puppet wrote to us with a CNN article that's currently running. Apparently, the NSA is
drowning in information. The agency supposedly has too many targets, too much info and cannot sift through all of it. So, here's to sending out thousands of bogus signals for them to sort through! *grin*
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It had to happen eventually... our government is too paranoid for its own good.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Just means they need more funding from that nice Mr Clinton person.
Or are they just letting us know that they're not as scary as we think they are so it's all right, we can just forget about them?
White Rabbit
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
This was inevitable, unless the NSA somehow managed to get about a decade ahead of the rest of us in information management. There are just too many ways of gathering information.
As for the problems presented: tapping fibre may be tougher, but once you've tapped it you've huge amounts of information; much more than tapping mere copper would produce.
Also: the NSA used to have only one country to keep track of? Bullshit. I doubt that China, North korea et al have been left alone except during the last decade.
Somehow I suspect this isn't really us. Simple *bomb bomb bomb* *the president will fall* type stuff is unlikely to really even pass algorithmic muster.
I'm willing to keep pulling for it though... I drop a few phrases here and there in random emails. Maybe I should develop more friends in the Middle East...
-josh
If they make a distributed client at NSA, we could help them process all that delicious information. I'd love to get my hands on other people's secrets.
The KGB had a so great number of info, that It could'nt manage it :) P.S: for NSA people: nuclear, uranium, weapon, terrorism, Clinton, Kosovo, Majestic *that one hit a lot :)*
Information volume is growing exponentially - especially on the Internet, where it probably will have left non-online volume behind - and information-gathering power by any single entity is linear. Sooner or later it becomes an impossible task.
Unless they decentralize completely, and assign this to distributed nodes - a worm in each router, or something like that - which doesn't seem likely anytime soon, either.
Maybe they should release a distributed client for it. NoSuchCrackClient2000! I'd run it.
Apathy is a lesser known virtue.
terrorist Marxist FSF North Korea security South Africa nuclear DES Semtex KGB FBI Noriega colonel NSA SEAL Team 6 nuclear Ortega PLO supercomputer Treasury terrorist assassination Semtex [Hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance] Serbian fissionable FBI spy arrangements Kennedy Noriega cracking Nazi Ft. Meade Marxist Waco, Texas cryptographic genetic Cocaine jihad
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Don't believe this! It's misinformation intended to make us complacent, thinking that the NSA will miss our plans to Ussama bin Laden World Trade Center bomb President Clinton American Embassy Iran missile or what ever... they have plenty of capacity and just released this information to trap the smart guys who can see through their plans, cos THEY'RE the really dangerous ones.. oh. oops.
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
The NSA aren't the only people suffering from information overload. What about Jo Public?
Each day I've got access to around 120 channels of television, 40 radio stations, over 200 trade publications and some 400 hours of music and 230 books that I can choose from each day.
And then there's the internet. Gig upon gig upon gig of data available for my consumption. Perhaps I should start employing people just to absorb and review information for me each day and email me a digest!
Here's the problem with the NSA:
What do they do? attrition.org has some interesting ideas, not to mention a few facts. One thing is for certian hey sure spend a lot of money and generate a lot of international bad press.
Who do they protect? Do they protect the people, or the government? If they protect the government and that's it then they are unethical, immoral, and most importantly illegal. This puts the government in a dictatory position over the people. According to the US Constution we are to have a "representative " and "republican" form of government.
Getting back to the money: Echelon, which Australia supposedly says exsists - the EU and China sure hate the NSA - gee that's most of the world. The United States is gaining a lot of enemies because of the NSA - I wonder why... Essentially constutional rights can be usurped if the NSA says it is to "protect national security" or in laymans terms "usurp the governments power over the people". This is utter bullshit.
The US Fed. Government is crap in my opinion. They have alienated the states, and local governments. Tied up the busines owner and tax the hell out of the end person. For instance if my friend Mark was to make 2 thousand dollars more a YEAR he would be pushed into such a high tax bracket that he would _literally_ be paying 43 percent of his income to the IRS alone.
Are we going to let the Government be seperate of the people forever? Career politicians that make deals with commercial lobbists in order to have the funds for their next campaign? Hell everything is so commercialized anymore it's disgusting. The problem here is that the government does not need to make a profit, or spend money on crap programs such as "The study of the flow rate of Catsup" OR the NSA.
But then again, that's my opinion... what's yours?
Has nobody realised that CETI and other distributed clients in reality are funded by NSA and are used as dataanalyzers.
All the hype about keys etc is nothing but cosmetics.
Keep in mind that the NSA probably has filters to ignore any lists of suspicious word that are immediately followed by a smiley ;-)
I guess NSA should make their own distributed project so people can help the government invade their privacy themselves. Power to the people. Somebody should make a fake press release of the above and post it to segfault ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In that Cray FAQ, that the NSA owns the most Super Computers (near Fort Meade) than anyone else in the world. I for one, can barely comprehend what that many machines could be doing at full capacity (to make them worth their insane cost).
Maybe, THEY have a "distributed" client, between all of their massive super computers, to review ALL of the data pouring through the internet (every day??) ?
Scary thought...
-Dextius Alphaeus
-- Java is not a Jedi trait... "do, or do not, there is no try" --
The CIA, NSA, and the entire alphabet soup of intelligence agencies ARE for the most part people paid to absorb and review information each day, and to produce digests, handed to people over them who produce more digests, until it either gets to the President or gets dumped in a filing cabinet.
The skullduggery (asassinations and sabotage) are actually a secondary mission and not that common, especially in these post cold-war days.
If you don't have GnuPG or PGP, get it now, and start using it!
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.
Good point.
If something filters out of NSA, it's in their plan of action. It's not to get the public informed about what they are doing (this would obviously be a very strange behavior for the NSA).
Egoine.
The Internet creates mountains of public -- not secret -- data that needs to be analyzed -- a job for which expensive eavesdropping equipment is of no use.
Perhaps the best way to keep something secret is to make it public?
This doesn't dammage NSA, it's the opposite.
The essence of the message is not that the NSA doesn't do their job properly, it's that they need more power, money, etc. to do their job properly.
This is good for them. A clear path to a road for more funding. And as an interresting side-effect, it makes people believe they are not so dangerous, which is pretty good, obviously, from their point of view.
Egoine.
If you look at the Top 500 supercomputers, the Hitachi supercomputer at some Japanese university has a fraction of the processors of any of the other Crays and is still up in the top 5 I believe. Think what 10,000 of those could do. ;-)
Hahaha, wasn't the NSA playing a big role in restricting export of encryption software? Too bad! By enforcing silly, short-sighted, frog-in-the-well laws limiting the power of encryption software in the US, they've just shot themselves in the foot. Now the US is crippled with respect to encryption, and in the meantime, projects like GnuPG, being developed way beyond the reach of agencies like NSA, are giving everybody else, like the common everyday Joe, access to powerful encryption.
Let's see how much "intelligence" they can gather, when one day encryption is used by default on the Internet. Billions upon billions of encrypted transmissions across every Internet linkk everyday, 99% of which is irrelevent. Fine, use the most powerful computers and cracking tools and what-not against it, this is the point of diminishing returns. You spend 99% of your processing power to decode useless transmissions like letters the common Joe writes to his wife. If you ask me, this is a dead-end. A really dead end.
It's about time people start realizing that the age of the Internet necessitates a totally new, different set of rules, and totally new, different ways of doing things. Traditional methods are totally useless in this new medium. Wake up, people! :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
i believe this is representative of much more than just the NSA. We may be amused by this happening to the NSA but it is not so nice trying to deal with it yourself. (Spam for example)
Information overload has been exploited by the pr0n mongers. The free pics, have been drowned out by those sites that shout FREE, and then say adult check.
Search Engines can be exploited, Geocities, Angelfire, Xoom and the like can be used to set up pages shouting NAZI, SCIENTOLOGY, nigger, or Catholic, or Microsoft and shout down opinion groups you dont like, just as you can spread (unpopular) messages of your own.
Free Speech yes, but if you cannot get yourself noticed over the crowd of other people shouting...
You can deliberately create lots and lots of chaff and people will have a harder time finding what they really want.
For something a little more intelectual:
"Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption"
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt
This is not the most rigorous arguent, NSA is also tring to break encryption, and it is probably a weak comparison, hopefully the moderators will help sort the wheat form the chaff.
--
"Lets go to work" -- Resevoir Dogs
So when do we reach critical mass? As technology improves, and the power to encrypt and maintain your own privacy improves to the astronomical level -- i see one of two things happening.
1. The NSA routes around the problems using the U.S. government. Using new laws forbidding the use of private security and encryption (in the name of something like national security or other constitutional loophole) -- the NSA can then grow and be able to monitor all the informations on the many different channels it now comes around. This is a changing-the-rules to get around the critical mass. May happen. Though our constitution and the nature of the net make it difficult at best (unless we go behind a national firewall like china).
2. Critical mass is reached with no workable route around and the NSA is rendered fairly innefectual. Realizing they can't monitor every channel and can't limit the channels everyone can use, they start doing their real job and specifically targeting that information they need and find the criminals/terrorists that they need to. They won't be extrememly effective, but will more rely on tips or other info (like the police have to).
Perhaps these predictions are a bit simplistic. Okay maybe a bit more than a bit. But I believe that the essential point is critical mass will be reached, and they will either 1. change the rules to push back the critical mass, 2. succumb to it and have to operate like any other agency that isn't given root access to the world.
This in turn is a cover up move intended to draw away media attention from the impending invasion of Europe, to stop Intel from investing in Suse. And who is behind all this do you ask? Microsoft of course!!! They are the only ones who benifit from the P3 markings, which will be used to crack down on piracy of Microsoft Paint. By forcing all to use Pentium 3 and cutting investments in Linux Bill Gates will soon recover all ground lost, and with Eschelon to aid him his world domination plans are soon fulfilled.
I am so happy I found Slashdot, I get *ALL* my world news I need here.
;-)
************************************************ ***
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
The timing for last night's Voyager episode was perfect in its parallel to today's NSA story.
*spoilers below* (but it's only a Voyager episode)
7of9 makes a machine to download hoards of the ship's records (including all archives) down to her while she sleeps/regenerates.
Over a series of days, each time she awakes from this, she comes up with more and more elaborate conspiracy theories about the crew and the past 5 years to try to put order to the overwhelming mass of information which comes to her without order.
She gets irritable and starts pacing a lot (which isn't a bad thing necessarily) and starts telling certain people in secret what her theories are.
Eventually she has a theory about virtually everybody she knows (even Naomi Wildman).
The parallel breaks down though since she wasn't paranoid initially but became that way with overwhelming amounts of data to sift. But the NSA started out paranoid before they got overwhelmed.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Isn't this like drawing the attention of people away from the real issue? They should probably not be collecting this information in the first place! Now, instead of having a bunch of people shouting, "you shouldn't be doing this!", they have a group shouting, "HA! Told you it would never work!", whilst the NSA really can handle the information and just sits back and relaxes, confident in that noone thinks of the real issue any more.
Okay, I can understand that a lot of people out there have a real problem with the thought that the NSA may be listening to them. I can understand being mad at them for doing this, but do it really matter? No, it doesn't matter that they maybe be recording the conversation you had with your wife last night. It matters if you plan on blowing something up. In other words, if you don't have anything huge to hide, the NSA really doesn't care that much.
Now, can we get off the NSA fixation?
- Jack Holloway
Well I don't know... But if used up all this
fibers might produce some multiple of all the data
SETI produces in a given interval of time, and if
it also is encrypted just forget it.
I gess, anyway.
rm *
Interesting. Like most readers, I am suspicous of the motives, modus operandi and general existence of the NSA.
To hear any words coming out about them suffering teacup-in-front-of-a-Firehose syndrome is interesting, if not immediately trustworthy.
However, given that data gathering and the associated data management is their entire raison d'etre, I've always thought the best way the NSA could serve their country would be to be a bit more open about the tools, techniques and processes they use for this.
Think about it. We now live in a wired world. I have terrabytes of data at my fingertips - some local, most remote. Managing access to that is a nightmare, and there are no effective tools.
Why aren't the NSA making their work public on this? Don't you 'merkins, as tax payers, have a right to that information? Wouldn't that make you undisputed world-leaders in information management if you did?
Sod privacy, ignore conspiracy.. Fight for your rights to dominate the IT field. Get commercial interests involved (hey, if they don't buckle under to the almightly dollar, why would they stick to the law?).
henley, who is in a get-em-any-way-you-can mood today.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
When people look at the leaked numbers supposing to approximate the budget of NSA (last I saw, the estimate was in the $20billion range) and the number of people (maybe 30,000 or so), everyone seems to assume that they're all codebreaking wizards. This is stupid - it's like assuming that the CIA is full of James Bond people. What people seem to forget is what the money actually goes to, and you'll see why the NSA is having problems keeping up with it's mission:
With all these extra "duties" that people seem to forget about, I doubt that the NSA spends more than $1b on actual codebreaking each year. And, from the people I know that are involved in some of this, I've gleanned something that I think is significant: While I believe that the NSA retains probably a 10-year lead in the mathematics of cryptography, they have now less than 2 years lead in actual hardware Moore's Law has been very hard on the NSA. While they used to be able to count on having not only unheard-of advances in crypto knowledge but much, much faster and more advanced computers, they now no longer have the significantly advanced machinery. Being perhaps only a single interation ahead, rather than 4 or 5, cuts their advantage down by an order of magnitude.
So, you get an organization that faces an explosion of new requirements, heavier demands in it's old field(s), and a decrease in technological advantage over it's opponents, and well, Things Are Not Going Well At The NSA.
Mind you, they're still very sharp, and what they put their mind and resources to, I'm pretty sure will happen; the problem is now, that in order to focus on a problem, they end up neglecting other areas.
Fun, Fun, Fun!
-Erik
Disclaimer: I do not work for the NSA (or, at least, I can't say so...)
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I seriously don't understand what people have a problem with this for. In the current state of the worlds military powers, things are the most undefined that they ever were. (Wow, did that make sense? I think its still too early...) The government is rightly concerned about being a target for a terrorist attack. The other countries that we are not so friendly with would not resort to a full on attack. That would be ludicrous. The new undefined fields of battle are urban areas, and terrorism is the tactic of choice. We (the defense industry) listen to all kinds of briefings stating this over and over. The NSA has a job of trying to protect the government and the citizens of this country. They don't read everything they get.
They look for certain words. Whats wrong with this? Those that aren't doing anything wrong wont be messed with. Only those that have a reason to be afraid need to be. I just think its completely irresponsible to try to flood the system. It puts you on a list you probably don't want to be on. If they see a message like "That party was the bomb," or any other harmless message, they don't even blink twice. Poeple need to be aware of the overall picture of what is going on. This whole up in arms about privacy being invaded is lame. Unless you give _them_ a reason to invade your privacy, it wont be. Think about it...
-- toolie
*Cough*Cough* ECHELON *Cough*Cough* Evil *Cough*
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
This is just a hype to get more funding for the NSA ihmo.
What are they expecting to find over the internet:
Hi,
I'm new to this usenet group, could you please help me to make my virus more effective since it only kills 99% of the population. My dictator wants better results....
Or via telephone:
Hey Eric, I kinda bored right now. Let's bomb something today instead of tomorrow...
They are probably using it to track and gather personal information of high profile people (or who they think could be handy to track) instead of finding future terrorists or criminals.. If they find them it's a bonus but I don't think they are betting on it
Is generating massive quantities of hate in the USA and around the world "protecting the American way of life"?
Did the KGB and friends do a lot to protect "the Soviet way of life"? Maybe in the short term but not enough to last until now.
The NSA creates hate, then the NSA "protects" more, that creates more hate,...
The typical terrorist action-reaction spiral.
The US Government behaves internationally as a tyrant.
For all we know, the SETI distributed find-the-aliens project could have a little "rider" in it to help out our friends at No Such Agency. I mean, that program just cranks out numbers and the response isn't "found the key!" it's "Nope, no aliens found yet." Uh... ok... Guess I better keep running this until we do.
In fact, who knows what the hell any of the non-open source distributed programs are doing?
Wait a second... Who knows what ANY non open source program is REALLY doing?
Ah!
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So, jam echelon day worked after all :-)
---
Once again it's Bullshit day on Slashdot. You guys are the most ignorant, spoiled sons of bitches I've ever seen.
I'm going to start using PGP for every inocuous message sent my technology friends. (e.g. How was that sandwich yesterday? Mmmm mmm.)
At last I will have the warm fuzzies of *looking* like I'm up to no good.
I think that the real problem with the NSA's collection is that there is so much available information, you have to have a focus.
The NSA exists solely to give the US Government advanced warning of military actions around the world and to give our troops the best chances for success at beating on other countries. Have you ever thought about how the Director of the NSA is a military officer?
However, the NSA is controlled by the President. He is the Commander-in-Chief of the military (even if they won't admit it) He gives the direction to the NSA as far as where his priorities are. For example, his priorities (and therefore the nation's priorities) are most likely A) Protect the US troops in the former Yugoslavia from the Yugoslavians B) Protect the US Troops overseas from terrorism C) Identify and overwatch programs to develop or proliferate Weapons of Mass Destruction D) Get Ken Starr (not really, I don't think DIRNSA or the NSC would allow that). Beyond that, it's anybody's guess. Thing is, the President drives intelligence collection, and if he doesn't know what his foreign policy is, how the hell can the National Intelligence community?
The heart of the matter is that since most of the operations that our soldiers (or airmen, sailors, or jarheads, can you tell that I'm a part-time infantryman and military historian) are on deal with peacekeeping, the intelligence effort has changed from collecting on fixed military locations, with military activity that is fairly predictable and routine, to Small Groups of Pissed-off People (SGOPP's). These SGOPPs sometimes don't even have communications devices to look for. This includes insurgent guerillas (or freedom fighters, if you prefer) that only surface when they conduct raids.
However, if you are a fan of the government, or if you treasure the *relative* freedoms that we have, all is not lost. There are other intelligence organizations out there that have better capabilities when it comes to SGOPPs, such as the NRO, CNN, and CIA. Intelligence collection is a concerted effort between different agencies to either confirm or reject theories about what's happening.
By-the-by, I am not some neo-fascist, right-wing conservative. I live in Eugene, OR, and I love hippies, Saturday Market, and treesitters. Most of the time, I argue the "Other Side" just to get out an opposing view. I believe that you become what you hate. If you hate war, you create an army to protect youself. If you hate being spied on by the NSA, you in turn spy on the NSA.
Well, that's my $0.02.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
With your privacy going to the drain thanks to the NSA, your right to knowledge too thanks to the DMCA, your democracy allowing a certain form of corruption called lobbying... shouldn't it be time that Americans stop to be proud that they have still (mostly) the same constitution and change it to give more control back to the peoples?
America: Land of Freedom, my ass, I prefer to stay in Europe.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
The CNN report has all the signs of a puff piece. The two congressmen cited obviously are grinding a funding axe, and I'm sure if you followed the trail you'd find a press release was the inspiration to this story. This means of course that we'll be hearing a lot in the next few months about how badly NSA needs more money, a better legislative environment, blah-blah.
I dont think the NSA is not aware of every possible sorting algorithm that ever existed. On the other hand, CNN has never had too little DISinformation to manipulate our perception on such things.
Without music, life would be an error.
They would want you to think that... wouldn't they. Think about it... Hmm Why would the national security agency be letting the world know it can't handle security??? This would sure not be a good move for pr or such. I think that they just told us this because they want us to think that, so we let our guards down and don't worry so much about being cracked by the nsa... or maybe that's what they want us to think!! Maybe they just want us to think that they're not busted up because they really are and don't want to get cyberattacked up the wazoo! Thanks for reading my rant :-)
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
The same is true if some people send "terminologically-enhanced email" around in quantity; some analyst is reasonably likely to notice it, and find some way of filtering it to some degree.
What would be more likely to cause consternation would be to have larger quantities of encrypted traffic. If, for instance, CVS and FTP archives started using GPG to encrypt all file transfer information in transit, this would cause more traffic where it may make it hard to tell if it's suspicious or not.
The entertaining option would be to use something like unto stenography...
This would involve taking "raw" messages, compressing and encrypting them using something like Blowfish. And then transforming them into masses of "dangerous terminology," compressing and maybe again encrypting that, and then transmitting this.
Thus, if we start with message "M," we do: % cat M | gzip - | blowfish -e -k "tata, NSA" > N We now have a file, N, that's hopefully small, and reasonably encrypted.
Now, pass it through a transformation where we turn it into a sequence of "dangerous words." The simplest option looks like:
The obvious answer here is to pick the 256 best "dangerous words;" having only 64 would amount to a perverse equivalent to Base64 encoding; having 4000 words makes life more entertaining.
Another alternative would be not to pick words, but rather to pick phrases in some manner from some controversial essays/books, so that we're not merely getting random words, but rather sets of words that go together to appear to be in a vaguely meaningful sequence. Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures might have something to offer here. The idea is to pick from the ways that words were phrased in some text, so that the results at least vaguely look like something one might write.
You'll then get the original 500 byte message to expand out to something like 50K of "steganography." Fortunately, that 50K will be highly compressible English text. (Unless, of course, you picked some subversive book written in Russian as the "steganographic dictionary," in which case it'll be 50K of highly compressible Russian text.)
Compress again, encrypt into submission, and send that CVS patch over to the GnuCash archives...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The Internet creates mountains of public -- not secret -- data that needs to be analyzed
So... is this proof that there is an Echlon or something similar to it?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am
Perhaps what the NSA needs to do is make use of their mass popularity among the geek crowd and develop a distributed approach to cracking down on wrongful thinking.
Just imagine -- you download a screensaver that uses your system's spare cycles to analyze a chunk of suspicious data. If it should prove to be a legitimate thought crime, your system sends out the orders directly to the silent black helicopters. Let's see, we could call it SPOOK@home.
I think it's something we all owe to the NSA -- don't you?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
It also happens to have one of the largest standing armies in the world. And the fact that they (the army) are well fed, would lead to the starving farmers. Oh and the slight fact that they do have missles that CAN reach Japan, not to forget their biological weapon technology. All in all I think it is best NOT to underestimate a country that is so volitile. Because of its weak state it makes it much bigger problem.
toku...
And living conditions are still incredibly variable from state to state. Sure, we're all "Americans" here, but the two years I went to school in another state did seem almost like being in another country, as did the week I spent in San Francisco. YMMV, of course, and the change from NY to Pennsylvania doesn't feel as drastic. Hell, even upstate and downstate NY sometimes feel like foreign countries to each other.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
First of all...I've obtained an interesting perspective on all of the NSA gossip that I can't explain for a few reasons that I wont explain :) Secondly...I think if you all just thought about it the solution would become clear. If you are worried about all of their monitoring, forget about it. About their "Distribuited client"... hehe I think the best thing we could do right now is launch a huge string of virii...each containing some of the same code-this would act as OUR OWN distributed client/server architecture... I strongly beleive that all the power of computers we could "own" put together would at least equal any of the NSA's attempts. We could finally have the world to ourselves again-without the NSA and other agencies to worry about. Sound good? I'm planning... Reach me at: lennyu@mn.mediaone.net or: loren@visi.com Nick: lennyu on EFNet
1. Info-addicts like me end up in all kinds of interesting trouble at work (that's why I've semi-disappeared from
2. More importantly IMHO, the lowest common denominator is STILL pandered to. What good are multiple cable channels when they're all taken up by Monica Lewinsky, old B movies (that aren't even so-good-they're-bad), and syndicated re-runs of shows that weren't worth watching the first time around?
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Let's face it, facts like that are simply relics of what the intelligence industry used to be founded on. Back in the day, computer manufacturers could only make the top-of-the-line computers for governments and those with similar budgets. Now, the entire computer industry and its advances are being driven by the consumer market. Manufacturers make more profit designing faster consumer-aimed machines that will sell in the millions, rather than designing multimillion dollar machines that sell in the dozens. And new technology breakthroughs from R&D labs are out in the marketplace within a few years, far too quick for groups like the NSA to keep any serious computing advantage for long.
As someone else has already said, intelligence agencies are going to have to get SMARTER, rather than trying to fulfill their wet dream of an Orwellian overseeing of all the world's information.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
"More goverment" "Throw money at the problem and it will go away" If the government doesn't trust me with my guns, why should I trust them?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
1) the NSA is taking requests for eavesdropping from *way* too many people, and is probably operating illegally (domestic political targets).
2) the NSA is attempting to break too many decently encrypted messages.
If (2), us PGP users/advocates have hit them where it hurts.
Nobody got it. This article was a good shot to spread FUD on the public usage of encryption like GnuPG and PGP. I see this as an answer to the German endorsement of GnuPG.
So all the Americans will repeat in their bible hours "encryption is evil - God sees everything and NSA hears everything" and develop a broad public opinion against encryption. Then they can more easily ban encryption.
I wonder when the US will impose crypto IMPORT regulations. The US are developing into a totalitarian state. sorry about this... But I'm outta here soon...
Everyone by now knows how easy it is (for some gurus among us - not for me though) to gather information from internet/phone/GSM/other communications that it wouldn't be use to send information NSA can act with. How many bytes of information thay get? How many of that is encoded? To be short it would take more time to monitor it than it is worth it. Its better not to hide, because than they don't seek you ... ;) 'BE the difference that makes the difference' - JEWEL
If you want to *really* give the NSA a computational overhead, that is. And bear in mind, that the names and addresses, not the contents, are the parts of a message most likely to get it flagged for processing.
J00 H4V3 N0TH1NG T0 PH34R 4NYM0R3. TH3 NS4 H4S B33N H4QU3D BY M3. TH3Y W1LL N0 L0NG3R B3 4 PR0BL3M.
1N R3M3MB3R3NC3 0F MY 0WN1NG 0F TH3 NS4 1 W0ULD 4PR3CI3T3 1T 1F J00 W0ULD S4Y A PR4Y3R F0R M3 WH3N J00 4R3 34T1NG J00R TH4NKZG1V1NG D1NNER.
0TH34W1Z3 1 JUST M1GHT HAQ J00 N3XT! HA HA HA HA
RYD3 0R DY3
I wonder what the NSA is going to do to the guys at http://www.silentsurf.com
Are you sure all this noise isn't just to justify a funding increase? Two sympathetic congressmen making declarations on the floor of the House is hardly the reason for an NSA collapse. I'm not even sure this isn't a little "don't worry, NSA is human too"-type damage control from all the bad press their spy system has gotten recently. I forget the name for it but there's a term for this type of advertising where you try to come across as harmless. They just want a) more money, and b) for people not to worry and c) don't rush that crypto system into widespread use since we secret agencies are soooo overworked anyway.
Better still would be to use the Bible as the text onto which messages would be layered.
The "Bad Guys" might think you're a religious crank; raving a bit, but harmless.
This kind of amounts to a reverse form of Bible Codes analysis... There are cranks out there that think that God put special "codes" into the Bible that they can analyze; using the Bible in this way produces documents that are "Biblical" that actually do contain special codes.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Sure, and the cost of that is nothing but the death of tens of thousands of innocent Guatemalans, Vietnameese, Jugoslavians, Iraqi, Colombians... The list can go on.
And don't try the bs that they all had to die to protect democracy and freedom. Cause the US don't mind murderous regimes, as long as they play along nicely. Like Iraq, Turkey, Indonesia, The Talibans of Afganistan, Pre-Castro Cuba, Cambodia, pre-revolution Iran... Again, just to name a few.
If that is what it takes to uphold our way of life, I'd very much like to change my way of life right away.
"Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot."
If you ran a secret service like NSA, would you like people to think you had an easy job spying on them?
What I think the NSA is saying is indeed "Give us more money", but one neds to look further than that.
I think the root of the matter is more complex: it's the same as the US Millitary is facing. A job that is much more complex and difficult than before, with the expectation from the civilians that they do it with the same amount of money.
When this happens, there are only 2 solutions: either you give the organization more money to cope with all the additional responsibility they have to take on to satisfy their mission, or you change the mission. It's that simple.
What really needs to happen at the policy maker-level in the US gov't is a hard look at what we really want our National Security-related organizations to do. Hard priorities need to be made, that reflect current (and reasonably anticipated) realities, not the assumptions of 15 or 20 years ago. Then, the organizations need to be told the new mission definitions, and funded accordingly.
This isn't easy. Many organizations have a large institutional inertia, which resists change, and so far there has been little leadership from the policy-makers to do a complete overhaul of US National Security policy and directives to the organizations. It needs to be done; steps are being taken, but they need to be faster and more sweeping.
Hell, I don't have any problem giving the NSA more money, as long as they have a rational mission that reflects current realities, which I'm not so sure they do anymore.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Why would the NSA admit to not being able to handle their current load?
To justify a larger budget, or to justify something else? A larger budget seems like the obvious answer.. US history is chock full of examples of this sort of thinking. They create an imagined threat and enact into law things giving them more power. Keep an eye on what they do next...
"Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 even better than its predecessor" -- from the article. heh.
It is unlikely the NSA is "drowning" in information. First, 128 bit encryption has been opened up. Second, if there are specialists in cypher or encryptography in the world they work for the NSA. The US government is not going to injure or comprimise its ability to gather any type of intelligence, whether it is humint, electint or otherwise. Any discussion about the purpose of the NSA and constitutional impediment/infringement is polemic at best. The NSA is a government organization to provide, process, and advise the US exec Administration on national security matters. Period. Comments about not passing the algorithmic mustard are right on the mark. Simply typing idiosymantic crap will not buy a nickle's worth of attention. These algorithims are far too sophisticated for this droll. And they are managed by pattern equations which would cover yards of blackboard if font size 8. Sorry, I don't think we've really hit the information down side to the NSA. And let's not get too paranoid about the whole thing. I mean, really, what are you going do about it? Live in a "copper jar"?
Oh my god! Now it all makes perfect sense why NT runs like a dog! and IIS 4 just makes it worse!
Either that or those trained chimpanzes, err programmers, that write it are just too plain lazy to debug their code once in awhile....
Maybe SP6 doesnt stand for service pack 6, it stands for secret project 6! and its whole intent is to add new bugs until it pisses off admins to the point that we grab an axe and bury it in the head of the nearest person in the Server Room, thus slowly dumbing the world down to a controllable level....hey you never know.
-The government is bombarding us with paranoia waves! are you looking at me?
PS i wasnt being sarcastic about NT, it really DOES run like a dog!
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
The NSA refused to comment. CNN's sources were people outside the agency. Read the article again.
Though they sift through our lives, they do keep the country safe, i know i dont want terrorists in here.
icq:=22921393;
Okay, so the NSA is complaining that they're overburdened. Good. Now let's treble the noise introduced into the system and write our congressmen to keep them from getting any additional funding.
We mustn't get satisfied here - If noise is constant then Moore's law alone will help them out. And this may all be misinformation, since if anyone would be aware of the utility of that it would be the NSA.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
do i still count? :]
-mg.
Yeah, there's a standardization issue there. There are so many different Bible (and mine is the only truthfull one and not yours :-).
Does this mean that the recent Jam Echelon Day, where everyone was supposed to use terrorist-style keywords in their mails, will be used as an excuse for the NSA to funnel more money under innocuous headings in the Budget?
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, it's the CIA I'm scared of. Besides, one of the US signals intelligence bases here closed down recently, because they didn't need it any more....
deus does not exist but if he does
You: DOH!
Until the citizens of the respective countries you named take responsibility and control of their governments from despots, zealots, and the greedy/power hungry then none of them are innocent; They are no better than accomplices. The children are exceptions (of course).
Ignorance is bliss I suppose...
Or not. I recall that the "Jam Echelon" day wasn't a success (also reported by CNN). Could this just be creative misinformation to try and make the US gov't re-evaluate their "new" encryption stance, or otherwise lull us into a false sense of security? Digital data is not harder to work with than analog; it's easier! By its nature, it's easier to examine things bit-by-bit and score it with simple AI programs (and don't tell me there aren't a few Lisp/Prolog or Perl hackers in the NSA).
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I don't mean the NSA, either. I mean a rather vocal portion of the Slashdot readership. :-(
"Hey, let's post Echoelon fodder!" Yes, brilliant. First, it is pretty doubtful that putting random keywords at the bottom of your message traffic is going to fool even a computer. They're looking at where your message is from, where it is to, and what it is about. They really couldn't care less about your posts to comp.os.linux.misc with "plutonium" and "Iraq" at the bottom. Second, even if you did have an effect, all you are going to do is increase my tax bill. Increase the workload, and more people/computer power is needed, which is paid for out of my wallet. And while you're at it, you might actually be reducing the attention a real problem might otherwise get. Yeah, great idea.
Folks: Governments spy on other governments and organizations. If you think this is news, you really need to wake up and smell something. The CIA and NSA and Armed Forces and whoever else are going to go right on spying on other governments, because I can guarantee you, the other governments aren't going to stop spying on us.
Personally, I'm glad we have a reasonably good military and intelligence operation, because it greatly reduces the chances that we'll be speaking Chinese or Russian in the future, or be reduced to radioactive cinders for that matter.
And if you really think the government is out to get you, you should seek the aide of a professional psychiatrist. They can help you overcome your paranoia, and help you realize that the "X-Files" is just a TV show.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
North Korea is a large threat because of their alliegances.
If some of the older slash dotters around here might cast their minds back[might require some straining], we may remember exactly who the UN were fighting in the Korean War. Mostly it wasnt the North Koreans, but the Peoples Republic of China, who entered the war when McArthur proceeded to invade North Korean Territory after successfully capturing and securing South Korea.
Are they a big enough threat to national security for you?
People may comment, 'but china and the US are major economic partners etc etc etc. They wouldnt threaten their own economic situation just for North Korea'.
China will support and very likely defend North Korea if a war broke out.
Because North Korea provide a convenient military buffer between themselves and South Korea. Keep in mind that China is still a communist country, and would not be adverse to sacrificing their economic goals, to bolster their internal and external political/strategic goals. We should not try and project our capitalist views on another country, especially as many have mis-judged them quite badly in the past.
They do have the weapons, the manpower and the ability to wage effective war when they see fit. Those who doubt this should perhaps remember that china does have a long and proud military history.
So dont ever underestimate any countries ability to wage war. The smallest enemy, can become your deepest worry.
As to the question, 'is China a threat to National Security?', that is debatable, depending on US intelligence estimates and their related threat estimates of China's strategic Forces, but one would have to catagorize any nuclear capable enemy as a potential threat to ones national security.
Even if a their nuclear birds dont fly due to whatever, it isnt hard to sneak a low yeild nuclear weapon into a country with vast borders, such as the US, slap it in a delivery truck and park it within a kilometer of the white house. Or perhaps in Pearl Harbour. Or close by any strategic target you might want to name in the US.
Dont get me wrong, the US has relatively good defenses, both military and civilian, but they are not omnipotent. Hence where a project like echelon comes in, to fill the some of the gap. It aint pretty, not even legal, but from the point of view of any Chief of Staff, or nuke weary politico, knowing where the enemy may be, or may strike, or his plans, are invaluable.
So debate among yourselves the merits of echelon and your national security agency, but dont doubt their are threats out there, domestic and foreign, there certainly are, and they will perhaps join us when slashdot has its first nerds revoloution, overthrows world governments, installs linux on everything including my TV remote control, and software, pizza and caffeine beverages are free for all.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
If you don't like it, don't support it. Do what more and more people who despise the federales do, quit paying as many taxes as you can, income tax included.
"...the provisions of the Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged and being placed in the category of direct taxation..." Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103.
"The right to labor and to its protection from unlawful interference is a constitutional as well as a common-law right. Every man has a natural right to the fruits of his own industry." 48 Am Jur 2d, section 2, page 80.
Ergo, no new power means no new subjects of taxation. The previous income tax was invalidated for being repugnant to the Constitution, so why should this one not be? Because people who file tax returns are declaring, under penalty of perjury, that their "income" is taxable under the IRC, when in fact it is nothing more than compensation for labor, a Constitutionally protected right, not subject to taxation.
{STUPIDITY}
;]
{SARCASM}
d00dz! Jam echehl0n day WORKED! s0 L1k3 mayb3 TH1S m3ANS the PRESIDENT will CR4CK D0WN 0N US F0r stuff like BOMBS and ASSASSINATION!!!!!!!!!
..
Well, those of us who sent 50+ emails for Jam Echelon Day can dream, can't we?
{/STUPIDITY}
{/SARCASM}
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
"Innocent! HAH..."
By your own argument you have complicity in the U.S. financed murders of children in any of the above countries. And maybe some others, too.
For the sake of simplicity I will neglect the case of parents who don't dare speak out because doing so would result in their deaths, and thereby remove their ability to care for their children... thereby causing the deaths of those self-same children you are so concerned about.
Now that you have personally taken responsibility for your government's actions, I'm waiting to see you jump in and wrest control from the dickheads ordering the murders.
Still waiting...
I've just found out that "grits boy" is actually a NSA mainframe that's gone-insane/become-intelligent, and is trying to interact with humans for the first time.
Isn't this something? A 500 million dollar twit.
(Why yes, I always cruise at -1)
Remember, the results of strong encryption resemble random noise (statistically -- never mind header issues). If you want to waste their compute time, simply tack the results of a 'dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=1 | uuencode nothing.interesting' on to the end of each e-mail message you send. Don't even worry about the crypto for now -- it can be done later using this new covert channel. Simple, too -- you can even include it when sending to people who don't know about cryptography. Nothing is lost by telling them to ignore it. I knew that /dev/urandom thing had to be good for something! Let 'em turn their crackers loose on noise!
They're looking at where your message is from, where it is to, and what it is about. They really couldn't care less about your posts to comp.os.linux.misc with "plutonium" and "Iraq" at the bottom.
No, of course not; everybody knows all international criminals obey proper netiquette by posting only to alt.terrorist.evil. Or better yet, they send nice, properly addressed SMTP messages to "binladen@secrethideout.org"! No terrorist organization would even think of using a massively distributed system like Usenet, where tracking the receiver of a message is impossible and tracking the sender (assuming something like mixmaster is used) can be close to impossible.
You know, I just wanted to post this because I got a chuckle imagining alt.terrorist.evil, but now I wonder just how many alt.binaries.* posts actually have steganographic content.
Lord of the Flies
lordoftheflies@xechelon.org
http://www.xechelon.org/
It is true that some of the countries mentioned were ruled by despotic regimes. But what about the CIA's role in removing democratically elected governments in Australia and Chile?
In these cases, the democratically elected governments were not tyranical, merely a little too left-wing for the CIA's tastes...
Although we Australians merely had a Government removed with CIA assistance, the Chileans did not fare so well. And none of the thousands of people butchered by Pinochet in Chile were accomplices to tyranny...
Fixing copyright
Yes, very true. China is the only threat left to America and the world (except for the proliferation of Nuclear weapons to smaller states: but that is a different question). Had he said China, I would never have objected.
However, we don't say China, do we. Instead we trade with and suck up to China, completely ready to not give a shit about the people they kill or the countries they invade (Tibet). We send our leaders to China where they proceed to get down on their knees and praise the totalitarian, dehumanizing dictatorship. Even here on Slashdot, anyone saying that the Chinese regime is simply evil and should be crushed with any possible means was moderated down in exchange for long letters about the peace-loving, politically stable, economically sound government of China.
And so we have someone claiming to work for the NSA using little fish like North Korea (large standing army my ass: remember what happened to the last large standing army America fought) to justify continuing operation like if the cold war were still in full force.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
First off, Am I happy with the way the US Government has acted in the past? NO
Am I troubled by the incidents of US funding being used in ways that was not intended initially? YES
Does that make me a Baby-killer? perhaps.
Anyway, my previous posting was of course overly simplistic, but I personally get tired of constantly hearing people slam the various US Government agencies for past funding of regimes that (may) have had human rights abuses. It was/is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, but what were/are the alternatives? The US isn't exactly adept at resolving issues purely in a diplomatic fashion without at least a threat of violence or some other "covert" action.
During the Cold War era, we sacrificed certain levels of morality (turned a blind eye, if you will) in order to keep in check the spread of the USSR's influence. Of course, in retrospect, the choices that were made, and the dictators, despots, etc. that we supported were not that hospitable to their own citizens. What would you have done instead? Turned a blind eye? Let the USSR spread? or maybe come up with some other option that the politicians never considered?
Respectfully, I personally don't know.
Note: we in this context stands for the US Government and to a lesser extent me :)
Yeah, they're spooks, but they're *our* spooks.
I'm as much for protecting my personal privacy as anyone else here, but having grown up in the DC area and gone to school/worked/been neighbors with the folks who work for No Such Agency, I can see the need for Echelon. Folks outside the States certainly might not agree with me (along with a lot of US citizens), but the reason Americans enjoy the benefits of political and economic hegemony is from slightly shady actions and projects like this. Is it right to use this for economic gain? Perhaps not in a sense of absolute morality, but international relations isn't governed by morality, it's governed by the conflicting desires of sovereign (er, at least, in name for those states which function as puppets of US policy) states for economic, political, and military gain.
In this respect, the NSA & company are out there trying to keep the US ahead of the rest of the world. It might not be moral, but that's never stopped any other state from exploiting others for its advantage. One couldn't accuse the Brits, for example, of selecting the straight and narrow path every time ("Britain has no permanent allies, only permanent interests").
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
I guess maybe we /.ers are without guile, but if I was the NSA and I was happily churning through my work, the best possible scenario would be for someone to leak to CNN that I was way behind, emboldening my critics and adversarys to do what they will, thus playing into my hands.
Really, did you think the NSA would say anything true to CNN? You know that a lot of ex-government types work for the press in America, right? That getting an article like this onto CNN is probably a matter of Bob calling Alice and complaining about work, and Alice says maybe this is a good story, and Bob protests a little but never says no, and then you're all running around patting each other on the back for being so great while Bob and his minions at Ft Meade cackle with glee.
Perhaps it's time they get adept at it. Your beloved "democracy" was just a catchy word to put behind the real goal - ensuring the expansion of the global markets and US access to them.
Now, that the USSR is gone, the global market can spread and reach to every person on this planet, in order to create a zombie race of consumers which, currently, perhaps, 90% of "free" americans are...
Pre-digested opinions served on CNN to justify another illegal and immoral action to save "democracy" in the world and spread US influence over more people.
But, since the USSR is gone, real, old-fashioned democracy is not neccesary anymore to justify US actions and, already, people like you are getting their right stripped without even knowing (FISA courts anyone? Can't remember the correct name right now).
The cold war was never about democracy, but about money. Many new wars to "stop tyrant X from killing his poor people" are setups to boost US arms sales...
Whatever, to defend, or justify the US actions on the international stage is to be completely ignorant of the facts...
"But other countries do it too", you say. Sure they do, but the US, being the most powerful country in the world at this point has the greatest potential for evil and the greatest responsibility to lead by example...
saq
The United Nations is an organization which takes money from poor people in rich countries and gives it to rich people in poor countries. - saq
Nooooo! They can't know about all the pr0n I d/l every day!!!
Wow. More unfounded conspiracy theories... Get over it saq.
"Whatever, to defend, or justify the US actions on the international stage is to be completely ignorant of the facts..."
Were's your "facts"? Love to see them saq...
...at http://www.nsa.gov:8080/about_nsa/mission .html they are in the business of "The ability to understand the secret communications of our foreign adversaries while protecting our own communications -- a capability in which the United States leads the world -- gives our nation a unique advantage." So now we know.
Until relatively recently, the NSA wouldn't get mentioned much in the popular press. (i.e., movies, television, etc.) Most conspiracy theory plots would use the CIA as the default 'shadow agency'.
Today, you have them mentioned in everything from "Good Will Hunting" to "My Fellow Americans" and so on. Thus, everyone knows about them, and soon everyone and his kid brother that works in the Govt. realizes 'hey! they're a Govt. Agency just like us! Let's ask them for help!' and next thing you know, PHB's from the Dept of Agr are pestering them.
They need to find a way to quietly disappear again for a while to get their real work done...
I think the obvious answer for the NSA is to create a nice looking screen saver that also allows the computer to process some codebreaking and send the information back to the NSA. Sort of like the SETI@home screensaver project that came out this year.
grumgrum
What is the threat? Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, China, North Korea, Russia plus transnational issues. Why? Terrorism, particularly state-sponsored terrorism, is probably the greatest danger. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (one of those transnational issues thingies) is correlated to the threat from terrorism. The fundamentally open nature of this country leaves us more open to such dangers than more restrictive regimes. National security organizations are part of the price we pay to maintain an open society -- better, in my opinion, such agencies than a structurally restricitive society.
The strategic deterrent built up against the Soviet threat is based on the expectation that one can tell where a strike originated. As such it is equally effective against a Chinese strategic threat. If the delivery mechanism is a rental van instead of a ballistic missile the difficulty of locating the source is great. If the relationship between the striking country and the people who actually carry out the attack is believably deniable how do we respond?
Add to terrorism your own favorite threats (narcotics trafficking, hostile intelligence collection, and -- if it bothers you -- the potential spread of communism or particular flavor of fundamentalism espoused in Iran and there is a mission that agencies like NSA should be charged to perform.
The environment they face is one in which increasing amounts of useless information are moving at greater and greater speed. Within that vast data set is a relatively absolute (I believe) amount of information of some value (what have you had to say lately that anyone would really care about from a national security perspective?). The problem is getting harder to solve as the haystack gets larger and the needle stays the same size.
Another part of the environment is the shift in demand for the very best and brightest technical folks. There are much more pleasant environments to work in than national security support (even as a contractor, much less as an employee). Salaries and facilities are better working on the next generation of AT&T switches, or Qualcomm phones, or GE cat-scans than pounding away on the target of the day. The technology and the challenges are as good or better in the real world.
So what the heck will NSA do with more money? They can't really hire more people (at least not of the caliber necessary to address their problem set). I tend to believe the time has come for a fundamental restructing of our national security infrastructure (including recruiting, training and retention in the armed services).
What should it look like? I'm not completely sure. Certainly it should be more agile, more open to outside advances, more clear about what is and is not in the job jar.
I wish them luck. It isn't my problem anymore.
If you think the GOP would be more interested in a smaller intel community, that's only because you either never knew or deliberately forgot what George H. W. Bush did before being elected.
Bytes on the Internet may have grown exponentially. But information hasn't.
You know, I just wanted to post this because I got a chuckle imagining alt.terrorist.evil, but now I wonder just how many alt.binaries.* posts actually have steganographic content.
Believe it or not, this hits on my point exactly.
Do you really think a terrorist is going to post all their plans plaintext on Usenet? Why don't they just run front page adds in the New York Times (free registration required) instead?
The fact of that matter is, the people in alt.kill-the-president (or those posting in comp.os.linux.misc who should be posting alt.kill-the-president) are exactly the sorts of shallow kooks that the NSA is not interested in.
The NSA is interested in real threats, not (1) nutcases who don't do more then make a lot of noise or (2) people who pretend to be be nutcases by posting random keywords. You're just wasting my tax dollars. Cut it out.
BTW, great subject line. Calling me a "fool" obviously proves your intellectual superiority over me.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The NSA is interested in real threats, not (1) nutcases who don't do more then make a lot of noise or (2) people who pretend to be be nutcases by posting random keywords.
You're just wasting my tax dollars. Cut it out.
So which is it? Does posting gobs of "echelon keywords" in cleartext bog down the NSA or not?
If it does, then the people posting them are doing exactly what they intended to, and your "adults acting like children" post was foolish. (By the way, is it gall or just a short attention span that causes you to complain about an inflammatory subject line, which was a reply to a post with an inflammatory subject line?)
If it doesn't, then why are you complaining about your "wasted tax dollars"?
Either way, how on earth do you come to the conclusion that your tax dollars aren't being wasted by the NSA, who commands multi billion dollar budgets to spy on you; they're being wasted by the trivial protests intended to make that espionage harder?
Oh, that brings up one last point - you don't seem to grok "Jam Echelon" in the first place. The point is to raise awareness of the downright criminal desire of government agencies to spy on innocent citizens; any actual hinderance to those agencies is just gravy.
Now, a bit further off-topic: from my experience, there's a lot of people in the community who percieve NSA to be the embodiment of evil, and much fewer who are cheering for them (or may be the former are simply more vocal?)
Well, wake up, boys and girls - NSA makes sure that you keep HAVING your so-much-cherished freedom. Most of their operations are directed outside US borders, at people whose aim is to harm US citizens or US interests.
And when some juvenile sitting comfortably in his home in New York starts yelling "Let's cripple NSA!", just try to remember that their primary function is making sure that a lot of people (and yes, they exist) who want to rid the world of your presence can not do so, by providing your government with intelligence needed to protect your behind.
Oh, and that extra bit of info which their Cray didn't crunch because you think "nsa-triggering" .sig is way cool and is a good way to spend Cray's CPU cycles, may well mean the difference between your young neighbour serving in the US Army coming home to parents or getting killed. Remember, in modern warfare, information and logistics is what wins the war.
Yes, the sinister "Mercury Rising" types are way more sexy to imagine, but guess what, for most part, NSA is inhabited by fellow geeks trying to do good things for their country.
-DVK, the intelligence-friendly geek ;(
Discalimer: I don't work for NSA, or US government in general (although I did get a job offer from No Such Agency while in college - had to turn them down for i'm-not-a-citizen yet reason
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
The EXFO Live Fiber Detector, along with the 3M Photodyne tool work in a similar way: Momentarily bend an optical fiber and catch some of the photons that wander out. They can distinguish between a dark fiber, one with an "optical tone" (1kHz modulated light), and one with a live signal on it. The question is, are there enough photons there to reconstruct the actual signal, or just enough to distinguish it?
At the office end, ADC makes Optical Splitters which are perfect for monitoring optical traffic, just like the MON jacks built into most copper (T-1 and T-3) cross-connect systems. The only problem here is that the NSA has to make their presence known, and might have to present *gasp* a warrant!
Technically, it's trivial to get at the signal in question. Whether they can do anything with the data at that point, is a much more difficult question to answer.
Aside from the obvious problem of sifting through all the voice and data traffic on these lines, you need to identify the parties involved in an interesting call. This would require monitoring the SS7 link and possibly having access to the SCP(s) involved. Simply hearing a conversation doesn't do a lot of good unless you know who was speaking.
Claiming... Let it pass, let it pass.
Anyway, regardless of the DPRK army, the largest threat they have to us (and I don't really worry too much about China, because we can't predict their recent behavior with any accuracy at all) is the missiles. If you had been following the news lately, the DaePoDong II missiles that the DPRK has test fired (remember the "sattelite" launch over Japan?) are capable of hitting Alaska and Hawaii today. They are (according to open press, since I'm not going to get in trouble with classified stuff) working on improved third stage systems, which would allow them to hit California.
Is THAT a big enough threat for you? I'm not an alarmist, and I personally believe we should let South Korea fend for itself, as well as that Yugoslavian morass, but I'm not making policy, I just have to pay attention to my little piece of the pie. Since that piece is Korea, I do tend to notice the problems and dangers there more quickly than elsewhere. Mea Culpa.
Illegitimi non carborundum
I thought long and hard about just ignoring this, as it is patently offensive to my beliefs and the beliefs of everyone I know in the Army.
:-)
However, the Nuremberg Defense does not work in the modern U.S. military, because we are told to follow the LAWFUL orders of those over us. So, we would not be following the "meta-orders" we swore to uphold (protect the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic) if we did anything which was illegal as we understand the laws of war and of international treaties.
With all that said, I don't personally believe that the Echelon program is evil or illegal. I don't particularly like the idea that it exists and may be watching me, but that's for larger bodies to wrestle with. For example, the U.S. Congress called DIRNSA to testify recently (a couple months ago) on the Echelon program. He refused. Now, THAT, IMO, is illegal. I can't imagine that any appointed bureaucrat can say no to the U.S. Legislature.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I'm sure someone much better versed in Executive-vs-Legislative branch policies will pipe up soon enough.
Illegitimi non carborundum
So which is it? Does posting gobs of "echelon keywords" in cleartext bog down the NSA or not?
...the NSA, who commands multi billion dollar budgets to spy on you...
:-)
Like I said in my first message:
It is pretty doubtful that putting random keywords at the bottom of your message traffic is going to fool even a computer... even if you did have an effect, all you are going to do is increase my tax bill.
At some point or other, Echelon is going to clue in to the fact that you're not a terrorist, and dump your message out of whatever queue it's in. If it is sooner, then you accomplish nothing, if it is later, you're wasting my money. Get it?
Where do you get that? They're spying on other countries and international organizations, not you and me. They couldn't care less about US citizens, unless said citizens are the other end of a comm to some middle-eastern terroist or whatever.
[How are tax dollars] being wasted by the trivial protests intended to make that espionage harder?
I agree that any impact is likely going to be trivial compared to the overall cost. But if that is the case, why do you bother?
The point is to raise awareness of the downright criminal desire of government agencies to spy on innocent citizens...
If the point is to raise awareness, then fine. But wouldn't a short tagline saying "The NSA is doing so-and-so, check out this website for more!" do a better job?
By the way, is it gall or just a short attention span that causes you to complain about an inflammatory subject line, which was a reply to a post with an inflammatory subject line?
Gall. Okay, so I guess I deserved to be flamed for that one. Sorry.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
sign me up.
Remember that everyone who works for the NSA is also an American citizen, who knows the Constitution and probably knows the laws regarding searches and seizure, and intelligence collection on U.S. citizens, far better than most of us do. Heck, even in the incredibly conspiratorial movie "Enemy of the State," the NSA guy only got his resources to spy by promising that this was a "legit Op", and he ended up getting nailed by higher-ups in the NSA when it was found out that he was using NSA assets to spy on Americans. People who live in foreign countries may have just cause to be pissed (and evidently the whole European Union is getting pissed), but Americans really don't - the NSA isn't allowed to spy on American citizens, and every individual who works for the NSA knows this.
I don't believe that the NSA has the ability to crack strong encryption, as that would require fundamental mathematical breakthroughs that many people feel are impossible. While some of their vast computer network may be dedicated to breaking weak encryption, and a little more may be doing voice recognition and translation of phone conversations, most if it is probably running fairly simple searches on unimaginably vast streams of unencrypted data. If you don't want the NSA to read your messages, just encrypt them with strong encryption.
Also remember that spying on other countries' electronic communications is only half of the NSA's job. The other half is ensuring the security of our own military, intelligence, and diplomatic communication.
To those who seeded their personal emails with keywords, way to go. But so much of that stuff made its way onto the public byways of the net, there's another effect worth mentioning. That day is also the "New Event Horizon for Research on Intelligence Agencies, Terrorist Studies and Other Interesting Subjects." It did _not_ really muck up the advanced filters employed by intelligence agencies. People discussing nasty acts do not often use the comic book words you see in news stories. They use subtlety. The spooks have the 'context' thing so well developed that a red herring list of terms will score low. Besides, based on your prior recorded correspondence they already know that you make less than $20k a year, like to joke around about bombs and have a cat with one ear. What it did do was to muck the search engines up for the rest of us. From now on, anyone with a real interest in spies and their trade is going to be presented with -- everything. All the cheeky inclusions, word lists, suggestive sigs... and the sigs will go on and on. Kind search engines might include a 'exclude E-Day' checkbox, but they probably won't. I much prefer taking the fight to the opposite end of the entropy rainbow. Use encryption and steganography for personals -- let's keep the public stuff -relevant-! -Mr. d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
"I personally get tired of constantly hearing people slam the various US Government agencies for past funding of regimes that (may) have had human rights abuses. It was/is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, but what were/are the alternatives?"
Exactly my sentiment. Who knows what the alternatives were to many of the actions that our government, or agents thereof, have taken? I seriously doubt we (the general public) could make any assumptions as to what our government has done and why. Certainly, there are many extraneous factors which have an influence which we cannot begin to comprehend and many times, I'm sure, it is choosing between the lesser of two or (possibly many more) evils. Which is the least evil? What a weighty decision, eh?
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I think, given the gist of the thread we are on, that we have somehow justified the existance of the NSA. We can't even agree on ONE true threat to National Security in the US(Apart from Thermonuclear weapons)
If the issue can be so convoluted for a group of educated, well adjusted(my friends call me moon unit), and according to us, well informed people, imagine the job the NSA or the CIA has?
Instead of one large menacing enemy, such as the Soviet Union to concentrate on, we have 10,000 smaller but equally threatening enemies. NSA have to account for them all, cause if they dont, im sure the media, and us the public, will rip them limb from limb cause someone got through the net....again...
so what do we want? We want an NSA with carte blanch to operate and take out all the 'bad guys' John Wayne style, but we dont want them to have any power to do so or the ability to use technology to track them...
damn i already got a headache....
There is a balance out there im sure, but as usual, not one that will keep everyone happy.
Technology and the Net is our playground, and we tend to like keeping it free from cops, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, NCA, ASIO, DGSE, KGB, GRU, ONI, ATF, and ELMO,(I hate that muppet), we dont want censorship, we dont want governments trying to regulate our Internet Usage, and hoooray for us, damn straight....so what do we do about terrorism?
We have to do something, cause us innocent bystanders are the targets, it wont be bill clinton, unless an all female jilted lover terrorist group emerges from akansas.
Once again there must be a balance, but im sure it will piss off greatly. The price we will pay for peace, is eternal aggrivation, and most likely, lack of privacy:)
Dont let the Bastards grind you down.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
walk when Congress wanted to find out what all the money was being spent on
Congress was annoyed enough by this that it "has drafted a bill requiring it (the NSA) to
account for itself, while the House Government Reform Committee has decided
to grill NSA officials in hearings early next year."
I'm too generous, I really am. Quit bitchin and
k 2B7cNaJ9OqRQiQoi
b Fy0y1xy2bCbFsYij
q foypgF1RaC0fABEB
h c3RlckBuc2EuZ292
j vXWcYw6p1iW+0euR
Z jCvSFTNu/5X1qn1r
9 cNMylZHRef3PZCQa
x hNYl/NiH2GzXYbNe
M c+m823vVltm9l/f+
v DNGi9uE=
flood the NSA with your very own NSA PGPkey! This
was reversed engineered while debugging some
Microsoft Crap Code. As far as I know, they don't
publish their key, and only correspond with the
great unwashed via fax. This would be a better
hack than the silly attempt to flood Eschelon.
How about thousands of PGPEmails with Megs of
useless crap that those Cray Computers would have
to spend endless hours trying to decrypt. Better
than sex, and it's free! You all give them too
credit. They may have awsome resources to pull from, but in the end they are finite ! A low tech
approach to a high tech pain in the ass. Please
don't thank me, really !
Type Bits/KeyID Date User ID
pub 1024/51682D1F 1999/09/06 NSA's Microsoft CAPI key
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.3i
mQCPAzfTdH0AAAEEALqOFf7jzRYPtHz5PitNhCYVryPwZZJ
e1YdpAH/OQh3HSQ/butPnjUZdukPB/0izQmczXHoW5f1Q5r
4ReQ7QHrMb8nvGZ7OW/YKDCX2LOGnMdRGjSW6CmjK7rW0ve
AAG0LU5TQSdzIE1pY3Jvc29mdCBDQVBJIGtleSA8cG9zdG1
PokBFQMFEDfTdJE+e8qoKLJFUQEBHnsH/ihUe7oq6DhU1dJ
YfZjwpzPotQ8m5rC7FrJDUbgqQjoFDr++zN9kD9bjNPVUx/
it7IHU/6Aem1h4Bs6KE5MPpjKRxRkqQjbW4f0cgXg6+LV+V
5DOI5crQ0IWyjQCt9br07BL9C3X5WHNNRsRIr9WiVfPK8ey
UWjaS2KuJNVvozjxGymcnNTwJltZK4RLZxo05FW2InJbtEf
n2iYBAaDs6I/0v2AcVKNy19Cjncc3wQZkaiIYqfPZL19kT8
=PhHT
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Again, we go back to the basic concept of "neither confirm or deny" that is so precious to spooks. It is a good rule, as it keeps your enemies guessing. We PROBABLY have Echelon. But, are you 100% sure? I'm not. It sure sounds like it exists, though.
Everyone I know that works for the intell community has always acted appropriately with regard to intel oversight and not doing illegal operations. Based on my experience in the small piece of the SIGINT pie that I work with, I would have to assume that the rest of the NSA is also conscientious about not doing anything wrong.
The definition of eavesdropping is where things get interesting. If you take a look at the intelligence oversight information page, you'd see the definition discussed a bit. Basically, if we inadvertantly pick up something non-target, we cannot keep it. The only exception is for things the Attorney General has to approve case-by-case. As I said, everyone I know is honest and follows the rules. I would like to believe the rest of the community is as well. And, honestly, most people are incredibly dull, so who wants to spy on them anyway? (joke, folks)
Illegitimi non carborundum
So, i'm guessing the mention of bomb and president in one message would be even more information for the non-existent NSA and echelon?