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.

Comments

Start with the multinationals

[jd]

1. The large, international corporations are potentially losing BILLIONS of dollars in business through commercially sensitive information being stolen.
2. For the -LAST TIME-, nobody in their right minds would code Echelon with a keyword search. The NSA are likely to have tools ever so slightly more advanced than grep! This is NOT a keyword search, this is pattern-recognition, tuned to commercially and politically sensitive information.
3. More than likely, Echelon is partially funded by the sale of secrets. Makes for a less troublesome demand on the so-called "black budget". Sales of commercial secrets are well established, now, but it could equally be used to sell information about politicians out of favour with the US (or NSA) to terrorists or extremists in those countries. The CIA is known to be involved in drug smuggling, so being able to chart which customs agents are where, and locate where the best prices are, would obviously be an advantage.
4. The interception of communications between European Government officials and their constituants is HARDLY "anti-terrorist", unless the US has declared war on France and I've just not noticed it.
5. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans for a reason. Evading this law, by getting the British to spy on them, on behalf of the NSA, and then give the NSA the information afterwards, is in serious breach of the spirit of the law. If you don't -like- the law, get it changed. Unless you're convinced that you really ARE doing something wrong - genuinely wrong, not just defying an authority you don't happen to like. By breaking the law in this way, those involved in Echelon demonstrate that they acknowledge that there is NO justification for their actions and that they admit, somewhere in themselves, that what they're doing is plain wrong.

Some information among the noise

[ajs]

Some things to keep in mind:

1. The NSA has been around (we think, and have good reason to believe) just about as long as the CIA (e.g. since late WWII). Some posts contradict this with suggestions that the NSA has been around as long as Morse. This may be true if you count other covert agencies, and there may be some legacy of monitoring infrastructure, there, but I don't think so. The NSA was the result of a joit US/UK attempt to make sure that the kinds of things that happened in WWII could never happen again (e.g. Pearl Harbor and the V2s). A funny thing to note is that, while I think that the NSA needs to be slapped down, and hard; I really do think that this kind of monitoring is generally a good thing. It just needs much tighter control and oversight. Privacy groups like the EFF should certainly be consulted, and backdoors like the FBI proposals should just be shot; but the idea is sound. We can't afford to miss out on a slip-up, and if we're ever in another large-scale war, we certainly want the kind of SIGINT and code-breaking capabilities that we had during WWII.
   
   
2. The NSA's mandate is international, and efforts like FedNET underscore the likelyhood that the NSA does not monitor STRICTLY domestic communications. Of course definitions get tricky, here. It's most likely that any communications that involve long-distance radio or microwave including satellite are monitored. Also, if your packets happen to bounce through Canada or other countries on their way, they will almost certainly get bagged.
   
   
3. Voice is monitored. This much is almost certain these days. Imagine, if you will, a regular-expression against patterns in an audio stream. That's probably what's going on. If you say "Iraq" over an international phone-call, your call will be flagged, and transcribed as well as the best speach-to-text that money can buy will get you.
   
   
4. Never trust that using encryption makes you safe. It doesn't. In fact it identifies you as a target for code-cracking.
   

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....