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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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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;
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.
Not totally meaningless either....
"...place to be searched..."
and
"...people or things to be siezed.."
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.
In other words, just participate in Usenet as usual. ;)
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
"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.
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.
This is higly subjective. But WHY should terrorists' privacy be protected? Don't you have a duty to the thousands that will die at his hands?
I don't want to say that the Constitution is to be taken lightly. But I think you have to look at the intent, not the letter here. They simply didn't have the technology to do what we do today. Search most certainly implied siezure at that time.
For a moment, let us ignore the Constitution, How exactly are you adversely affected by a machine processing and ignoring your transmissions? What is the harm? And what is the potential pay off? (assuming my previous criteria)
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.
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.
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
Even better, engage your friends in realistic email exchanges about (fake) subversive plans.
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.
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.
Here they're violating the sanctity of your home -- things which you might not share with ANYONE. For many people this would be a huge issue. But also, you've got HUMAN AGENTS who're highly subjective. You may walk in on them. They'll certainly not be able replace everything exactly. Who may decide they don't like other things they don't see (porn, etc).
Let us imagine that instead of going in your home, they flew over your house for chemical or thermal (FLIR) precursors, of say drug production. It observes this and nothing else. Would you have a problem with this? They've done it before.
My BlackBox scenario is setup such that it is not subjective, and its only searching for things that are an immediate threat to national security. While I suppose some may be highly sensitive about a machine reading their email, within my scenario its not a sufficient objection.
I'm not advocating that we throw the Constitution out the window. But how exactly do you propose we stop lunatics from conspiring to build bombs? With the internet, they've got a vast resource of information on bomb building, a few milliseconds away, without ever having to leave your home. No traditional investigation techniques are sufficient.
What if Echelon were perhaps smarter, more impartial, and more discrete than any judge. That it could decide if something is "bad" before it lets anyone see, or act on it. I'm asking you to identify WHAT exactly is so evil about the machine I describe (though I dont think it possible).
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.)
No one's reading your email.
:)
It's just a computer, looking for words. If it triggers an alert, it sends it to a new program for more analyis. If it still is ringing bells, an actual human takes a look to see if it's something to worry about. At that point, you've obviously sent something that people should be worried about, or it's a huge mistake. If it's a mistake, then they go "oops" and hit delete. There's no way on earth that they could amass enough storage to keep logs on every communication that everyone makes.
So far as objecting to the NSA sitting around cracking your keys... If they can, then you need new keys. Don't get angry at them if you're using keys that aren't long enough anymore. That's your problem, and only yours.
You also have to remember that the US Gov't/Military are responsible for building what we call the internet. It is a public resource, but only because they let us use it. If you don't like that, send mail the old fashion way: in envelopes. Much safer than email. And there's due process involved in intercepting your mail. If you're going to use the convience of the internet, then you have to realize that for the convience, you sacrafice some privacy
Personally, I am kind of intimidated by the idea that everything i do or say could be monitored, but honestly, I don't think anyone would wantto waste any spare cycles on me. I'm just not that interesting.
>>Even better, engage your friends in realistic email exchanges about (fake) subversive plans.
If you're in the US that might have BAD results. Remember you don't have to atually do anything to be convicted of Conspiracy to (insert scarry sounding word here). If they are listening and you're making plans (faux or otherwise) can get the feds interested in you. That is not something you want. There's nothing that can make my butt pucker the way it did when I had two armed federal agents on my front porch asking me "Is your name 'Lord Kano*' ? " .
I'd say a signature designed to randomly thrown in Echelon key words shoould get the desired effect without raising too much attention.
*-My real name replaced here
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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)
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.
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.
"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.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
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.
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