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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.
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
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.
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)
Funny, and I agree. Someone moderate this AC comment up.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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?
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IIRC CBC carried a story a couple of years ago about CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) getting in trouble with the RCMP (mounties, Royal Canadian Mounted Police) over listening in for keywords in coversations. CSIS, which doesn't have the same mysticism around it as No Such Agency, has no government allocated rights to do this (thus the reason they got in trouble) but are reputed to anyway. Perhaps, under the Access to Information Act, someone could dig up something about them?
OFTC: By the community, for the community
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.
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
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
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
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
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)
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 and what army? Unless you're sitting on a couple of billion dollars for equipments costs, it would never happen. On top of that, eavesdropping on private communications lines is ILLEGAL. And believe me, if you could get an operation like this moving, they'd see it happen.
Moreover, Distributed.net works on one piece of information, encrypted with one key, over a number of YEARS. If they used heavier encryption than RC5 (which they undoubtedly do) it would take you a couple of thousand (or million) years just to decrypt one of their messages.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.."
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.....
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
But what has always kept me as a disbeliever is if this all was true, how come nothing ever seems to come out of it? How come the Oklahoma City bombing happened? How come the Columbine shootings happened? If this were all true, why didn't the NSA pick up on the upcoming events and make those guys "disappear"? How come the NSA hasn't shut down Slashdot because of the type of discussion that comes here? Why hasn't the NSA shut down the website that tell the world about these conspiracys? Maybe this is true, I frankly have no idea, but common sense tells me that the odds aren't that good. But that's just me.
This also means that the intelligence budget gets the political support of the business community; in other words, it's damned smart politics. (And it has exactly the same fishlike smell, don't it?)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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....