harm.
(Please, shut down the Internet and Slashdot. The potential for harmful information is too high!)
The issue is NOT that such a machine would be impossible to make perfectly accurate. The issue is that someone else has decided what I can and cannot say via email. As a perfectly innocent person, I take issue with the fact that government appointed agents (software or meatware) are listening to my communications.
The proof that the 4th Amendment follows my logic and not yours is that it prohibits more than just seizure. It also prohibits simply searching. Just plain looking.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Posted by Nr9:
When should we beat up mankit and alex?
ok thanx really? the main timaggiotle was take my breath away do you have thomas shen's phone numer? till next 2nd semester
Posted by Nr9:
Thomas Shen's phone number is 2826-5439
Curious how internet news items continue to say things like 'The NSA isn't allowed to spy within the USA', clearly with the implication that 'that's okay then'... Do they really not realise that people outside the US will be reading stuff and that, whilst they may not think such efforts important if they left out the US (i.e. if US emails didn't cross borders) other people do?
slashdot.org is a wannabe of geeknews.com by the way, i don't work for geeknews nor am i affiliated with thme in anyway.
Posted by Nr9:
What's geeknews?