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Echelon Confirmed by Australians
Arctic Fox writes "The BBC has a story reporting that Australian intellegence confirms the existance of Echelon. " Obviously there is no "Official" confirmation, but its still pretty interesting. "They" are definitely watching.
Sir, if you believe that terrorists are mythical, then I think your Subject line applies more to yourself than your intended victim.
Sir, you are basically a moron. Let me tell you a story...
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom. King, people - and evil witch. So, she decides to put a poison in the water. Everybody in the kingdom was drinking water, except the king, who was always drinking milk. 5 days later, whole kingdom went ballistic (crazy, mad, whatever you want to call it). And they've decided to make a referrendum. To vote: who is crazy - them or king?
Of course, they've got the conclusion that the king is crazy, and executed him.
Think about this for a while...
Ask people from Yugoslavia, for example, if NATO pilots/generals are terrorists. What do you reckon, what will they think?
Now, I'd like to know why would someone think that people in Yugoslavia are all fucking dumb and stupid and don't understand that they are bad, while NATO (which was using all terrorist methods) is a good villain!?
What you call a "terrorist act", some other people call "fighting for freedom". What you call "fighting for freedom", others call "terrorist act". Did you ever think about that?
My point is: ANOBODY using ANY KIND OF VIOLENCE is a terrorist.
You know, once you, your power stations and your water pumps get bombed - I think you will change your opinion about "terrorism".
At the end of the day - have you seen some terrorist with your own eyes, huh!? I doubt it. So, how do you know that they exist? You don't. You've been told. They might have been created, in order to make you say "Yes, we need to protect from those terrorists".
I am amazed that some people say things like "Why do you think that govt is not doing what is in out best interest?" - just do *any* kind of business - and you will see shitloads of conspiracies, dirty tricks, deaths. Does anybody think that politics is ANY better!? Politics sucks, weapons suck... basically, people suck too.
We really need some aliens - otherwise we'll never understand how much we actually need each other.
Two words: Alien Technology
Aw, yeah.
I did the search for Echelon on the Sunday web site, and there's two links, which I reproduce below.
Big Brother Is Listening
Echelon system: FAQ and website links
The Sunday program (a Sunday-morning current affairs program that is seen on Australian television) did an hour-long feature article on Echelon back in May. It was this program that first brought Echelon to public awareness in Australia.
What I find particularly disturbing about Echelon is that it is being used more and more for purposes other than that for which it is intended. In particular, Echelon has being used by the Americans to help American firms win international commercial contracts. The article on the Sunday program mentioned this as well as the BBC article. On the Sunday program, it was said that for Australians, America might be a close military ally, but commercially America is Australia's strongest competitor.
To see the U.S. attitude on commerce, take a look at the recent tariff imposition by the U.S. government on Australian lamb into the U.S. market: 9% tariff with a quota, and lamb over the quota attracts a 40% tariff. This shows that as far as commerce is concerned, America is not an ally of Australia. (Echelon has nothing to do with the imposition of the lamb tariff.)
No wonder politicians on both sides of the Atlantic ocean are calling for an inquiry. Maybe our politicians here in Australia should be calling for one, too.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Anybody remember "Bait for the NSA Line Eater"?
.sig
Sure, and it still happens, right? See Results from "Jam Echelon Day" on this site, for instance. Or read cypherpunks' e-mail; some people still have such a
Isn't that why they got the NSA to get the CSE to monitor Margaret Trudeau's phone calls? To see if she was smoking dope?
I seem to recall a report by 20/20 a few years back about a radio listening post Russia maintained in Cuba. The gist of the report was that since the fall of the USSR (and perhaps before) the outpost had been used to provide commercial information to Russian bussinesses by eavesdropping on telephone/fax/data communications in the Florida area. This was possible due to the proximity and the large scale use of both cell phones, and ground stations to/from sattelite communication for telephone calls/faxes.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Certainly phone calls within Europe don't go by satellite, and not all transatlantic ones do. There's even a prefix you can dial to ensure you get a cable connection - and you can tell it works because it doesn't have the characteristic satellite delay (you can work out the height required for geostationary satellites and calculate the speed-of-light delay - it's about a quarter of a second if I remember correctly).
So, do they have separate monitoring for the cables?
So you're saying that you send messages that might have some national-security-threatening content? BINGO! Probable cause, you're now under investigation. Have a nice day.
Or maybe you're just worried that when you jokingly suggest to your friend that it's too bad they bombed the World Trade Center instead of Congress you'll end up losing your job and possibly your liberty because they won't get the joke?
Therein lie the rub. When Clinton was first elected, one of the Senators from the Carolinas suggested it might be best if he didn't come to their state. If he were anyone else he would've been arrested for threatening the President.
The real danger is the lives that'll be ruined due to a federal investigation of nonsense. Go ahead and explain to your boss that the FBI guys who came to interview you (and HIM) were only kidding. See how long you keep your job. Even if nothing ever happens they'll always suspect you.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
The reason it matters (to me) is because the government has done nasty things in the past (and denied it), despite what the original poster believes. They've dumped chemicals on the public (Clinton admitted this recently...happened in the 50s or 60s, but he admitted it), sold guns to anti-american terrorists, etc. All it takes is one lie to ruin trust. You might trust the government to know all sorts of personal information about you. I don't - I just don't feel safe. Sure, I'm law abiding, but I'm generally liberal, pro-environment, religiously open-minded, etc. Maybe over the next few years the government becomes radically religious-conservative...suddenly I'm a subversive activist!
:)
You're right about people calling the original post a troll, though. I'll echo your sentiments: Fer Christ's sake! A guy can't have a fucking opinion here?
Heh, felt like cursing.
Lead-lined aquaducts!
Fortunately, geeks aren't good at killing people. :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Petabyte: 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Now, I am substituting descriptions from different parts of his site. He actually compares a petabyte to 3 years of satelite data... but I can't visualize that very easily.
I can visualize the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is a big place. Now, you want to stuff all that through a wire (or fiber... they had that in '89) 100 times in 30 seconds!! Incredible. I think someone had their exponents a little off.
This sounds like people I know who swear that government spy satelites can read your watch.
Oh, just one more thing, in the interests of accuracy. Just because I like base 10 instead of powers of 2, the numbers in my description may be off by, oh, say... 117,253 GIGAbytes . This minor inconvenience (errata, call it what you will) is brought to you by Microsoft, Intel, and the Windows calculator.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Yes, most likely the Aus government monitored Indonesian transmissions, and got very useful information out of it (this is back in 1975 you are talking about, by the way!) - although it didn't seem to help the journalists. So what? How is that equivalent to Echelon? Our largest neighbour was invading a small country on our doorstep. Of course it would be given the utmost priority in the Australian intelligence community. That doesn't mean Australia can scrutinise all such transmissions day in, day out, even from Indonesia alone.
All governments able to afford security organisations have been eavesdropping since before WWII. Do you think Nazi Germany was part of Echelon? Or the Soviets? Why does everyone seem to be surprised that this happens at all, then go overboard and become convinved that it is always happening?
Get a grip, people. Of course "they" are watching; they have been for decades. That doesn't mean they are watching everything.
Take another look at the article, and note what is actually said and what is merely implied. The US, UK and Australian governments all monitor radio communications. No surprise there. They might, under certain circumstances, pass on this intelligence to each other. If one of them got wind of a plot to assassinate another's head of state, it would be positively unfriendly not to pass this on.
Somehow Duncan Campbell makes this into an admission of a vast conspiracy. Of course he might be right, but then again he might not.
What is really needed here is the application of the scientific principle: someone else has to go out and try to replicate Campbell's findings. I'll take more notice of this when I see someone else's name on the reports.
Incidentally, Campbell has a rather chequered history here. Last year he "revealed" that the UK ISPs and police were in "secret" talks about handing over subscribers email for fishing expeditions. The truth was considerably more prosaic: the ISPs and police were talking publicly (OK, so you had to pay £60/day to attend) about how to streamline and regularise the existing legal process under which the police can request subscriber information (e.g. snail-mail address) from the ISPs. Campbell forgot to mention that under UK law the ISPs are prohibited from passing over confidential data unless they have good reason to believe that a crime has been committed, and that email contents are dealt with under separate laws. If the ISPs hand over data to the police without good cause then they could be sued and/or prosecuted. This gives them a motive to inspect every request carefully.
So now Campbell has moved on to bigger conspiracies. But having seen his attitude towards the truth on that occasion, I am very skeptical about this one.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Do you want another example? Some years back some asian country wanted to buy some trains. Two competitors (or perhaps the only ones) were a German company (I think it might have been Siemens) and a French company, the former offering the ICE, the latter the TGV. The negotiation offers from the Germans were faxed to the local persons in Asia. The French government caught that fax and informed the French company the information about the ICE offer. Therefor they were able to undercut the Germans at any time with their offers. Unnecessary to say that the contract went to the French.
Very soon, people are going to get fed up of looking. Why bother? It's just another hoax, after all.
Then, you build your -real- silo within the bounds of a farm, or inside some woods. With everyone conditioned NOT to look in those places, you can be fairly confident nobody'll even question whether this could be the genuine article.
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)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
-"Liberty vs Security": I would not trade liberty for security. Echelon is not limiting my liberty in any way.
"Echelon isn't helping": Then why are they paying for it?
Silly fool. There is no Echelon. No such thing. If there was then we would have let you know about it long ago. Now run along and go play.
Please plan to kill just yourself instead of other people first, then yourself the way nutjobs always do.
Better yet --turn yourself in: go to any shrink with a MD enabling them to write RX, and tell him: "I'm as crazy as hell and I don't think I can take it anymore!" It's the braver course of action. Don't fret about whether to go to this one or that one --pick the first name in the book.
Processing power has to be expended on every message, or else Echelon will fail. Let's take your example, that if a person sends out junk headers and such in their e-mail with "tripwords" in it, Echelon will filter them out. OK. Great. We now know that this person is trying to make us waste survelliance time so we'll ignore him. Where is the flaw in this plan? Oh yeah. A terrorist could send out junk mail with junk tripwords in it for a few years, then be relatively secure from the NSA's snooping. That is the problem with this type of system. You have to watch everything, all the time or else you'll miss the most important event, the one you're looking for.
-- Terry
I have been on the site where this work is done, and all I can say is - Panic Not. There is an awful lot of traffic to be monitored, so the focus of the equipment is very narrow. Even with all of the gear that they have got, they still only get to monitor a very small portion of the stuff that is really interesting.
If you want to go look at the gear - it is just out of Alice Springs, on the road to Ayers Rock. The most intersting thing about the whole site is the Yanks - the Australian facilities are fairly unassuming looking affairs, but this base (Pine Gap) has lots of Yanks in camo fatigues and sunglasses toting guns, and driving around in left hand drive cars on the wrong side of the road.
The other reason not to panic (about echelon) is that around the same area (within a days drive), there are some much much more interesting things.
For example, in a certain area, you can drive off the road for some distance, right in the middle of fscking no-where and you will find a series of trapdoors in the bare dirt. Open them up , and climb down the ladder into a small cylindrical bunker about 2 meters across and 4 meters deep. The bunker is full of thick wires coming out of the ground and going to ... who knows where ? Right in the middle of this bunker is a little 68000 based computer chugging away quietly doing data aquisition. It is completely sureal being in this bunker, with nothing but hundreds of miles of dead silent red soil bush around you.
Also, about another days drive in the same area, is an even more amazing site ... absolutely nothing for miles, and then this thing hidden behind a hill with an array of massive diesel engines chugging away. Nearby is a big metal grid on the ground near what appears to be antennas - walk over this at the wrong time of day and watch the hairs stand up on your head (like a Van Der Graph generator). Extremely cool .. but I cannot tell you what it is for :)
Doesn't anyone wonder how the government manages to catch every major terrorist.
Oh, that's easy. If it's a public thing, they just pick some poor sap and make him the scapegoat. The Atlantic City Olympic bombing is a pretty good example. They got some inncent guy, make it public and looked good in front of the world.
It seems everything that gets lots of attention is settled ASAP, where as many issues that do not get that much attention end up unsolved.
On the flip side, if something they cannot solve is real public, they come up with some bullshit excuse for it. Like the TWA 100 flight that went down accidently. Even though many people claimed to see a object streaking toward the plane and the air traffic controllers saw a small blip converge on the plane before it went down.
Come on, do you really believe that the government would have a problem lying to us to make it look good and look like it solve any mystery?
Finkployd
Funny, and I agree. Someone moderate this AC comment up.
I completely disagree. Ok, I admit the Nazi goverment commited some of the most henious crimes in the history of man, but Hitler didn't just start killing Jews at his first Putsch. He started with his infamous brown-shirted thugs intimidating and SPYING on people he considered dangerous. You don't have to kill Jews to be a fascist goverment.
Abortion has little to do with Echelon.
But by its definition fetuses are the subject of the action, not babies. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that a women's right to an abortion is protected by the Constituion. It is a hard choice to make, but a women's right to choose what happens to her own body is an absolute necessity for equality of the sexes.
Though it may seem a little sad, recent studies have linked the present decrease in crime in the U.S.A to safe and legal abortion. I don't think they count the anti-abortionists who shoot health care providers and volunteers in these statistics though.
Actually the NSA is restricted from a few things:
1. They may not collect in the US.
2. They may not collect in the country they are in.
3. They may not collect on US citizens.
The obvious caveat to all the conspiracy nuts is that they are only barred these actions in their public rules.
t
Well, maybe not overtly, but check this out: :)
http://www.bullatoms ci.org/issues/1994/nd94/nd94bulletins.html
http://dilbert.daily.umn. edu/daily/1995/10/03/news/spray/
Those friendly guys in our government lied to us. This is not the only case, I'm sure (and I got tired of trying to separate the wacko (my opinion) sites from the real ones in tracking down coverup info). If our government is willing to do things like this to us and lie about it, why should we believe anything they say about invading our privacy to catch terrorists, etc. Hell, for all I know they only set up this Echelon crap to get around the rules about spying on the public and they are gathering as much dirt on us as they can, just to have in case they want to mess with us. If it exists.
-beme
-beme
1971
Return to your homes.
A lot of posters here could save time editing their messages in emacs and calling M-x spook a few times.
For example: jihad AK-47 explosion Cocaine Waco, Texas North Korea Khaddafi Kennedy
Saddam Hussein security Legion of Doom quiche Delta Force Clinton
Serbian. I'm not too sure about "quiche", but everything else seems consistent.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
The law in question is Executive order 12333 or 12456(can't remember which) which states in essence that the CIA, NSA, NRO, military intelligence cannot perform intelligence gathering operations of any kind against US entities, unless evidence can be shown that there is a legitimate foreign intelligence interest, such as tips that XYZ country club is really a front for a foreign terrorist group or intelligence or special forces agency. If there is simply a drug operation going on at XYZ country club, according to the order the FBI, state, and local law enforcement has jurisdiction. If its really an insertion point for North Korean SOF troops, the CIA, DIA, NSA and intel components of the armed services take over. If Echelon is in fact all its supposed to be, and in fact scans all communications, it would be required to either filter out all US communications or pass them along to the FBI. If Echelon fails to do either of these things, it is illegal and I hope Bob Barr finds those responsible and has them executed for treason. The power of Echelon is great, and with great power comes great responsibility. I don't believe in an all or nothing view regarding security vs freedom, too much security and we have no freedom, too little and we have no freedom(because then ANYONE with bigger guns or more money can take it from us)
...the most recent abuses of the Clinton regime: over a thousand FBI files on political opponents delivered to the white house, individuals jailed for asking non-scripted questions at "town hall" PR events, the use of the FBI and IRS to persecute political enemies - oh, and the recent allegations of sening in US military forces to "help force a resolution" at Waco because the whole thing was getting politically embarassing.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
North America
...communists think capitalist society is screwed up?
Are you talking about Canada and Mexico, or just the U.S.?
another [mother] "owns" her baby It is about fetuses, not children. It is not about ownership of the fetus, either.
I am pro-choice because it is not up to the government to decide what a woman can and cannot do with her own body.
Um, which communists are you talking about? And what does this have to do with what you're talking about?
p.s. -- Late term abortions were extremely rare even when they were done. The technique you describe is a mis-representation of what occurs in these cases. Sensationalism may get you readers, but it won't get you thinkers.
they have their own chip fab, a (good) percentage of the best minds on the planet and whatever cash they want from the us gov.
think what the slashdot community could do with those kinds of resources...
now let your imagination run away thinking about what they have under development in their skunk-works.
gunderwo@hotmail.com
If people overusing the term "Nazi" in a negative sense reduces the true horror of 6 million murders for you, I'd say you've got some issues of your own you should be worried about... If you wanna say it's too harsh a term to be applied to Echelon, I'll agree with you there. But in my opinion, the attitude that misuse of the term "Nazi" trivializes what they did is part of the mentality that allows things like Echelon to exist in the first place. Worry about people remembering that killing 6 million people is a horrible thing. As far as people remembering in 500 years that the Nazis actually did so, well, you know what they say.. any press is good press
Needless to say, this is bad news. At least assuming from the story if this is being used to protect American business interests, this is the worst sort of nationalism. Geez.. they should rename it from NSA to NZI. Too bad we can't, uh, vote the NSA out of office. Who the fuck comes up with things like that? Democracy, my ass.
SA
Reasons are:
1. The government finds major criminals fast because they don't want the american public breathing down their neck. Thus, the more of a public issue it is, the more they devote to solving it.
2. They construct a plausible theory, declare it true because it fits the available evidence, ignore the 50 other possibilities that fit the available evidence as well, stop looking for more evidence, and declare the case solved.
I'd be willing to bet a whole years pay that the vast majority of quickly solved major crimes and terrorist actions are the result of either one or both of these issues at work, or stupidity on the part of the criminal/terrorist, rather than any Echelon system.
That's why it's secret. Get PGP, get a PGP phone or build your own personal encryption device. The lack of oversight really does bother me, but if you get in the puppet master's way, you'll just end up dead from a "self-inflicted" gun-shot wound.
--------------
The NSA works for the NSA, they don't give 2 shits about you. Unless you're in their way.
Total Control? As opposed to the limited control the US Government has now? By definition, the government is in total control. If they weren't, they wouldn't be governing.
As for fear of the Y2K bug being a government plot, there would have to have been a LOT of people in on this plot, and none of them have broken yet! Amazing! Remember, never attribute to malice what can be explained with stupidity. Y2K is the result of incredible managerial short-sightedness, nothing more.
Is Eschelon a Bad Thing? Yeah, because governments are made of people, and it's inevitable that someone is going to abuse the system. Right now, that's far more likely (probability approaching 1, if the contract story mentioned by the BBC report is true) than the US government going Fascist. It's the same problem with Key Escrow for encryption: who guards the guardians. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago.
Now put back on your aluminum hat so that Eschelon can't read your brain waves.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Anybody remember "Bait for the NSA Line Eater"? These were keywords we would attach to USENet messages back in the 80's, the purpose of which was to force one of the NSA's analysts to look at the message -- it was believed that they monitored the Usenet pretty closely. So, people would include things like "Assasinate president weapons nuclear kremlin american communist party" in their message. (For the record, the previous is not a threat to assassinate the President, but an example of content that would conceivably trip such a system if it exists).
:-) ) that were meant to trigger the monitors.
Another thing people would do is "rot-13" their messages. Rot-13 just means that you rotate each letter 13 characters. I think this would still be useful for keeping AOL Newbies out your hair.
Now, I don't think that the NSA was actually monitoring any of this, but if Echelon is in fact the case you could probably have some fun/get in a whole lot of trouble by calling your buddy in Bulgaria and saying a bunch of nonsense words (or "Amphigory"
Oh yeah -- back in the 70's a machine called "kremvax" (kremlin vax) came up on the USENet briefly. I understand that the Government actually took notice before it was exposed as a hoax.
I miss the bad old days. *sigh*
-- Slashdot sucks.
The BBC article, as well as the Wired piece mention Austrailia, the US, and Britain, but no others. Are other countries involved? How wide spread? I've heard everything from "some radio communications" to "all email, phone, fax, and other communication". I've also heard from paranoid friends that they're being listened to right now. I'm also pretty sure there's no "good" sources out there with "true" information, because no one outside the NSA/other national equivilants knows. Where should the interested individuals go for info?
;)
In the meantime, wave KILL BOMB WACO GUN ECHELON hello to the NSA
The Good Reverend
First of all, I don't even know what a petabyte is.
:)
Second of all, I don't feel like looking it up.
Assuming this is the next larger value than a terabyte, where, exactly, were they storing this information in 1989?
I think my father had a computer with an 80 megabyte HD that year. Assuming there was publicly available technology to store a gigabyte then, in a format they could get all the data off of in 30 seconds, is a stretch. Six orders of magnitude ABOVE that...?
I don't think it unlikely that they could store this much info, but to be able to get access to it in 30 seconds, no. I won't bother dealing with the bandwidth issues here. Its more probable that they invented teleport technology and just beamed the data across the US.
>>>>>>>>> Kvort
-Don't mind me, I'm personality-deficient and mentally-impaired.
This being aired can mean good things--like a reason to fight for privacy instead of letting it slowly eek away. As Echelon gets uncovered more and more, it has the potential, as soon as the big media outlets get ahold of it, to really freak out mainsteam types who don't realize the absolute insecurity of email/cell phones/ and evidentally even some land-line voice communication.
They're doing it. No surprise. Y'all saw the story about warantless peeping-tom via thermal imaging, right? The faster these come, the more likely people will wake up and fight for privacy. Or at least download GPG.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
hmmm ... the Masada, and the destruction of the Temple, fair enough. But the Masicure at York? I doubt you'd find one Jew in twenty who knows what the hell you're talking about.
I certainly don't.
jsm
The actual disinformation scenario I've seen described involved keeping it secret as long as you can, but if you find out it's likely to leak out, leak an exagerated version to something like the Weekly World News. Then no reputable news source will touch it.
You don't call attention to it until it's going to be revealed anyway. Then you make sure that unbelievable exagerations are revealed too, and anyone talking about the true version, will be assumed to be talking about the ridiculous version and thus ignored as a paranoid lunatic.
As for R.A.W., yeah he's a crackpot, but it's an odd sort of crackpot who spends half of his books telling you "This is what happened to me, but don't believe me, I might be lying or crazy, try it yourself."
thejeff
While it is technically possible to listen in on atmospheric radio frequency data (SETI anyone?), (1) there is an absolute TON of it out there (2) Not all telecomm/computer transmission is atmospheric (in fact, a very small proportion of it is)
Now while I can not guarantee that the NSA, nor anyone else, eavesdrops on our switches, I can say that it is very unlikely that they tap into everything and filter/record it. We own our fiber, we own our switches, and many transmissions we carry end-to-end (i.e. no switching outside our network).
Think about it, folks. Nortel just announced a switch that can handle (IIRC) 9 terabits per second (up from today's state-of-the-art approx. 1 terabit/sec). Does anyone seriously believe that NSA can intelligently process/filter info from a few hundred switches, let alone the thousands that are in place today?
OTOH, what better way to have some fun with the unthinking paranoids than to NOT comment on these ravings! Makes everyone believe the NSA's up to something, and common sense tells that it's not what you know, it's what other folks THINK you know...
For a group that prides itself on critical thinking, there are an awful lot of paranoid drones out there...I echo the earlier post: Get a grip!
"If ignorance were corn flakes, you'd be Kellogg's of Battle Creek" --paraphrased from Cecil Adams
Now, I'm no intelligence analyst; let me state that up front. But if I was trying to get a coherent picture of various people's activities (whether terrorist, commercial or political) I'd have a system that analyzed traffic first and foremost; not what was sent, but who sent things to whom how often. It would look for particular words/names and count them, to see what's important in their communications (and thus to the person being monitored). It would flag the appearance of new names/objects, and watch to see when these things were mentioned in communications to different people (likely indicating when something was becoming more important). Et cetera. This is way more sophisticated than you need to take phrases crafted to pop up, and ignore them.
Someone using a phrase like "Eschelon is an invasion of privacy" is not news, and probably does nothing more than flag the user's ID in a file somewhere which tracks potential enemies of the NSA. It would probably be far more effective to use something like Racter to write a little screed in somewhat different words every day; it would require a much more sophisticated filter to dump it automagically than a canned line repeated on every post. Even so, people trying to grab attention usually aren't the ones who need to be watched, and I bet the NSA's techniques are way beyond what's necessary to deal with this stuff effectively.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Of course. Thats why the _real_ terrorists use those fields to send the messages, since they're filtered out.
Or maybe filtering the crap would make the whole exercise pointless?
You people all make me sick to my stomach. The NSA is there for the sole reason that you can sit on your cushy little butts and send this crap across the internet. Why did we win WWII?? Any real history buffs here? Because of the NSA and Britian's counterpart decoded Germany's encrypted messages. Germany would have won hands down if it wasn't for misinformation from the NSA. Look it up before you reply with something stupid. "I don't want the NSA reading my emails...blah,blah, blah.." Does anybody remember Oklahoma City? Unfortunately I do, because I lived there at the time. 300 people dead including innocent children. Dead. That doesn't mean anything to everyone who is invincible behind their little computer monitors typing anti-government hate mail. But, if the NSA had decided to tap into Mr. Mc Veigh's transmissions and heard the word "BOMB," tagged him and saved hundreds of innocent lives, then God give them the power to do it. And screw all of you for hating what they do. Why do we have technology such as Echelon. Because not only do we have ignorant bastards like some of the people posting on Slashdot and elsewhere, but the world is NOT a nice place and without the NSA and CIA then this country would be run or attacked by the likes of people such as the IRA (Irish Republican Army) or attacked by any little country with a nuclear weapon in a briefcase. They are there to protect you. If you don't like this country then LEAVE.
dont you just love these so called elite hackers with their sound advice..... I mean even crack is rigged to look for number letter substitutions.
Has anyone else noticed that the year is 1999 and there has *not* been a successful terrorist attack against the USA of UK with a weapon of mass destruction, such as a biological agent? I find it utterly astounding now, unlike say 1995 when it would have been rather unlikely, that this has not happened. Of all the people with a grudge against the USA on the entire planet not one of them is capable of pulling off such an attack? Call me an optimist but maybe Echelon is actually working! It would be nice if the spin merchants within the security agencies responsible come out with some good news occasionally about how such monitoring might have it's good points because sure I'm they'll get canned for all the bad points.
Of course, things like planning terrorist attacks could easily be done with no grammatical structure. And it would be even easier if you could use all trigger words as much as possible.
Then again, things like Echelon are basically an exercise in futility. You simply cant scan the content of that amount of data and catch anything you didnt already know, if youre dealing with people who know they're being watched. The amount of CPU power that would be needed to catch even the simplest evasions doesnt even come close to existing. Just look at the processing power needed to do even minor filtering on a corporate basis to attempt to block out some stuff from employees. And that _is_ pure text search. Add to that lexical analysis and associations and you realize it doesnt even begin to make sense.
Unless, of course, the NSA directors nephew owns the company selling the hardware, in which case I can see at least how someone is getting some benefit. And if thats the deal it doesnt really matter if it works or not.
I'll promise to go back to school, if you promise to someday attend school.
By the way, which trailer park do you live in?
because you work for the NSA! aha! Your secret is out! I KNOW! ::waves finger at NSA secret agent!::
It may very well not be up to the government what a woman (or man) does with his/her body. That's why suicide is illegal
"The Government" simply speaking, has nothing to do with it, they are simply to enforce the view of the general public in a democratic society. It seems that the general public, at this time (and just barely) sympathises on the side of "pro-choice" which is a term to indicate exactly what I said -- that the mother "owns" the baby inside her which is labelled a "fetus" because it is still attached to her womb.
If you believe that there is a difference in value between a human life inside a woman as yet unborn, and a baby one week old smothered by their teen mother, you need to rethink your system of beliefs. If you realize that their is no difference, you're stuck either saying that abortions are wrong or teens murdering infants that no-one else knew about is wrong. "She should have had an abortion instead of killing the child" is actually often stated in these cases.
Think about it.
PS, asking which communists I'm talking about it pretty numb -- communists are anti capitalism. And in the mid 1900's, the low moral values of North America in general were used as propaganda against capitalism.
PS #2, the technique I described is still in use in many circles today even though we tend toward others which are equally violent but considered less harmful
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
You people all make me sick to my stomach. The NSA is there for the sole reason that you can sit on your cushy little butts and send this crap across the internet. Why did we win WWII?? Any real history buffs here? Because of the NSA and Britian's counterpart decoded Germany's encrypted messages. Germany would have won hands down if it wasn't for misinformation from the NSA. Look it up before you reply with something stupid. "I don't want the NSA reading my emails...blah,blah, blah.." Does anybody remember Oklahoma City? Unfortunately I do, because I lived there at the time. 300 people dead including innocent children. Dead. That doesn't mean anything to everyone who is invincible behind their little computer monitors typing anti-government hate mail. But, if the NSA had decided to tap into Mr. Mc Veigh's transmissions and heard the word "BOMB," tagged him and saved hundreds of innocent lives, then God give them the power to do it. And screw all of you for hating what they do. Why do we have technology such as Echelon. Because not only do we have ignorant bastards like some of the people posting on Slashdot and elsewhere, but the world is NOT a nice place and without the NSA and CIA then this country would be run or attacked by the likes of people such as the IRA (Irish Republican Army) or attacked by any little country with a nuclear weapon in a briefcase. They are there to protect you. If you don't like this country then LEAVE. Stupid People Shouldn't Breed
How many terrorist acts haven't occured because of Echelon? Those we never hear about coz the gubment doesn't publicize (often) terrorists that are caught before they commit a crime...guilty until proven innocent? If ever actually given a trial...
Ok. City and Columbine were internal acts (or so everyone believes). Echelon monitors international traffic. No reason any within the US should worry about this, eh? Only if you're calling/emailing/etc overseas. I seriously doubt most of my general email, posts, and Quake traffic flips overseas before arriving at it's US destination.
The one they SHOULD have caught was the World Trade Center bombing- that was international terrorism (or so everyone believes).
Perhaps those jerks relied on carrier pigeons.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
It is only natural that in an environment where information is becoming more and more open that people would be concerned about privacy. However, I am afraid to say that another person posting is quite correct in saying that the battle is already lost. If you use credit cards, ATMs and internet connected computers as well as half a dozen other convience technologies you have effectively given away your privacy for the ease of living in a quick fix society. If you don't like that then please give up the technology and leave the building immediately.
Also, the president of the USofA can't get a blowjob in the oval office without it making its way all over the front pages of every paper in the universe and yet people believe the same government can turn around and keep its stuff together long enough to pull off all this conspiracy crap? That is bull. Does the US and other intelligence agencies come together to monitor transmissions especially from foreign powers they don't like or organizations that scare them? Sure. Are they some all powerful force running the world behind the scenes? Nah. People are giving governments and their agencies far too much credit.
ACK
Most terrorist who are serious about such nefarious activities are going to be quieter about such operations. Speaking in code. The stuff we see in movies. The NSA keywords would only stand out long enough from the noise for the spooks to install a noise filter. Just like we can filter out the AC first post freaks.
But what if the intent of the system was to watch for signs of that kind of activity? Transactions for the supplies and infrastructure for ugly activities. On demand tapping of a particular person's conversations. Searching email for people with dangerous questions or dangerous knowledge. Searching for people that warrant further watching.
Then other options can be brought to use. Tempest to check out whats really behind those PGP messages. A quick background check to determine idealogical motivations. Action would then be taken as necessary.
Imagine your personal profile. Maybe a risk scoring system with a few different variables based on what you've written, emailed and said. Maybe a few higher points on the 'personal independance' score cause you post the NSA keywords. A few less on the 'knowledge' score cause you barely passed Physics and Calculus in college. Hmm, a wife and kids? Knock the 'motivation' score down a little. So your Jam Echelon keywords never make it past the first stage, they aren't even interested in you. But now take your terrorists. Hmm, their motivations may be known by their religion, their public postings or published papers. They or someone they know has the necessary knowledge to cause major disruption. Echelon tracks everything they do and say.
Is Echelon tracking US Citizens? They didn't know Ted K. was hopping on the bus and mailing bombs. Of course, he was pretty low key, low tech. They didn't know those guys bought a bunch of fertilizer and diesel and packed it in a truck and parked it outside a Federal Building.
They didn't know about those guys that blew up the parking garage under the World Trade Center.
Of course, one could get very conspiritorial and say they did know about these things. There were other motivations that made the NSA allow them to happen...
Bleh!
I feel bad for those who fall prey to the wolf... I would rather be the paranoid I am and not be fooled by the lies, than have to come to terms with reality when it rears its ugly head.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and think you're only drunk.
Nobody said you have to monitor EVERYTHING. You don't need to build another Echelon, only a few select pieces. You might even be able to pick out which pieces to monitor because the transmittion will have to include where it came from.
Chill out, it's an idea - I'm not going to steal a billion dollars for you to build it. Who would have thought SETI@home could have processed all the data they had so quickly?
Actually, it was April Fool's Day 1984.
Part of the joke was the +84 04 01 phone number.
For more info, consult your friendly search engine.
Even (or perhaps especially?) in a democracy, I think such sentiment is a little simplistic. I don't trust the government. I don't fear it, but don't trust it, either.
The beauty of democratic government is that trust is only a minor part of the equation. Rather, checks, balances and oversights keep the government in line, and more important, keep it in touch with the wants and needs of the people.
Much of the U.S. government is under significant representative oversight. This is simply not true when it comes to the intelligence agencies, including the NSA.
The troubling part about ECHELON, specifically, is that it allegedly allows the U.S. to spy on its own citizens, thereby circumventing legal safeguards. Those safeguards exist because information is power, and too much power in one place has, historically, been bad for things.
If you're trying to argue against the rabid anti-government conspiracy theorists out there, I agree with you. The other extreme, however, is untenable. A middle ground must be struck, and ECHELON, if it lives up to its billing, goes quite a bit over the line.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
None of them have broken?
None have them have lived to tell about it. . .
http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/397.html
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What an interesting situation.
I post a bunch of "FUCK YOU" comments, and then your ignorant ass comes up and demonstrates even more illiterate garble.
It's "Echelon," you blind fuck.
Can't you read the topic?
I don't mind your insults to me, but I sure as fuck mind dumbasses who can't fucking read worth a shit.
Go back to school.
Moron.
-cow
Fact 1 -- Deja News is in the Echelon building:
Deja News, Inc.
9430 Research Boulevard
Echelon II, Suite. 350
Austin, TX 78759
Fact 2 -- Cycorp makes what are arguably the best tools for scanning the web for concepts.
Fact 3 -- Cycorp was a spinoff of MCC.
Fact 4 -- Deja News, Inc., Cycorp and MCC are within walking distance of each other.
Fact 5 -- Bobby Ray Inman was the first director of the MCC.
Fact 6 -- Bobby Ray Inman is a spook's spook.
I may be a bit biased here since I was invited to go to work at the MCC when it was in its early formative stages (before Austin had been selected). My office was, at that time, at Arden Hills operations at Control Data Corporation, just two stories above about an acre of supercomputers that had signs hung on them that read "Fort Meade".
As Seymour used to say to the "insurance" agents located at the "Thorp Insurance offices" out in the middle of the corn fields near his farm where his tribe was building the Cray-1:
"Just don't let my people know you're here."
Seastead this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First, in principle I agree, they probably aren't spying on me. I don't do any international calls and don't have many spirited political discussion via email. On your other points I think you're being a little naive. For isntance:
> For starters, it is illegal for the NSA and the > NIC (National Intelligence Community) to spy on > American Persons
It's been illegal for our gov. to do many things they've done. Since WWII they've taken the approach that the end justifies the means. This would include things like CIA drug trafficking, arms-for-hostages deals to Iran, etc. If you were them and believed a person to be dangerous, you mean to tell me you wouldn't ask your Brit spook-buddy to send you their data? See, you didn't collect it, so it's OK now.
>Out of respect for the countries of NATO, we probably don't spy on them either
How about Israel? We spy on each other like crazy. Can you say "Jason Pollard"?
And why wouldn't geeks with guns count? Do you think they *know* you're just a mild-mannered geek with a ton of ammo?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Doesn't anyone wonder how the government manages to catch every major terrorist. One wonders how many of those directly responsible for the Africa bombings were caught. As well as many others, it seems like the only person who it took us a long time to catch was the Unabomber, who, surprise surprise, didn't use any electronic communications at all. We must also remember that for every time the FBI or CIA fails, there must be many many successes
Hidding the existance of a message is called steganography. Its more common to high the message in a single image or MP3 as they have more bits to obscure the payload.
;-)
Absolutely. And, they have more bits to analyze. I'll bet I could write a program that would identify images very quickly that have been so modified. How? Just a simple statistical analysis against a baseline sample of such images. Gee, the low bits of this image are very unlikely for a JPEG. I'll just take a closer look....
Yeah, that kind of analysis is probably part of the NSA's automatic filtering already, and you can bet that they've got a full USENET feed watching the binary newsgroups for just this sort of thing. Funny that we would pay so much money in taxes for our government to collect and analyze porn
It is widely known that the french counterpart of the NSA/CIA has routinely given such help to french compaines competing for business for years and years and years. This may have been a little payback/warning about that practice.
For a non-french company to compete on, say, a construction project in France, you have to resort to extreme measures to protect bid information. You will be subjected to signal intercepts and even break-ins.
They're telling the truth, in a way: "golf ball" is another word for "radome"
hmm.. I wonder if I can sue echelon operators under dutch law for invasion of privacy and/or breaking of :)
"lettersecret" - no idea how to translate "briefgeheim", so this is a litteral translation. If someone knows the correct term.. please say so
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The fallacy of your argument is that you believe that the US Govt. serves the interest of the people of the US. It does, but only a minority, of rich, powerful, and influential people (hmmm, influential, that means they have influence, right?). As long as YOUR interests mesh with theirs (I know mine do in some degrees, being a pretty average (statistically speaking) suburban middle-class white family guy), that's okay. But if you're out of that elite group - say your skin color is about a shade darker than beige, or your income is a bit less than $20k/yr, or you're beliefs are a bit Marxist, or perhaps you're a tad to the right of Billy Graham, religion-wise (not economics-wise - excellent confusion of issues there), or if you are not a US Citizen, your interests perhaps are NOT being looked out for by the US Govt. Even if you're a voter (not the case of non-US Citizen).
Now, that argument of emotion aside, the logical argument on why Echelon is bad, bad, bad, is when you learn the basics of how the US Govt. is set up, with it's system of checks and balances (never mind the lobbyists and Political Action Committees), you see that it's carefully set up to prevent any small group from gaining total unilateral control of the whole shebang. The Executive branch is answerable to the Legislative branch, the Legislative branch is answerable to the Judicial branch, and the Judicial branch is answerable to the Executive branch. Unfortunately, the NSA branch is answerable to noone. Therefore, pure evil.
Oh, enough of attacking your arguments. I'll attack you now: You're ugly and your momma dresses you funny.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The NSA is keeping track of you. Think you can hide behind "Anonymous Coward"? Think again. The NSA KNOWS WHO YOU ARE. You can run but you can't hide. I for one am willing to contribute a little extra $$ to the NSA for them to come and get you while you sleep. You will wake up in a cell in Iraq?, Moscow?, Colombia? You won't be able to tell since your cell has no windows. All you know is your guards don't speak English. You will be taken to the torture room several times a day. You will confess everything you've ever done in your short wretched life. They will cut your pecker off with a dull knife. Then you will be returned to your room in your parents' house where you will try to continue an otherwise boring existence.
Can someone tell me how they have all the codes to break satellite encryption????
THor
mozkill@yahoo.com
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
B for me. but I still don't trust the Govt. Though I DO think a lot of "conspiracy theorists" dramatically overplay the power the government has. Especially the survivalist whackos, who seem to WANT the apocolypse to come as some sort of "social purging", so they can restore their sense of meritocracy to the world (guys with bunkers, jeeps and guns deserve to survive, bankers don't).
"Bah!" I say (as I polish the ramp and throat of my vintage M1911)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
One more thing...
Most of the stuff you hear about Echelon is here say. The NSA never opens their mouth, because thats their policy. People scream about privacy issues, but the truth is that the NSA is a passive organization. They just watch and gather information. I'm not saying the potential for abuse doesn't exist. What I am saying is that the NSA takes action on nothing. They have no field agents. They just provide informaton.
Now one thing about Greenpeace being spied on by the NSA, I believe that to be the oldest urban legend ever to exist about Echelon. Even if it were true, I wouldn't doubt it being because some zealous nut was planning to blow shit up. I have a lot of confdence in the NSA.
The only thing I have issues with are the rumors that they've been stealng corporate secrets from Eurpean nations. But I like to keep one thing in mind: If the French had this capabilty I have no doubt in my mind that they would not think twice about exploiting it. Hell the French steal from eachother, why the hell should they have any respect for evil America?
Just imagine if we all sent messages to each other that was just random digits. That ought to keep them busy for a while. Anonymous - I don't think so anymore
Agree with JD. Look at their web site. Some very sophisticated systems there. Maybe 10 years ahead of the market.
Though any international corporation which doesn't encrypt all WAN traffic deserves everything they get.
Deleted
Pay-per-View? No. A broadcast channel. On the big screen in Times Square. On all the Demo tv's in the stores. Execution would be an excellent unquestioned deterrent if people saw it. They'd say "I let my anger get out of control and kill my wife that will be me!" It won't stop everyone, but it will at least get some borderline evil/crazy people who would otherwise commit murder from crossing the line.
Your analogy states that Echelon hasn't been created yet, but the hype has, and when the hype dies down it will be. Heh, which I certainly didn't claim. What I did say that drawing attention to someting ISN'T good disinformation. Making up excuses why this thing isn't important, which takes attention away from it, is.
I hope they put the executions on pay-per-view.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Its all those sub-space communications channels they're using.
A Peta-byte? I don't believe that for a second. Not by today's standards, let alone 10 years ago. That woman was talking out of her ass. When you talk about bandwidth lke that you're talking about wide-range conspiracy of the masses.
The military's technology has always trickled down to the private sector very quickly, because the private sector designs 90% of it. What you're talking about is an insult to the competence of the architects of the Internet2 and the entire academic world behind it.
Good ridence
With me, the real issue is not that I do not trust my government... though that might chaneg at some point.
I just feel that we have the right to be informed (as I posted above). Obviously, a lot of money is being pumped into this program... well, that is our money. I want to know where it is going, and I want to know if it is working (which we really have no idea). I am not demanding that I should have the choice of where my money goes, but only the knowledge (if I want it). This should be our rights as citizens... no matter what they think our best interests are. Especially something like this, that could greatly effect our lives (the potential is certainly there).
Do you see this point?
possibilities: Family doesn't want the publicity, or the identity of the agent could cause a compromise of security, or lead back to the family which would then be a target of foreign agents hoping the NSA guy told them something they shouldn't have.
Criminals make dumb mistakes all the time, Thats why court-ordered wire tapping is so usefull.
Sorry I couldn't finish reading your post. I passed out by the time I reached number 5.
assuming that abortion was not much more prevalent under communist governments
You accuse me of making an assumption I have not made. I'm not even sure that the individual I'm debating with has made this assumption.
My words: "Um, which communists are you talking about? And what does this have to do with what you're talking about?" and "Please, this time can you tell me what this has to do with abortion?"
I don't see any assumption, only questions.
In the future, before criticizing, jsm2, please read a little more carefully.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think the point was that the Nationalsozialistische Partei Deutschlands (er, spelling, sorry) did not just rise to power in a day, and kill all the Jews before anyone knew what happenned. the point is that the NSA's efforts to oversee all communication paralells the efforts of the early struggling nazi party. yes, the Nazi's also had problems becoming accepted, and many germans attempted to rebel against their rule (ever hear of Die WeiBe Rose?). And perhaps we should not call anyone a communist, lest they would be assocciated with Stalin, who murdered more Soviets, and whose 5 year plan totally raped the environment of the USSR. Nor should we call anyone an Aztec, or perhaps we should not call anyone a "white man", as historically the white people (yes, i am white) have been gerally the most oppressive toward people who they see as "different". And the Romans had been declining practically ever since Sulla's reign (around the last century BC), who also coincidentally murdered a bunch of people. It was a combination of internal weaknesses (the slave to citizen ratio in Italy during this time was 3:1) and pressure from outisde. Sorry if this is too off topic, but it a reply, so technically its not too off topic. :P
I think most people who do the keyword thing are well aware, by now, that it does not trigger Echelon.
on the other hand, on that web site that was doing all the Jam Echelon Day advocacy, there was some kind of text generator, which actually generated a little block of text that made grammatical sense, and used the keywords, but was randomly generated. THAT is what I used on Jam Echelon Day, and that's what I told all my friends to use, because if Echelon is CONTENT sensitive, that's the sort of thing that would trigger it.
Folks who otherwise relied on dumb keyword lists, didn't read the whole Jam Echelon Site day, and get points off for not following directions. Go stand in the corner.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
From reading the responses to Temporal's original post, it seems that most /.ers have problems with Echelon that go beyong simple distrust of the government. I think there's also the question of accountability. Temporal, you admit that our government has done some terrible things in the past. What has enabled us to discover these things? Governmental Transparency. Our government is built around the idea that citizens should be aware of the actions taken by their government. Even in cases of National Security, documents are released under the Freedom of Information Act (after 30 years, IIRC).
I believe that any actions taken by our government need to be publicly accountable. Programs like Echelon seem implicitly incompatible with accountability and governmental transparency. When a government decides its citizens are no longer allowed information about governmental actions impacting broad swathes of the population, that government has ceased to be by, for and of the people. And that's what ours is supposed to be about, right?
I'm basicly saying that I do not believe that the NSA has the ability to spy on American Citizens the way half of the disillusioned slashdot frenzy believes. I truely, truely do believe that the NSA can pick a voice up out of a crowd, simply because I know about the computing power they have, and it wouldn't be too hard. If they were trying to identify every single transmission, thats one thing, but if they're looking for Osama Bin Laden, thats another story. One voice out a a hundred million is easier to find then 5000.
The Government can spy on anyone they want to. That is the way we want it. Half of the slashdot nerds who fear the NSA and their ability to abuse fail to realize that the NSA people themselves are Americans, and they themselves do believe in civil liberties for Americans.
And don't worry people, they couldn't give a flying rats ass about your Trench Coats mafias and other lame masses of importance. The fact is that no American has anything to fear from the NSA because they are there to protect us. We all vote. We all choose who has control over the information. The chances of something going horribly wrong that is incorrectable in 4 years is highly unlikely.
Now before 500 of you respond with "it starts with the net and ends with my bedroom", thats a lame argument merely by the fact that they're not in your bedroom and never will be. Hell even if they were to invade people's privacy to that, you can always just vote for someone who is in your best interest to stop it.
Congress still passes the budget.
I'm not going to respond to cracks on politicians either, because thats off topic and irrelevent. You can be a politician if you want.
because it helps desinformation efforts...
Better yet, a new Melissa macro virus that does this for us. I wonder how long it would take Echelon to break then?
Just a day or so ago, it was reported that a teenage old boy was put in jail for writing a Halloween story in which his classmates and teacher were killed. This, despite receiving an "A" on the paper and despite the fact that it was obviously a work of fiction, not intent.
Why? Well, it was one of those "zero-tolerance" things passed in the aftermath of Columbine. Few oppose such things because, of course, only people writing threatening material would be effected...
Well.
Anyway, this is pretty much the typical "criminals don't deserve rights" argument. The trouble with that argument is that it fails to understand that the rights aren't there to protect criminals. They are there to protect people mistaken for criminals...
The reason to oppose things like this is because it puts too much power in the hands of people who perhaps might not be able to tell the difference between a serious terrorist threat and an innocuous one. We already know that some police officials may have trouble telling the difference between a game company and system crackers (see Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown). Do you real want to trust them going through random e-mail?
"If you are talking about bombing the Whitehouse in your e-mails, frankly, I want the government to take a closer look at what you are doing."
Hmmm... I once used the phrase "Take a shotgun to the Oval Office", or words to that effect, on a public BBS. Of course, I was describing the "Duke Nuke'm" add-on "Duke it out in DC". Do we trust the people in charge here to understand the intent? I sure as hell don't! (Again, see The Hacker Crackdown.)
The cake is a pie
CHICAGO-- Well, it's a worthy question. This is quite a shot in the dark, and maybe only tangentially related, but the interplay of the US and Austrialian governments in the recent events in East Timor spring to mind: The US was basically rather directly supporting the atrocities being commited by Indonesia there, or at least supporting through inertia; Austrailia seemed to finally get fed up with this bullshit stance in "US international leadership" and took action (with the US then weakly following suit). I think just about every other country in the world must get sick of US hegemony and want to act independently. Maybe we're seeing Austrialia trying to get some moving room outside the underside of "US international leadership." Let's see more of it, if so.
Oh you are so silly. They will just spend more money on bigger computers.
Now, considering that the telecom industry has been in bed with the NSA since the days of morse code
HEHEHEHEH. If you read AfterY2K, picture the evil
NSA men climbing telegraph poles installing their abacus-based scanners on the lines.
At least until super-buff Linus and the TTB's save the day.
---CONFLICT!!---
but you do have a point in that there are limits to what they can do. ultimately, you'd need 1/2 of the world's population to monitor the other 1/2 full time. you also run into the problem of understanding what happens. the nsa and its sibling organisations are trained to respond to certain kind of threats, e.g., international commyunizm or "terrorism." they probably have some marginal competence at dealing with such things, but they are probably incapable of dealing with anything else effectively. in fact, they haven't been able to deal with the reality of these threats, and have created false "intelligence" in order to pump up their phatasmatic enemies, their budgets, and their status in the american bureaucratic hierarchy. the cia couldn't get a conceptual grip on the end of the soviet union -- it was sort of like you trying to think of life after death or what's beyond infinity.
so yes, they are listening, but it's an open question as to how much that matters.
Thanks for saying that. Unfortunatly, I don't have any moderator points to give...
Thanks!
Ryan
I don't quite know how else to explain this to you: the government really has no natural right to exist, nor, even by our constitution, does it have any rights. It has limited powers.
The sort of attitude which your original post displayed is something that saddens me. People are so easily whooped into a frenzy over nothing: terrorists, "niggers", drug dealers, teen sex, etc. Most of our laws already exist to limit our freedoms, at the same time they greatly expand private power (corporations - who also have no "inalienable rights" - by our own constitution); the whole thing serves to keep the superfluous population ("losers"; the folks who can't make it in the system, etc) and make others terrified of them.
The US government has been involved in the most horrible atrocities: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc, and has NEVER been held accountable for these things. I don't belive in realpolitik. All power is inherently immoral. I am an anarchist, but within our terribly corrupt system there are things we can do; above all we must limit power: all of it, on all levels.
You hint at the popular notion that the media is some sort of watchdog - this could not be farther from the truth. The media are nothing but a pack of plutocrats, and the information they sell you is simply whatever you want to hear. Most of the crap the US is involved in goes unreported. I can't even count the number of ridiculous hollywood movies that have been produced over the last two decades that served only to get the public more frightened, more cowed, more afraid of nothing but phantoms. Our prime time TV shows literally glorify cops, one after another. The apotheosis of this was perhaps "America's Most Wanted", where the nation is cajoled into being ... stoolpidgeons.
Echelon is a horrible thing. Power is a horrible thing. We have to act now to limit or destroy it.
support gun control: take guns from cops
It's open to the public. You can see it at the National Cryptology Museum, across from NSA in Fort Meade, MD.
bomb osama bin laden empire state building fbi cia nsa illuminati dyNOmite c-4 terrorist reagan carter clinton bush komehni mosaad jdl world trade center testing one two testing one two. Ahem, Ahem. Now that my throat is clear, I will continue. I think that most of us have known for a long time that most transmissions were monitored, but the extent and organization that the BBC story alludes to is just incredible. Everyone gets that feeling sometimes that someone is watching over their shoulder. Now you get to see who it is. Big deal.
What's going to change? Nothing. Who can regulate an international mafia? No one.
I'm not saying to bend over and smear on the vaseline just yet, but unless this story is thrown into a bigger arena for the herd to read, nothing significant is going to happen. IMHOA
__ While you sleep, I creep... gaining ground by the week.
there was an excelent book about this...
*****************************
War by Other Means
Economic Espionage in America
The hard facts behind an attack on the American economy so deadly as to constitute a time-lapse Pearl Harbor.
By John J. Fialka
******************************
it talked about how contries have been doing this for years.
some of my favorite parts about this book were the stories about:
1) russia's project called "low ears" that would listen to satelite phone calls.
2) some business man in japan was using a scrambler on his hotel phone and within half an hour a "repair man" came to fix it.
mostly the book focused on the economic impact of espionage. and some of the espionage was done by businesses. (the author writes for the wall street journal i guess)
it was a good read. And although, the author wasn't generally infavor of the whole sharing of information to other nationallities, but had many other excelent things to say.
The Black Budget (i.e. the part of the US Federal government budget for intelligence activities) is on the order of $100 billion. That's annually - every year they get that much money to spend.
The EFF built a DES (56-bit) key cracker with custom hardware for $250,000. Assuming a similar level of difficulty and hardware that scales up, a 64-bit RC5 key can be cracked in a similar period of time using hardware that costs $64 million (256 times bigger; remember - key space searches scale linearly with the amount of hardware you throw at them).
Note carefully that $64m is less than $100b by three orders of magnitude. How many such machines can they buy in a single year?
Now, consider what "Echelon" is supposed to do: monitor foreign communications. If you are interested just in the United States, how many trans-oceanic cables, cross-border cables, and satellite transponders do you have to tap? I bet it's less than 1,000...
The Black Budget is very large. It is not infinite (after all the taxpayers of the USA do have limits), but it can do quite a lot. The trick in this game is to make what you're doing, cryptographically, hard enough that they won't have the money to build the machine to brute it.
CrusadeR's oranges are unamerican. His dark fascination with transformers is definately not something a democractic society would tolerate. NSA, take heed!
There, I said it!!! Roswell really happened. I don't care if I lose my job at the NSA anymore. And if I hear one more of those squeaky noises come out of that damn space alien in 51, I'm gonna just kill it. You would think with all that brain power in that little egg shaped cranium, it could learn the language, but nooooooo their mouths are much to small to speak proper English. Yeah, they can travel 10 kly in a blink of an eye, but can't learn the local tounge! Tourists, that's what they are, egg-shaped, squeaky, don't like the food, ungrateful tourists. --- Although, I suppose I know now how the French feel about Americans...Hmmm
'cause "Jam Echelon" is EVERY DAY.
jelly, dogs, GM, grease, spit, hair, ugly chicks, underwear, franks-n-beans, potatos, paint chips, math, bones, pears, screwdriver, heffelumps, putty, chrome, thanks, hairspray, carbon, cheese
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This was categorized as "Insightful". Sorry, Slashdot, you misspelled that word. In this case, it's pronounced "Naive". Any reader of history can tell you that even the "good guys" and personal heros of mine have done and hidden truly awful events and procedures, from the Canadian government allowing a CIA funded psychiatrist in Montreal to run MKUltra brainwashing experiments on non-volunteer Canadian patients to the US government running radiation experiments on non-volunteers to Prime Minister Churchill readying the use of anthrax if the Nazis were close to victory. The NSA, like any bureaucracy, works for its own self-interest, the same way that CIA use of heroin revenues helped fund untraceable "Black Bag" operations in the late '60s and '70s. At the time, I thought the allegations were absurd, like the idea of CIA involvement in the overthrow of a democratic administration in Australia. Decades later, the most outrageous allegations turn out to be understated. Don't think the NSA represents anyone but the NSA.
The NSA hardly has a monopoly on selling secrets obtained in the course of state-funded intelligence gathering (We gather intelligence, you conduct espionage operations, they spy) to private interests. Japan and France are much more notorious for a whisper in the right ear, but in Japan at least it's not for a direct kick-back, but just in the national interest, as defined by the government. The problem is not sale of information to private corporations. It's the selection of who gets to bid.
I disagree.
If abortion were put to a public vote, pro-life would easily win - most public opinion polls i've seen show about 60-70% in favor of pro-life. The current law "legalizing" abortion was essentially backdoored by the justice system into law - not through the legislature, where laws are supposed to be made.
I don't have the numbers handy, but I'd guess that at least 90% of abortions are performed for birth control, rather than other mother/child medical conditions. "Ooops! I didn't know that sex would make me pregnant."
I also find it confusing that if a person assaults a pregnant woman, he can be charged with child abuse, in addition to assault. Yet the mother can abort the child^H^H^H^H^Hfetus, cuz its just part of her body - like removing a tumor(?). But as Arnold so eloquently put it, "Its not a tum-ah."
I don't understand how anyone who has taken a biology class, yet alone had children, can say that "it" is a fetus and not a child. Or how many have seen a videotape of an abortion being performed?
BTW, I consider myself pro-choice, but 99% of the time, I'd "choose" life, not abortion.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Historical Review of Pennsylvania.) as found here.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There are major two sides I'm noticing: THEY HEAR EVERYTHING and THEY HEAR NOTHING AT ALL.
Both are naive. Don't just think about the computing power. Think about the manpower involved. To actually root through that data would take far too many people. That's what the computer's are for, right? All the conspiracy nuts and news agencies would be setting off triggers left and right. No, the article said it can intercept anything, not that it intercepts everything.
If I had to place a bet, I'd actually put my money on them using that system to listen to only certain people. In other words, when they know something is going on, then turn it on and see what pops up. Ignore the grocery lists, and ignore the boring people.
When Joe Nobody says "I heard they're still trying to catch that TERRORIST that set off that BOMB in the US EMBASSY", he gets ignored because he's nobody. When bin Laden says, "I poured a bowl of cheerios but there was no milk. Somebody buy some milk while they're out" it gets ignored because its boring. But when bin Laden says "Tell me about that BOMB" then the whistles and sirens go off.
I would guess there's no privacy violation because there's too much data out there for anybody to deal with. Unless you're a known terrorist, you'd have to be ignored. And there are too many terrorists and "interesting" people to listen to everything they say.
I work in golf ball factory, so I have no interest what so ever in planting false information.
In the honourable Ministers defense, the press had been telling us the same thing for weeks!
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the idea of the NSA playing puppet with other world powers, especially those under the nuclear umbrella with us.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I can vaguely remember seeing the original story on Australian TV a few months ago. I think one of the reasons mentioned was that information being gathered was being used to benefit US interests at the expense of other nations interests, including Australia's.
"btw -- it's an old spy trick to spout out incorrect information with the hopes that the people who know will correct it."
Hey, that's also the original premise of trolling! At least that's what I read in some Usenet primer somewhere...
Oh and that sounds like a real dangerous drinking game. I'd hate to see some poor segf^H^H^H^Hlashdotter go to the hospital with alchohol poisoning...
Forget it.
When a Jew (Jerry Seinfeld), has an episode of his Sitcom dedicated to "The Soup Nazi", you know it's time to give up this battle.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think that since the end of the cold war the security agencies have been scrambling to justify their existence. They keep growing despite less need for their existence. The whole spying thing bothers me though. We have a system of checks and balances in our government, but with the ever growing power of the security agencies, one wonders how there can be any real accountability.
Echelon is not a harbinger of ultimate doom. Trust me, if it was real, and as effective as many of you think it is, military intelligence collection would be extremely easy. Or, perhaps, the Echelon team is simply committing treason and should be executed. In my service as an intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps, I saw nothing about an echelon system. Obviously the NSA monitors foreign broadcasts, but to monitor every electronic transmission would require more money than the US has in its entire budget. The staffing requirements would be at least several million full time analysts. How many of you have said "Thats the bomb!" in an email or phone call referring to something that excited you? Probably most of us. Quite a few of us have expressed a desire to have the current political structure changed, sometimes in quite strong language. Echelon in some form certainly exists. But spying on US citizens, examining every email, every phone call, every fax? Not a chance. They could never afford to do that and remain unnoticed.
I think some people have watche Enemy of the State a few too many times. The US government is not that corrupt. If it was it would have been overthrown by now.
And on a conveniently offtopic note, killing Jews was perfectly legal in Nazi Germany, just as killing preborn children is in North America. The fact that one mother will lament a stillborn infant and another will have a premature baby after 6 months that the hospital will keep alive (not as part of the mother's body, I might add) and yet another "owns" her baby (as opposed to being responsible for it) because its still dependant on her for survival (which the government sees all children as being until 14 or so) and decides to have its head destroyed, cut open and sucked down a vacuum tube is proof our society is screwed up.
... freedom for all! Suffering for most!
Anyway
(And we wonder why the communists think capitalist society is screwed up?)
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Although I don't speak Dutch, I'm betting a better translation of "briefgeheim" might be "security of the mails" or "postal confidentiality".
YEAH, i KNOW i SOUND PSYCHO BUT WHEN YOU TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THAT JUST ABOUT EVERYDAY A GOVERNMENT IS USING IT'S SECURITY APPARATUS AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILLIANS THEN YOU'LL MAYBE WAKE UP. CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND WORK CAMPS ARE VERY, VERY REAL. Seriously, the US government will kill you and your family members if it ever deems is necessary and . Don't think that this can't happen...
Despite Ben Franklin's saw that those who give up freedom for security soon have neither, we Canadians are very willing to sacrifice certain freedoms (the right to carry suitcases of Semtex onto passenger aircraft, the right to bear arms without a permit, the right to die young in favour of paying taxes for universal medical care that results in lower infant mortality rates than the US despite the latter's greater *average* income, etc.) in favour of slightly more security. It's not that there are fewer crazy Canucks than our southern friends, it's just that as a result of our greater stress on security vs. freedom that fewer of our crazies can get access to full automatic rifles and concealable semi-automatic handguns. Thank God for the USA, and thank God that I get the chance to live in a country that chooses to stress security.
Very soon after the KAL airliner was shot down in 1983, the news outlets here in the U.S. were playing audio tapes of the Soviet jet fighter pilot's communications with his superiors.
Well, how do you suppose we got the audio tape of the pilot? The Soviets were denying the entire incident at the beginning. They certainly wouldn't have handed over the tapes.
The NSA has satellites which receive radio transmissions in thousands or millions of frequencies, like high tech scanners. All those conversations are recorded just in case they are needed later. I don't know if this specific incident relied on the purported voice-recognition technology of Echelon. The specific conversation could theoretically have been located manually, given the time and location of the shootdown.
Anyway, it's just another anecdote related to Echelon.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
As a result of Enigma decryption, Churchill knew that Nazi Luftwaffe bombers would bomb Coventry, but chose not to reveal the decryption by evacuating the civilians in order to maintain the source of knowledge and win the war sooner. It's the JOB of the security gathering agencies of any government to penetrate others' secrets and protect its own citizens. As such an agency, the NSA is infinately preferrable to its former Eastern Bloc equivalents. Tradeoffs are just inevitable. Coventry paid in lives to save the UK and, ultimately, pave the way to defeat Hitler. Don't think the same tradeoffs aren't being made today. It's sad, but it's also inevitable. (I am not a US citizen, nor have I ever lived in the US, but I am sympathetic to their problems)
But maybe all of the crazy conspiracy theorists aren't so crazy after all. As time goes on, I'm seeing that what was dismissed as a "absurd" notion is/was indeed fact. Which leads me to believe the slogan I saw: "1984: We're behind schedule (NSA)." But then again, maybe I'm just a ploy to make you think that what is real isn't. Which would make what isn't real..real...
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
this is great....yet another example of our lack of privacy...
No one was surprised when Pakistan tested a nuke; the surprise came a month earlier when India did so.
And even that surprise was rather limited, given that India had detonated something that it called a "peaceful nuclear explosive" 25 years before.
Yeah... they should have arrested him way before he did the bombing. Good thinking. We also should have had a wire tap on Jeffrey Dahmer's line so all his raping and murdering could have been stop. The kids in Columbine? We should have tapped their e-mails as well... could have prevented those murders. You are right, the other posters are ignorant bastards... for actually stopping to think and realize the implications before they start to spout off. -Rabbins
It just is -- ask someone who knows more than you (hey, call a random phone number, maybe?)
Of course, if you'd quoted the whole comment, your next comment would look pretty stupid
First, go look up "sympathise" in your Oxford English -- it doesn't mean to feel bad for someone (as you probably assumed it does), it means to have similar beliefs to. Also, "sympathise" is not incorrect spelling but Canadian and UK spelling. As for the comment looking stupid, the government is elected in the US and Canada so their is no separation of "the government" or "the people" deciding. The people decide everything -- including laws enforced by government. Murder is illegal because the majority of people in the country think it is. If they didn't, the laws would change. The law isn't there to make people conform to the minority view but to enforce the majority view. If you don't understand law, don't argue this point any more -- you're looking bad already, your views aside.
Oh, and the fun one:
Until what age is a person a child? 18 (most states and provinces). How about a baby? Usually 2 years old by definition. A senior? 65 some places. A fetus? After conception and before birth. Was the fetus in your mother's womb you? I guess not. Otherwise it was a person
I stated how. If a child is born three months premature, 6 months after conception, in a teen's bedroom, and she lets it die by exposure, poisons it, etc. It is murder. If she had an abortion the day before, it wasn't.
You tell me the difference. The difference is exactly what I said, in TRUE terms (not interpreted thoughts on the matter) that is, whether the baby is attached to the mother physically. It has never occured to you that the sack a fetus grows in seperates it almost entirely from its mother except by the umbilical (sp?) cord? And yet you would argue that it is simply a part of the mother's body
Re: Capitalist society vs. Communism:
For the last time, Communists use the fact that Captialist society has low moral standards as propaganda against captialism. The aborting of unborn infants is one such low moral standard used. If you couldn't understand that thought-process, you might want to stay out of these discussions.
An intelligent psychoanalyst would be more inclined to realise my anger at others for being unwilling to value human life in all its forms. That is, that society at large ignores those persons that are inconvenient -- babies unwanted, street persons, drug addicts, etc.
Moral wrongness vs. rights. If you want to bring God into something, you just defined his interaction here. We do indeed have the right before a Christian God (if you wish to believe in him of course) to do anything we please. He has made this very clear. However, he also tells us which things are not beneficial and which are wrong. Just because you're allowed to do something doesn't make it right -- sometimes in fact, its the lesser of two evils
If you think doing what you want is fine
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
So it really does exist, damnit. I knew I shouldn't of emailed Saddam asking how to construct biological weapons... Hrmmm, next thing, yall will be telling my Microsoft is a monopoly
----------------------------------
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
On PBS (KCTS 9, Seattle) last night The Timor Conspiracy by John Pilger was broadcast. You may have seen it already; I saw it in London on ITV just after the network decided it was losing too many viewers with too many Heartbeat repeats -- this would have been about eight months ago.
In the show explicit notice is given that the Australian security services were electronically monitoring the fall of East Timor to the Indonesians; they were able to pinpoint precisely where an Australian news team were abducted and later executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Various former heads of governmental departments were interviewed, including Whitelaw. Several of these people stated unequivocally that they used electronic surveillance to get as much information as possible. Echelon specifically is not named, but the implication is clear: this thing exists. How far it goes, is anyone's guess.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
>This concept is explored at great length in >Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.
>Heh, this guy defines crackpot. You cite a guy >who claims to have talked to a multi-dimensional >alien named Mescalito
>and, according to his own disinformation >theory, spreads disinformation himself. I always >thought of him as an ignorant
>new-age version of RA Heilein.
Hey, you better watch it, insulting my favorite author and all;/
Anyways, if you would actually read what Wilson said, you would *no doubt* realize that when Wilson said he had contacted a discarnate-multi-dimensional entity who also practiced guerrilla-ontology(e.g.:disinformation)he was actually pulling your leg(or at least trying to filter out the droids who actually believe the gov't is a Good Thing...
Read a little more carefully, for Wilson is not a crackpot...
Congress still passes the budget, but when they asked the NSA what it does with its money, the NSA told them to go %^^%^ themselves, and they said "OK". There was a discussion about this in a previous Slashdot posting about Eschelon.
I wonder if they are are monitoring this discussion right now?
Thinking and questioning are good things. I'm glad you do so, even if we disagree.
>I, however, fundementally trust my government to protect the interests
>of the people of the United States. In the past, the US gov. has gone
>to great lengths to do what it thinks is in our best interest.
The problem is that the government is run by people. Kvort's first theorem: "People suck." The government of the United States was created to be a huge balancing act. One portion of government balances another.
The major balancing act, however, is between the government and the people. The people run the government, and the government governs (for lack of a better term) the people. Should one side or the other get too much power, the system will get out of balance. On one side lies anarchy, on the other, a police state. For examples of a police state, look to Hitler's Germany, where disliked people were (for political reasons) blamed for the difficulties of the nation.
For another example of a police state, study the US' Red Scare, where people were destroyed, policially, socially, and economically, for being communists. Many of these people were not communists, but were accused unjustly. Communism is not even a bad thing, but simply an unattainable ideal. The biggest reason the US disliked the USSR was that it was a police state, which is what we almost became ourselves!
On the other hand lies anarchy, which I feel many people here would probably argue for (I disagree). I do feel that the balance has shifted over to the side of government, but I do not think that it is a huge imbalance, nor do I think we should tear down the government and replace it.
I DO think the government should not be allowed to restrict free speech in any way, which includes monitoring of communications, which COULD and HAS and WILL be used by those in power as a tool for political or economic gain, usually by destroying other people.
I will eagerly await your reply, for this is quite an interesting conversation.
>>>>>>>>> Kvort
-Don't mind me, I'm personality-deficient and mentally-impaired.
I can only wonder why you have so much time on your hands. My favorite: "it just is"... ;-)
Coming from someone with a karma of -6???
...
That seems like a waste of digital breath to me
The point, dingbat, TERMINATE was that if enough people did that COCAINE, they would simply KIDDIE PORN be overwhelmed with things AK-47 to watch. It's the RENDEVOUS only way to BULLION fight back against the NSA unseen enemy who may or may not be SUBMARINE watching us all.
And it's pretty clear that if enough FREEDOM FIGHTER people do it, even the COMMUNIST computers can't do enough processing to discard NSA messages based on the context being LSD nonsense, something that computers are not terribly good at these days anyway, unless the NSA nsa has some really good linguists to make some technology better in this regard than anyone else knows about. Gee, maybe CHOMSKY's lefty stuff is just a cover ;-)
And for the record I do remember those days, just barely.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I don't understand why so many people are upset about Echelon. I don't know about everybody else, but I don't write about assasinating the president in my e-mails, and thus they don't get read by Echelon. Furthermore, IMHO, not being bombed by terrorists is a bit more important than maintaining my personal privacy.
The entertainment industry is mostly to blame. Shows like the X-Files (don't get me wrong, I love that show) and similar movies have taught us that the CIA, FBI, and especially the NSA are all out to get us. However, as my .sig suggests, the NSA is in fact working for the good of the people of the United States. That is why they are called the National Security Agency. The idea that they are trying to harm us is downright silly. The concept of government conspiracies is pure myth, perhaps rooted in the fact that there are inevidably a few somewhat corrupt people in the government that have done a few inconsequential things, like having oral sex with interns.
Getting back to Echelon, so what? It is a computer that collects international electronic communications that include phrases like "bomb the Whitehouse." If you are talking about bombing the Whitehouse in your e-mails, frankly, I want the government to take a closer look at what you are doing. And if you don't want Echelon to look at your e-mail, don't talk about bombing the Whitehouse. Efforts like "Jam Echelon Day" have done nothing but help terrorists get a chance to get by our security. I think that we should instead all do our part to avoid writing e-mail that might get picked up by Echelon to lighten their work load and let them take care of the important stuff.
It's 10 o'clock. Several Russian suitcase-sized nuclear warheads are missing. Do you know where your priorities are?
-------------
If it isn't the NSA doing it then someone else is or at least trying to. Trying to legislate out such things is pointless. Personally I wish they'd open the NSA up and turn them into a huge R&D lab (as they are) that releases it's inventions and various other toys to the public sector in some form similar to GPL. As for privacy, you don't have any.. Welcome to the Future(tm). The easier it gets to communicate the harder it becomes to keep communications private. Assume everything you do and say to be on public television every night at 3am and live with it. IMO encryption is primarily useful for letting computers talk to each other in a secure fashion because anything that you want to stay secret more than 3 seconds better stay in your head. Sure I like my privacy as much as the next guy but you can't take back the technology without killing off mankind (without tools we have little ability compared to other predators) so I guess my naked ass is on channel 7 tonight boys!
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
From the article:
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract.
If this is true (somehow I smell yellow journalism), why is the NSA spending the time and money to help out private corporations make money? Better yet, why are they spending MY tax money to do this? And is this the best Echelon can do?
For all the tales of what this thing can do, how it can sort through emails and has voice recognition, etc, what exactly HAS it done for the good of those of us that have paid taxes for something that isn't supposed to exist?
Something tells me that with more and more stories like this coming out, sooner or later something has to come out weighing the cost/benefit of this technological "marvel".
Or have they just not said anything officially because it hasn't done squat for the good of the people, only for the good of the governments? Just something to ponder.
Well, considering the Jewish predominance in the early Communist hierarchy that killed tens of millions of Christians, it's about time to give up your spiel. We're tired of hearing it. And for that matter, who, exactly, was behind the Versailles Treaty? And how come you never talk about what the Jews did to Germany in the 20's & 30's?
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,32302,00 .html
Hmm.. how do they know ?!
Do I seem utterly rediculous and even flamy to some when I say, "Hey, I think the u.s. government is just trying to "leak" (or let leak) such rumors out so everyone will think they are superior in power to all other countries...", or not?
- Sarin.
right you are it was overthrown, and a damn fine job they did of it to..
(yes I am aware that they have a constitutional monarchy, but let's not look to the british for too many tips about socially responsible government)
"Technically many factors contributed to the fall of the Roman empire, the heavy taxation of its colonies and the decline of the quality of its armies. Also the attacks of many different Germanic tribes caused the eventual fall" That wasn't the point, the point was that the use of the word has resulted in its changing from the orginial meaning. Its really great that you know how the Roman empire fell, but regardless you don't have to be a smart___ and try to change the true subject of the original post.
Keep up the good work.
ok folks, we all know it's going on...the NSA has been in Americans back pockets for years...why would this shock anyone? BTW, has anyone noticed the sudden diedown of the hoopla over the proposed "modem tax"? And one of the big problems with that scheme was the fact that it is very difficult to determine which are voice calls and which are modem calls. What would someone like to bet that the NSA has (or is rapidly developing) some nifty technology to fit right in that little crack?
Show me what you want, and I'll show you how to get along without it...
Who could be this stupid? Only someone who ignores the lessons of history - governments do not act in the best interest of those they "serve" but always act in their own best interests - which is - maintain power at all costs.
Okay, so these things are picking up on satelite transmitions. Now, what is stopping us from evesdropping on those same transmitions?
If it's encrypted, we'll just crack it. Even if it's heavily encrypted I know I whole lot of distributed.net and SETI@home will jump on the project. Sure, they'll just change the key, but they need a way to send the key to the satelite. We'll crack that too.
Who needs a police scanner when you can have Echelon!
Hittler did not start by mass murder. But the Jews were striped of Civil rights very quickly after Hitler came to power in '33. And Anti-Jewish retoric was a key point in the platform of the Nazi party in the runup to that election.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
In 500 years we (The Jewish people) will still remember the Shoah. Count on it. We still remember the Exile in Egypt, we still remember Massada and the destruction of the temple (73 CE) we still remember the Masicure at York (1190 CE) and many others. Trust me WE WILL REMEMBER.
And while we are at it we will remember the fact that in all Europe only the Danes as a nation protected their Jewish Population.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
If you see fnords, well... You're not supposed to.
I thought the most scariest thing was the allegation that information from Echelon was leaked to a private company in the US, so it could outbid a French company. I mean, most people probably expect the government has some sort of eavesdropping ability, and that information was being sifted through to catch "bad guys." But, if it's so easy to bend this to benefit some company, then it's obviously way out of control.
I'm hoping the outing of this technology will feed the interest with congress to have a look atthis thing. The potential for abuses here is so strong, that the mere allegation of this sort of action needs to be carefully looked by an oversight committee.
Give it up. This shouldn't be a game where we divide into ethnic groups and give ourselves points based the number of atrocities committed by the "enemy". Members of just about every ethnic/religious group have committed atrocities at one time or another, in the name of God, justice, the good of the common man, whatever. "Communist Jews killed Christians" in NO WAY justifies the killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, or vice versa. Humans are violent and greedy by nature. Just about the first thing we did after founding civilizations and building cities was to go out and start giant bloody wars over unimportant areas of land.
Echelon is your friend.
Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.
Eat your spam.
Drink your purple kool-aid.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I am currently in america on a linux box located in Great Britan. Hrm... lets see
WACO
KILL THE PRESIDENT
BOMB AMERICANS
NUCLEAR SECRETS
APPLE G4's SOLD TO CHINA
Did I just transmit through the echelon? Probably.
This is how you get around the echlon.
w4c0
k1ll th3 pr3s1n3nt
b0mb 4m3r1c4nz
nuc134r z3cr3tz
4pp13 g4'z s0ld t0 ch1n4
All the l33t0 hax0rz were just hacking the echelon. All hail those who hack the planet.
Has anyone come forward to explain just how this is allegedly done? I have friends who have worked at most major telcos (oh, wait, there is only Worldcom now =]) and every major ISP - the fact is, if something this large was intercepting or diverting or duplicating the traffic, SOMEONE would see SOME effects of it, somewhere. Are all those Cisco and Cascade bugs that make networks flakey around the globe really a government plot? Does the NSA own MCIWorldcomUUnetSprintMFSBrooksfiber? (I think I missed a dozen there...)
;-)
Then again, lots of punk kids have at one point or another compromised the switching fabric of the telephone system, I guess it's sort of silly to assume the NSA couldn't top that.
Your post (and many others) just convinced me to completely ignore moderation points. This post and the one it replied to were two of the best posts of seen in any of the Echelon stories.
As evidenced by their "They Served In Silence" memorial
I remember some documentary I saw on some history channel had a few clips of what iirc was that memorial. It really freaked me out. It was a Vietnam Mermorial-Esque thing, supposedly all private and not open to the public, and written in the same font as all the other names, in between real names were a couple of "Name Withheld"'s
On their own memorial they don't give names?
Weirded me out.
as i see it, the danger is not that people will be shocked and become pro-active ('we've gotta do something about this!'). the danger is that people will say "so? i'm not surprised" and go back to sleep. what amazes me is that, in my experience, this doesn't particularily amaze anyone; is it because the entire notion is so mind-boggling that it just fails to register?
Hidding the existance of a message is called steganography. Its more common to high the message in a single image or MP3 as they have more bits to obscure the payload. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/stegano graphy (among others) for more info.
-Henry
I can't give you a direct link, but go to the Sunday Program's site and do a search for Echelon. The head of the DSD, the local equivalent to GCHQ or the NSA, basically confirmed the existence of Echelon in writing. How much more black and white do you want?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Take a drink whenever :
-someone says the government hacks their computer and gives no proof
--twice if it's the nsa.
-every time reading all of the comments makes you forget exactly what the DGP is
-someone says the DGP won't work
-someone points out hacking/cracking discrepency
-someone suggests the gov. should generically follow the same rules the populace does
-someone bashes M$
--twice if they suggest billy should be imprisoned or killed
-anyone blames criminal behavior on laws prohibiting it
-everytime the word "encryption" is mentioned
--Twice if all security problems could be solved by relaxation of encryption laws.
-someone mentions a historical injustice as proof on gov. inadequacy
--twice if it is more than 30 yrs old
---three times if it deals with hoover-era fbi
-someone claims the government has backdoors on current computers/encryption
-someone claims the DGP will give the government absolute power
-all-seeing DGP mentioned without mentioning corresponding all-using DGP
btw -- it's an old spy trick to spout out incorrect information with the hopes that the people who know will correct it. Don't count on hearing anything from the NSA except what they absolutely must tell congress ;-)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
That's why suicide is illegal...Huh? Why is suicide illegal?
... Hey, that's all I'm asking for!
... sympathises (sic) on the side of "pro-choice"...
...that the mother "owns" the baby inside her which is labelled a "fetus" because it is still attached to her womb.
...you need to rethink your system of beliefs.
...less harmful ... to the mother (who isn't a mother because she doesn't have a baby, just a fetus, right?).
"The Government" simply speaking, has nothing to do with it,
It seems that the general public
It is not about sympathy, it's about choice. Who decides, you or the government? I say you.
How old are you? I'm fairly certain your age is measured from the moment of birth and not before. Until being born, you were a fetus. I know that it's hard to accept.
My system of beliefs is of my choosing, not yours.
If you realize that their (sic) is no difference [between between a human life inside a woman as yet unborn, and a baby one week old smothered by their teen mother], you're stuck either saying that abortions are wrong or teens murdering infants that no-one else knew about is wrong.
Wow, you are a pretty sick person. For your sake, it would be nice if making comparisons between extreme examples could lead to a logical conclusion. How do people between the ages of thirteen and nineteen killing infants relate to fetal life inside a woman?
"She should have had an abortion instead of killing the child" is actually often stated in these cases.
Where'd you get that load of crap. Nobody says stuff like that. You are truly insensitive.
Think about it.
I have. Choice is a beautiful thing. Please stop trying to take it away from the women of this world.
PS, asking which communists I'm talking about it (sic) pretty numb (sic) -- communists are anti capitalism. And in the mid 1900's, the low moral values of North America in general were used as propaganda against capitalism.
Please, this time can you tell me what this has to do with abortion?
PS #2, the technique I described is still in use in many circles today...
Where? You must be talking about Canada and Mexico again...
You must have a lot of pent up aggression against your mother. Freud would definitely take an interest. Are you upset that she didn't abort you and instead allowed you to come into a world where other people will do things which you find morally wrong, but yet they still have a right to do? It's so horrible how all these unborn children keep being murdered while still in the womb. Fun fact: greater than 2/3 of all fertilized eggs go on to spontaneously self-abort before birth. Does that make God a murderer?
Now, considering that the telecom industry has been in bed with the NSA since the days of morse code, it goes without saying that there exists a worldwide monitoring network the likes of which will make grown men cry.
However, it may also be useful to note that if the NSA is anywhere near as powerful as we have been led (or have led ourselves) to believe, we probably wouldn't know about it. Organizations (like the NSA) that operate on the perception of power have it in their best interest to spread disinformation about themselves, especially if they wish to remain obscure and secret.
This concept is explored at great length in Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.
The essence of the idea is this: people tend to dismiss the rantings of crackpots and paranoid conspiracy theorists.
So, let's say (just for example of course) you have a worldwide listening network, and you want to keep it low key. You're pretty smart, so you know you can't keep something that big a secret forever. What do you do?
You go out and spread rumors about it being all-powerful, and that it can monitor everything. If you're good, you even plant a story or two in some underground zines about how it's running stolen technology from the planet Vulcan, and was really created by occultists (or Masons) who traveled through time from the 13th century.
The rumor takes on a life of its own. You only have to plant the seeds, and the imaginations of the sheep^H^H^H^H^Hpeople will do the rest for you. In no time at all, anyone who believes it is obviously some kind of lunatic, and your mission is accomplished.
Just something to consider.
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Checkout thish tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/26/1925257.s
Echelon is how they (we) did sigint
http://www.menwithhill.co.uk/
You know, we can see Menwith Hill from the top of the hill, near my mate Andy's farm. Some nights we like to go up there and eat some mushrooms and watch the saucers land.
When we go to the airport, we have to show identification, get sniffed, magnetised, and x-ray'd. This is all without being accused or suspected of a crime.
When leaving an airport parking lot last night, the parking lot attendant demanded my VIN (then called the police when I refused), since I had a temporary license plate.
When you go into Best Buy, with a laptop, they demand to inspect your bag. To protect "us" from shoplifters. Even though anything of value is secured anyways.
Where is our Freedom?
Injured software engineer wins against Mattel!
You could do steganography with gzip files. There are many ways to compress a given chunk of input data into gzip deflated data, depending on how hard you try.
Trouble is, although the files would decompress to give the exact same input data, it would be obvious that people had used steganography on them, because the compressed data would be different to what gzip (or gzip -9) produces.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Just to compair the term "Vandal" probably makes 95% of people here think of some kid with a a can of spray paint and not the tribe that sacked and destroyed Roman civialzation. In 500 years I want people to remember exactly what the Nazi's did.
Now that does not mean that our government is perfect. But please keep the term Nazi for those who Truly Deserve it.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
What this amounts to is that the perplexity of random word strings as you suggested would be so high above "normal" text, that they would be very easy to weed out using a language model.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
The annoying part of this whole Echelon deal is that it has commonly been reported (sources are questionable, but becoming less so) that the US and UK set up monitoring of each other's citizens to technically get around monitoring laws that apply to citizens of the country.
O N/echelon.html
This must infuriate the FBI, as domestic surveillance is supposed to be their game. I wonder if we are not going to set off a serious inter-governmental turf war if/when solid proof of broad-based domestic surveillance is provided.
The EU commissioned a report in 97
http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/POLITICS/ECHEL
(link to the london telegraph article that references the eu report) complaining about echelon practices, but it has managed to stay out of mainstream American press to date. I'm curious how our citizens, assured at every step of their freedom and rights, will react to the idea of every phone call, fax, email, etc. being collected and monitored by the NSA and their flunkies. Congress, also, could have something interesting to say, if they were ever really informed.
I think it's time to start talking about this kind of surveillance in mainstream media, where it will reach the ears of those who don't want to hear.
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
Having read mosts of the posts on this article, I haven't been able to find any that directly address the issue of monitoring e-mail. Here's my address:
Echelon couldn't possibly be able to intercept and read everybody's e-mail. Keep in mind that this is a very large part of what Echelon is described as. Having been the Systems Administrator at an ISP, I can assure you that I was never approached by anyone who was probably a representative of the NSA and asked to transmit copies of all of our customer's e-mail over microwaves to their sattelite, or any other such thing. This sort of scenario seems ridiculous, and is probably not quite what most people are suggesting.
But, then again, how on earth would Echelon get copies of our customers' e-mail to each other? Really. Think about it. The mail travels from their computer to our mail server and then someone retrieves it from the mail server.
Assuming their aren't white TEMPEST vans outside all of our customers houses, how would they get this information?
"The phone company, obviously," you say. Nope. Previous to my experience as a Systems Administrator, I really wouldn't have any information that would leave me to believe that Ma Bell wasn't the NSA's puppet. However, when you really start to analyze this possibility, you again see that this just couldn't be the case, especially given the current evidence that exists. (Note that all I'm saying is that the phone company isn't used to intercept your e-mail, and will refrain from addressing voice phone calls as others have done this previously).
The first thing to look to is the existance of CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers). These are entirely private companies that decide they want to run their own phone network, either alongside Bell's or by building their own and interconnecting (yes, I know some CLECs just resell Bell's services). Here in Kansas City, these companies are Birch Telecom and MCI Worldcom (formerly Brookes Fiber Communications). In addition, the medium-sized ISP I ran also considered becoming a CLEC. This involves little more than paying twenty-give grand to a few lawyers.
Now, in the same way that I ran our e-mail servers and was confident that we weren't working with Echelon to give them all of our customer's e-mail (sent to each other over our mail servers), I am also confident that if I and my engineers ran copper between multiple suburban areas of the city, install SS7 switches, etc., that I would fail to setup the Echelon port (or somesuch other method of giving info to Echelon) on any of these switches. Any phone call that stayed within our phone network (our phone customer calling another one of our phone customers) would be known secure. Certainly, the FBI has the ability to tap individual phone lines and we're aware of that. You'd be a fool not to recognize the difference between access to a single phone line and access to every trunk in your network. It would be painfully obvious to myself and everyone involved in the construction of the phone network of an international ring of spies was going to be looking at the data.
So, I contend that because most any telecommunications company can start their own phone network in competition with Ma Bell and since all of these companies would become aware of the Echelon network if they were apart of it, that when one of our customers sent e-mail to our mail server and another one of our customers retrieved that e-mail, no one was intercepting that e-mail.
Futhermore, there would be way too many switch managers and other telco engineers that would have to be aware of such a massive network of spying for it to exist. It's absurd to think that one of these persons wouldn't have come forward with evidence showing the existence of Echelon before now.
"But what about e-mail sent all over the world that goes through large carriers?" you ask. It's true that I only addressed e-mail sent locally to a medium-sized ISP in Kansas City, but I think it's easy to see how the scenario scales to any large service provider. It is obvious that if Echelon wanted to read everybody's e-mail, they would be reading everybody's e-mail, not just some of it. When it comes down to it, Echelon would have to be working with a bunch of administrators working for AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc., just like they would have to be working with me in a medium-sized ISP to get everyone's e-mail. Think about all the e-mail that only stays on AOL's network, or just Netcom's. Wouldn't criminals be flocking to signup for service from my ISP if they knew that none of it would intercepted by Echelon since it wasn't traveling over large carriers' networks?
Certainly, I haven't addressed every possibility or methodology of spying on e-mail, but I think I at least put some doubt in the minds of those assuming that it wouldn't be that hard for NSA to intercept every piece of data in the world. I think it all comes down to remembering that the Internet is just a bunch of companies, large and small, working together, and that there would have to be a lot of these companies in on the masterplan for Echelon to be what everyone thinks it is. Now, maybe just UUnet, Sprint, MCI, Savvis, and Qwest are all in on covertly redirecting packets to Echelon, and no one else. I have nothing to offer to show why this wouldn't ve happening. While that might be a large percentage of Internet traffic, I still think Echelon would be largely pointless if it could be averted by using a small service provider (voice, data, or otherwise).
So, if you're still convinced that the Echelon crew is reading your e-mail, switch your phone lines to the smallest CLEC in your area, signup for service from a smalltown ISP, and have all the people you communicate with do the same.
What sucks is that I might be entirely wrong; that might be able to detect everything traveling on copper wire from hundreds of miles above the earth.
Who knows? Not me. So reply!
are big bad beowulf clusters
Our friends in Washington are about to repeal Glass-Steagal. Say whut, you say?
The repeal will let employers, insurers (your medical records, duh), bankers, and credit and stock brokers aggregate into supra-corps and exchange info about you.
And you think 'they' are tracking you now?
OK, so work out the average number of phone calls worldwide every day. Times this by the CPU power needed to monitor one phone call (FFT/Wavelet analysis, pattern matching and database indexing can all be done on cheap computer systems today)
Anyone like to work this out? I did a rough estimate for the UK a while ago and it is *very* feasible to monitor all the calls made here.
Oh, and I wonder if they use Linux?
I don't give a fuck what people know about me. This is about teaching these spooks some fucking manners. In the oldays people would stop and ask PERMISSION before they took a picture of even a little child they thought was cute.
... tools... (siglim 120 chars)" Like cars... to the office no more no less.
I'm sorry but you've been watching too many episodes of the X-Files.
"Computers should be
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Check out Echelon Entertinment at http://www.eesite.com/. This is obviously a front for the massive spy network.
Take a further look at their Privacy policy. I quote:
Echelon servers note details such as the server you are logged onto, the geographic location of the ISP you use, the type of browser you use, and your IP address.
Do not buy anything from Echelon Entertinment! EVERY PRODUCT has a bug in it which transmits environmental information (temperature, amount of marijuana residue in the air, etc.) along with sound and radiation emissions via microwaves to the Echelon HQ.
The food that Echelon Entertainment sells has chemicals which are mind-altering. They make you believe that people who are concerned about privacy are all paranoid freaks and induce feeling of pride and passion toward the NSA and Echelon.
Their humour and sports section has jokes which use special combinations of words to trigger the feelings that the food you eat produces. (Food + eating = brainwash).
The auction section is simply to make you think you're in control of your life, even though you aren't. Also, everything sold there is junk out of NSA agents' basements.
They also have mailing lists and newspaper publications for spreading their disinformation to the general public. Is their any avenue of thought which they do not stomp on?!
The webmaster's section is the first way for ordinary citizens to participate in a global spy network. They bribe Internet-savvy people into advertising their covert products to their friends, which is how they'll takeover the world.
Send an e-mail to echelon@eesite.com with the following message:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I hereby revoke all rights and privileges of Echelon Entertainment, Inc., its affiliates, or subsidiaries to own my soul. I would like to point out a judicial example, similar to the class action lawsuit which I intend to be apart of, the Salem Witch Trials. I request that you cease and desist from all distribution, commercial or othwerise, of products, consumables, and misinformation which promotes the global spy network known as Echelon.
Regards,
<your name here>
PS, asking which communists I'm talking about it pretty numb -- communists are anti capitalism. And in the mid 1900's, the low moral values of North America in general were used as propaganda against capitalism.
The level of this debate can be pretty accurately ascertained by the fact that both interlocutors seem to be happy with assuming that abortion was not much more prevalent under communist governments -- in Russia it was the main means of contraception.
jsm
Furthermore, IMHO, not being bombed by terrorists is a bit more important than maintaining my personal privacy.
What terrorists, exactly? Are you really that dull? No, I don't give up liberty for anyhting. It's idiots like you that are the reason for our ongoing police state. I'll rephrase that:
"Not being attacked by forty foot purple three horned hippopotami is more important than my security. We need more police".
The entertainment industry is mostly to blame. Shows like the X-Files (don't get me wrong, I love that show) and similar movies have taught us that the CIA, FBI, and especially the NSA are all out to get us
Yes, you are that dull. The entertainment industry glorifies the NSA and the CIA, there has been a never ending stream of bullshit "patriotic" movies about these non-existent "terrorists" since the eighties (Bond, Clancy movies, Rambo, Schwarzenegger flicks, et al). "You see?? These are the guys that save you from all these terrorists!! That's why you never really see them!!! It could happen any minute, so make sure to respect your friendly neighborhood cop!!"
The media does nothing but glorify cops, lawyers and government spooks.
The CIA is a terrorist organization, for sure. 99% of what Americans call "terrorist" are people fighting US aggresion the only way they know how. US needs to just leave them the fuck alone == problem solved.
The concept of government conspiracies is pure myth,
Then you know nothing of history, because governments have always been involved in conspriacies of the worst kind. There hasn't been one yet that hasn't.
The existence of echelon is a conspiracy in and of itself.
support gun control: take guns from cops
According to the first news story broadcast in Seattle concerning the crime, it was the CIA who made it public. All subsequent reports I heard omitted this fact, citing instead other sources for the information.
The significance of this fact is left as an exercise in conspiracy theorizing for the reader. :-)
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
There isn't any Echelon, there couldn't be. If they actually had one, then I'm sure we'd...
Hey... who are those guys over there by the elevator...
They found me.... I don't know how, but they've found me! Run for it Marty!!!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I have notices that a lot of people these days use to include some Echelon keywords at the end of their mails, supposedly to fool Echelon into thinking that the mail is 'interesting', thus overloading the system. I find this practice funny at best but certainly not effective since any mediocre programmer can filter out mails containing a lot of suspicious words in its last lines.
...) in the actual text. This will make Echelon think the words are only included to fool it. To make it even more tricky, you could sometimes use letters or even the spelled numbers (one, two, ...) instead of the numbers.
I have two more practical (i.e. more Echelon-fooling, though less convenient) suggestions to make:
1) Include suspicious words in the actual mail text, but don't overdo it. Two or three words per mail should do. Reading the text will only be a little more difficult.
2) When writing mails which do really contain suspicious words, write them in the last line of the mail and only use their numbers (i.e. the first word would be 0, the second 1,
If we have a lot of people doing 1 and 2 and a lot of other people using the old a-lot-of-suspicious-words-in-the-last-lines Echelon should be pretty distracted.
bye
schani
I know that at this very moment there are people being trained in the US Armed Forces whom the USA spends thousands and thousands of dollars on so they might learn Russian, Japanese, and other languages. Once they learn these languages, many are stationed at bases which have tapes of conversations, or in some cases live transmissions of radio signals, etc. These translators sit for hours and hours listening to boring conversations about the weather, foreign soldiers having phone-sex conversations with their sig. O's, etc all in the hopes of catching the *really important* information (whatever that might be). So now we can not only pick up all these transmissions, but can filter out the unimportant garbage? Can understand colloquialisms? Can determine the true value/threat of a given conversation? That's abso-fucking-lutely amazing. And to think that this whole time that all the real computing brainiacs have been working for the US Armed Forces, et. al. Who'da thunk it?
Please, be rational. This sort of technology doesn't just sound like science fiction, it is science fiction. Get a grip.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
That some Australian official would decide to all of a sudden talk openly about secret spy information ??
I'm not suggesting that this isn't true, but it really makes little sense to me. This isn't the sort of thing that government officials just start blabbing about, especially to the BBC. These guys are trained to do three things... deny deny deny... so why fess up now ???
You don't have to be a content-nazi.
I just love America. Damn, I'm glad I'm leaving the country in 2 months. Not that it will change the American government's ability to pry into any part of my social life that they want to, but at least I won't have to bow before their oppressive weight anymore. Lucky for me, I don't do anything that would warrant them violating my civil liberties. I just don't like the idea that they *can* if they want to.
FBI NSA CIA MULDER SCULLY UFO DOD DOJ CONGRESS ECHELON NUKE NUCLEAR CBRN CYBERTERRORISM TERRORIST URANIUM PLUTONIUM BOMB ALLAH WHITEHOUSE MISSLE ICBM SATELLITE WIRETAP FUSION UKUSA MENWITH HILL ENCRYPTION CRYPTOGRAPHY SURVEILLANCE SPY INTERROGATE TREASON POW MIA ASSASSINATE SNIPER COLUMBINE SLASHDOT WHEATIES WACO OKLAHOMA CITY MCVEIGH MILITIA CONSTITUTION BILL OF RIGHTS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE MICROSOFT DOJ 2600 PHRACK CRACK HACK AIBO COMDEX Y2K HOFFA CLINTON NIXON THIS IS STUPID
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
The moral of the story depends on who you are:
* if you are a privacy advocate, scatter your echelon words about with a better algorithm, and probably avoid "echelon" entirely.
* if you are a terrorist, don't talk about or email your plans without encryption.
* if you are an echelon employee, be smart with your database queries.
BTW, the phrase "golf ball factory" is rumored to be what (some?) NSA employees are supposed to use when asked where they work. After all, who is interested in the work of a golf ball factory employee?
Give it up. You have no privacy. If you are using a computer, credit card, ATM, telephone or cell phone (etc.) you gave up your privacy a long time ago. It is easy to plumb the depths of information about anyone...no one is protected. If you would just let go of the concept of privacy and focus on security of relevant information...you may have a chance of keeping your diginity. Outside of a few key peices of "secret" information about yourself, you are an open book.
Play Well
...is never talk about Echelon club.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I will probably continue posting replies as more people reply to me.
-------------
But I still do this - I insert an X-Spook header
in every one of my outgoing mail/news messages
with keywords like that... I used to call it
X-NSA-Fodder, actually.
It is easy to do with the spook() function in
Emacs with Gnus and a custom function to generate
multiple keywords. I'd be glad to post the elisp
if anyone else wants to do this too. E-mail me
as I'm not likely to check back here...
Let's all constantly reload /. so the NSA has plenty of slashdot material to read through.
:)
/. from constantly being refreshed....
But I guess for an all powerful omnipotent organization as the NSA has been proven to be, billions of copies of slashdot won't make a differenc, will it?
But that won't stop
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Better yet, why are they spending MY tax money to do this? And is this the best Echelon can do?
Actually, you answered your own question, Taxes, this US firm would pay more taxes then you. So the US government made a profit, not to mention the added wealth in the US that you enjoy.
So economically, it made sense. Ethically on the other hand...
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
begin sarcasm...
So it's just been reveiled that the government can know any aspect of any communication you have. Where'd all the Privacy Phreaks go?
A month ago they were screaming from the rafters about the FBI's desire for network snooping abilities being a viloation of privacy, but from the lack of posts here apparently Echelon (or whatever it is) is OK.
Jeez. Guess its Ok for the NSA to know everything about us, but not the FBI. Good ole NSA. Obviously the rumors about them are unfounded. Just last week I was at the supermarket, and there was a whole bunch of NSA agents helping little old ladies carry their groceries to their cars. Not to mention last month when they worked the food line at a homeless shelter. And don't forget the Smoke Off they had in the NSA parking lot last year.
Or maybe all the privacy phreaks realize that there's nothing they can do about it, and maybe, just maybe, it is actually keeps their little lives all nice and cozy happy. Like a kitten sleeping in a sunbeam.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
"Name, address, credit card numbers please.."
Look folks, I can believe that the NSA can
monitor most of the relevent international
EM communications traffic via listening
outposts.
I can believe that the NSA monitors international
long distance phone traffic. I can even believe
that the NSA monitors some internet traffic.
But the claim that they can monitor *everything* is bogus. They can't even monitor all EM frequencies or spread spectrum communications. If they could, they could do what SETI is trying to do in a heart beat. The fact is, the spectrum is too big to monitor in totality for "interesting traffic" It's much easier for them to scan frequencies in use by known equipment being bought by foreign governments.
Secondly: Monitoring *EVERY* phone call? I think not. International traffic, sure. But grepping every voice call made in the world would require such a staggering amount of bandwidth, CPU, and storage, it's a ridiculous assertion.
Even if the Baby Bells agreed to it, the monitoring equipment itself would likely degrade the performance of the carriers.
Every email? We know that's bullshit. The NSA can't monitor intranet-only email (unless they have millions of tempest outposts next to every company and ISP in the world). So they are left with the following choices: partner with AOL/Hotmail/EVERY ISP so they can grep intra-ISP mail or 2:
Somehow monitor IP traffic on everyone's network -- also bogus.
Let's posit that the NSA approached Cisco 10 years ago and had them build a special transmitter in Cisco boxes that forwards all "interesting" traffic to the NSA.
Can you imagine 1) the performance hit on Cisco routers to do this and 2) the bandwidth requirements to trasnmit this data to the NSA for analysis. Also, no geek has ever taken apart a Cisco box and detected this backdoor? No network
admin has ever noticed any weird packets on his network going to a strange play? or mysterious delays?
Echelon is a very boring concept I'm afraid. I doubt it lives up to the hype. It's just one big orbital frequency scanner, and some international phone cable monitoring.
To be otherwise, the NSA would have to have its claws into *hundreds* of corporations, and have silenced all the TECHIE GEEKS working at these places who would obviously know about the monitoring. Since I personally know people who work at HUGE ISPs and run their mail/network systems, I know this isn't true.
And the NSA can't just monitor MAE-EAST/WEST, etc, because much traffic is routed through private peer networks now. For instance, Above.Net has 190+ peering arrangements and several private backbones. So now we have the NSA having to splice into and monitor hundreds of private backbone networks.
Echelon would require as fantasic a conspiracy as the UFO morons posit. Occams Razor dictates that the truth is much simpler than that.
Good ole fashion logic dictates the NSA spends more time monitoring the airwaves and international phone, than they do trying to snoop on US internet traffic, given that the vast majority of third world governments are still using primitive radio and telephone equipment.
The conclusion is that JAM Echelon Day was a ridiculous waste of time that probably had some NSA guys laughing on the floor.
Yes, Echelon exists. It is incredibly powerful. It monitors communications in a variety of formats -- including air transmission (all bandwidths), voice telephone, and data. The voice-recognition software was actually a piece of cake compared to the data analysis and pattern-matching software. You should all be very afraid of what you send over the internet. I suggest you band together and lobby your politicians to fight this. Don't take their denials at face value -- keep pushing them.
(Hey, whatever it takes to distract you dumb sheep from the alien technology installations in Neva&%#++
** HTTP SUBMIT INCOMPLETE. SOCKET CONNECTION LOST UNEXPECTEDLY. **
Maybe you dont write email about assasinating the president but *I* certainly do. And I don't think it is very fair that the NSA is listening. I mean, did I really want them coming to my door and telling me they know what I've been planning? Goddamn it, I didn't need their weapons then and I don't need them now. I can kill the president without Echlon backing me, thank you very much.
fight club!
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
The UK had a system where they would watch for voice patterns. While it is just becoming possible to do recognition on a random voice, it has been possible for many many years to do an analysis on a random voice pattern.
So, what the brits would do is listen for phone calls that had a certain voice pattern (terrorists or other criminals), then actually *tape* those conversations, and have a person listen to them and transcribe them by hand.
I just thought this was kind of a neat hack :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Ok, a few points. First off, an individual in the AU gov't is on record confirming "Echelon", a global information monitoring system. He does not confirm that it is anything near the scale that the paranoids believe: All communications (e.g.: local and long distance phone traffic, internet, radio, sattelite, etc).
I, for one, believe there is a kernel of truth in the Echelon rumors; that there is the technology and the network to spy on unfriendly nations. Like Iraq for example, instead of depending on sattelites to notify of military mobilization, you listen to radio intercepts and the like. This is probably highly effective, and I have no problem with it.
I do not believe that Echelon is possible on the scale the conspiracy theorists believe. Even if you assume the NSA is "evil", you must factor economics into it. They may have a multi-billion dollar budget, but its simply not sufficient to do the kind of work that they describe. Even if you assume that the speach recognition hardware and the like came for free and is possible, think of the man hours and the sheer logistics of it. To monitor phone networks alone, you would need a basically parallel "secure" infrastructure (e.g.: data lines running your local phone calls to NSA intercept stations). You would need as many servicemen as all the phone networks combined (e.g.: AT&T, baby bells, sprint, etc). Not only that, but they would need to be kept reasonably secure......Man hours alone would cost hundreds of billions. Far more than any possible NSA budget (though we don't have the exact number, we do know gov't revenues and how much could be left in theory). There is just no way.....
that having the NSA pour over _all_ your messages is necesarily a good thing. I mean, how many times would your name have to pop up in some database to be placed on a "let's start surveilling this guys house 24/7" list or something?
Under US law anything broadcast on radiowaves (Except Cell phones) is free for anyone to listen to. If the NSA wants to listen in on Ham Radio or Air Trafic control or CB. They have just as much right to do so as You or I do. (They just have bigger toys to do it with).
Erlang Developer and podcaster
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Yeah, real nice. I guess Commander Taco gets preference around here. What the fuck was wrong with my posting about this story? subverse
Right before the fall of the monachy in England, during the 16th century, Thomas Hobbes wrote as essay that tried to give reason for why the people needed the monarchy and shouldnt over throw them. In this he basically tries to say that w/o security we would be in a state of chaotic war all of the time and there would be no SECURITY. This of course effects industry, progress in science and many other areas in society. He felt that it was OK to live under a tyrant as long as we had security. See this was all because the social pact we make with each other(the citizens) does not allow us to violate each other w/o punishment, but this agreement was make to give ALL our power to one ruling body does not in anyway bind the ruler from commiting offenses against its people. So even though u THINK the NSA is werking for the people BY the peoples best interest, a governing body that has NO rules or fear of punishment is in NO WAY SECURE!!! ******Note => The English read this and hated it. Within 20-30 years from this essays realease the monarcy was overthrown ;)***** Metaphysical Concepts: Time, Justice, Truth, Security --- zI
Well, please correct me if I make a mistake, but if I were a top-notch terrorist or heavyweight cocaine dealer, I would encrypt each sensitive message using PGP or a hand-made scrambler.
So what's the point in monitoring emails if you can't get any useful content? [unless of course pgp can be broken with moderate efforts, but i don't know about it].
Don't get so melodramatic. The NSA is not spying on you.
For starters, it is illegal for the NSA and the NIC (National Intelligence Community) to spy on American Persons, they being defined as an American Citizen or a company with a majority of holdings in the USA, unless authorized by the US Attorney General. Knowing J Reno's track record, I would believe that she would be into that sort of thing, but only with due cause.
This is illegal because intelligence organizations were slammed seriously for their invasions of privacy during the 50's and 60's, so it was outlawed.
Out of respect for the countries of NATO, we probably don't spy on them either.
At any rate, what makes you think that the government really cares about spying on you, unless A) you advocate the violent overthrow of the government B) you are armed (Geeks with Guns doesn't count) C) you are selling illegal substances. Most targets for intelligence collection are either military or political, it's just common sense.
If you are so worried about the government trying to spy on you, why don't you build your own sniffer to filter IP traffic looking for references to yourself?
In short, you are more likely to be spied on by that socially-inept kid across the alley who got a pair of binos for his birthday.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
Although many posts about Echelon have made mention of things like "disinformation" and "there is no way it could be done" plus the old "we look like schmucks for buying into it" I don't think that is the real matter.
Granted, there are those schlepp's who believe stuff like aliens in Congress (well if there are then that proves they are idiots as well). But the fact is "they" do listen in, on some mesages, most likely not all (I have a feeling "all" means "all they can get") but it is done nevetheless. At what scale doesn't matter, what matters is people, smart people, are being told to go away and leave them (NSA - whomever) alone. Again, we know these things happen, some of the laws within the United States allow for monitoring - we just want two simple things:
If we could get those things, I doubt anyone with a brain would care. It is in a sense a lot like children (kind of paradox - ish really) when you as a parent say "That is mine, you cannot look at it" and offer no explanation whatsoever or not even a very good LIE. If they would just come and say "yeah sure were doing this - but here is why, how much it costs and our regulating body is . . . " then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
" -- ow my brain hurts again -- "
The history of the CIA is a prime example of what happens, even in a democracy, when people are given tremendous power and little oversight. The sheer number of atrocities the CIA has been involved with is a testament to these dangers. Unfortunately, the NSA enjoys even less oversight.
I'd like to think most NSA'ers are good people who have the best interests of the country and the Constitution firmly in mind. Unfortunately, intentions aren't worth much. In a democracy, the people's best interests must be, fundamentally, decided by the people. The farther from democracy (read: oversight, representation, etc.) the system strays, the more the intentions of the powerful few will inevitably digress from the intentions of the majority.
Hey, I'm all for preventing terrorism and defending the country. But let's make sure we're defending the country, not just a few people's idea of it. IOW, let's keep it a country worth defending. There's more to life than survival, you know.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
OK, although most of you have directly attacked ME rather than my opinion (not nice), I would like to thank you for your comments. I now know what the REAL issue is:
Do you trust your government?
It seems most /.ers don't trust the United States government one bit. They are afraid that it will abuse its power, and echelon is a very abusable system. This is quite possibly true.
I, however, fundementally trust my government to protect the interests of the people of the United States. In the past, the US gov. has gone to great lengths to do what it thinks is in our best interest. In some cases it has even done things which help the US while hurting the rest of the world, which I believe is wrong. For example, intervening in the civil war in Guatemala and replacing democracy with dictatorship was a pretty crappy thing to do. Indeed, Echelon could be used unjustly against other countries. But every country spies on other countries, and most do it in a far worse way than this.
The matter I'm trying to argue, on the other hand, is that of Echelon being bad for Americans. The government has never been against anyone citizen or corperation of the United States. They are not going to spy on one corperation and give the info to another. Doing so would not help the US in any way, and the NSA knows it.
Please do not flame me. I have gotten lots of "you are a moron"'s, simply because I have a different opinion than everyone else. If you want to have an intelligent discussion, do it intelligently.
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My concern about Echelon is not the existance of Echelon per se, but the way that the NSA is probably using it.
It is against the law for the NSA to intercept communications within the US. They can only legally intecept communication where the endpoint of one leg of the communication is outside the US. Thus it is illegal for them to intercept my call from San Francisco to Honolulu via undersea cable direct. But if the call is routed to Cabo San Lucas (sp?) Mexico, and then to Honolulu, the NSA can legally intercept it.
Personally, I think this is just fine. The world is a dangerous place what with North Korea building long range missles and trying to build atomic bombs. It's a good thing to know a lot about what's going on in the world and eavesdropping on communications is a good way to learn. The problem I have is that the NSA seems to be skirting the rules on spying on US based communications by giving their keyword lists to the Austrailians, Kiwis, etc and asking them to spy on US based communications, passing the results on to the NSA. The Austrailians, Kiwis etc can do this because Echelon is truly international. A lot of US based comm traffic gets caught up in it. The NSA can't search it, but their proxies can and of course have a duty to turn over to the NSA any "threats" they uncover as part of their own surviellance.
Why should we care about this. Because it's illegal and the NSA is probably doing it. It's a separate argument as to whether it should be illegal.
Don't you people read Clancy? Do you think he makes this stuff up? HAHA, the only thing surprising to me is that people are surprised. This is all part of the SDI program started in the 80's... kinda cool that they made everyone think that the technology was not possible, while they developed it!
Wired has an update on the story: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,32302,00 .html
in which most people say, "well,duh, naturally". This basically does nothing to futher confim Echelon's existance than what was already known.
OTOH,it has spurrer Republican Bob Barr into action, huffing about privacy. MAybe he can gain some steam.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
The only semi-safe way to go is to meet in person with someone that you want to communicate with, transfer a phrasebook or list of one-time pads, and then use those later on. I've been thinking of writing something that uses postings to things like USENET, Slashdot, and so on to subtly encode things into. This would look just like ordinary traffic, but you could manipulate, say, the timestamp in the message header to get a small amount of data through. This would be very low bandwidth, but when combined with automation would allow short messages to be turned into several dozen "Hey, check out this article" type messages....
Isn't it time that we take back our countries and the freedom that we have a right to??? The only thing the intelligence community recognizes is force. Kill your local politician. (Damn right I'm an anonymous coward) Why did Slashdot erase this the first time it was posted? Isn't freedom of speech (no matter how heinous) something that Slashdot should espouse. Interesting... Slashdot runs a story about the loss of individual freedoms and then censors what "they" find unacceptable. Pretty hypocritical.
Can you imagine what kind of hell everyone could put the government through if somebody did that? Hehehe... Forward this to everyone in your address book! COMMUNIST ASSASINATE KGB KREMLIN PENTAGON WARHEAD lol... hilarious
Remember a couple of years ago when the Australian foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer totally pissed off Greenspan by telling the US press that the Fed was about to cut interest rates?
So it could just be an Australian problem about keeping secrecy. However, as an Australian, I'd prefer to think that this Echelon information was leaked on purpose (possibly on advice of the NSA, in line with some other posts), or maybe because we're sick of other countries stealing our ideas when it comes to new commercial opportunities (which IMHO is actually due to a lack of venture capital, and not theft of secrets).
Anyone who says something like this either:
a. Does not know enough about U.S. History and the birth of our nation
or
b. Has never been mistreated, harassed, falsely accused, suspected guilty before innocent, or otherwise royally screwed by their government or any other law enforcing body.
Those of us who are part of an "inferior" race, age group, social class, etc. realize what a danger this is.
Geez...I thought this post was about Eachelon and lack of privacy, how many four letter words your shivelled brain can form into a semi-intellegent sentence