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Echelon Confirmed by Australians 323

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-I-see dept.
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.
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Echelon Confirmed by Australians More

Echelon Confirmed by Australians

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  • I did the search for Echelon on the Sunday web site, and there's two links, which I reproduce below.

    Big Brother Is Listening [ninemsn.com.au]
    Echelon system: FAQ and website links [ninemsn.com.au]

    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.

    --
  • Anybody remember "Bait for the NSA Line Eater"?

    Sure, and it still happens, right? See Results from "Jam Echelon Day" [slashdot.org] on this site, for instance. Or read cypherpunks' e-mail; some people still have such a .sig
  • I seem to recall a report by 20/20 a few years back about a radio listening post Russia maintained in Cuba. The gist of the report was that since the fall of the USSR (and perhaps before) the outpost had been used to provide commercial information to Russian bussinesses by eavesdropping on telephone/fax/data communications in the Florida area. This was possible due to the proximity and the large scale use of both cell phones, and ground stations to/from sattelite communication for telephone calls/faxes.
  • The article says
    Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to
    but it also suggests that the system works by monitoring satellites. So what about international phone calls that don't go via satellite?

    Certainly phone calls within Europe don't go by satellite, and not all transatlantic ones do. There's even a prefix you can dial to ensure you get a cable connection - and you can tell it works because it doesn't have the characteristic satellite delay (you can work out the height required for geostationary satellites and calculate the speed-of-light delay - it's about a quarter of a second if I remember correctly).

    So, do they have separate monitoring for the cables?

  • So you're saying that you send messages that might have some national-security-threatening content? BINGO! Probable cause, you're now under investigation. Have a nice day.

    Or maybe you're just worried that when you jokingly suggest to your friend that it's too bad they bombed the World Trade Center instead of Congress you'll end up losing your job and possibly your liberty because they won't get the joke?

    Therein lie the rub. When Clinton was first elected, one of the Senators from the Carolinas suggested it might be best if he didn't come to their state. If he were anyone else he would've been arrested for threatening the President.

    The real danger is the lives that'll be ruined due to a federal investigation of nonsense. Go ahead and explain to your boss that the FBI guys who came to interview you (and HIM) were only kidding. See how long you keep your job. Even if nothing ever happens they'll always suspect you.

  • Re:Who cares? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The reason it matters (to me) is because the government has done nasty things in the past (and denied it), despite what the original poster believes. They've dumped chemicals on the public (Clinton admitted this recently...happened in the 50s or 60s, but he admitted it), sold guns to anti-american terrorists, etc. All it takes is one lie to ruin trust. You might trust the government to know all sorts of personal information about you. I don't - I just don't feel safe. Sure, I'm law abiding, but I'm generally liberal, pro-environment, religiously open-minded, etc. Maybe over the next few years the government becomes radically religious-conservative...suddenly I'm a subversive activist!

    You're right about people calling the original post a troll, though. I'll echo your sentiments: Fer Christ's sake! A guy can't have a fucking opinion here?

    Heh, felt like cursing. :)
  • Nice thing about NSA : no "ops" section. I've looked at the job listings on their websites (you can't run ops without field agents). CIA : needs field agents. NSA : needs mathematicians and cs'ers

    Fortunately, geeks aren't good at killing people. :)

  • Okay, I'm going to use decimal here, not binary (powers of 2). I do this simply because I have a handy reference, thanks to Roy Williams at CalTech, and his Data Powers of Ten [caltech.edu] page.

    Petabyte: 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

    • 1 Petabyte: 100 printed collections of the entire US Library of Congress(!)

    Now, I am substituting descriptions from different parts of his site. He actually compares a petabyte to 3 years of satelite data... but I can't visualize that very easily.

    I can visualize the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is a big place. Now, you want to stuff all that through a wire (or fiber... they had that in '89) 100 times in 30 seconds!! Incredible. I think someone had their exponents a little off.

    This sounds like people I know who swear that government spy satelites can read your watch.

    Oh, just one more thing, in the interests of accuracy. Just because I like base 10 instead of powers of 2, the numbers in my description may be off by, oh, say... 117,253 GIGAbytes . This minor inconvenience (errata, call it what you will) is brought to you by Microsoft, Intel, and the Windows calculator.

  • I have yet to see any report on Echelon that cannot be traced back to Duncan Campbell. Furthermore this one just rehashes some stale news. This Australian "confirmation" of Echelon goes back to last year at least. The BBC should be able to do better than this.

    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.

  • Let's take your example of the silo. Paint a thousand houses, trees and cabbage paches in mock camoflage colours, and place a HUGE neon sign by each, pronouncing it a 500 megaton silo.

    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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Processing power has to be expended on every message, or else Echelon will fail. Let's take your example, that if a person sends out junk headers and such in their e-mail with "tripwords" in it, Echelon will filter them out. OK. Great. We now know that this person is trying to make us waste survelliance time so we'll ignore him. Where is the flaw in this plan? Oh yeah. A terrorist could send out junk mail with junk tripwords in it for a few years, then be relatively secure from the NSA's snooping. That is the problem with this type of system. You have to watch everything, all the time or else you'll miss the most important event, the one you're looking for.
  • Yes, I am from Oz, and yes, I have done some work in this area.

    I have been on the site where this work is done, and all I can say is - Panic Not. There is an awful lot of traffic to be monitored, so the focus of the equipment is very narrow. Even with all of the gear that they have got, they still only get to monitor a very small portion of the stuff that is really interesting.

    If you want to go look at the gear - it is just out of Alice Springs, on the road to Ayers Rock. The most intersting thing about the whole site is the Yanks - the Australian facilities are fairly unassuming looking affairs, but this base (Pine Gap) has lots of Yanks in camo fatigues and sunglasses toting guns, and driving around in left hand drive cars on the wrong side of the road.

    The other reason not to panic (about echelon) is that around the same area (within a days drive), there are some much much more interesting things.

    For example, in a certain area, you can drive off the road for some distance, right in the middle of fscking no-where and you will find a series of trapdoors in the bare dirt. Open them up , and climb down the ladder into a small cylindrical bunker about 2 meters across and 4 meters deep. The bunker is full of thick wires coming out of the ground and going to ... who knows where ? Right in the middle of this bunker is a little 68000 based computer chugging away quietly doing data aquisition. It is completely sureal being in this bunker, with nothing but hundreds of miles of dead silent red soil bush around you.

    Also, about another days drive in the same area, is an even more amazing site ... absolutely nothing for miles, and then this thing hidden behind a hill with an array of massive diesel engines chugging away. Nearby is a big metal grid on the ground near what appears to be antennas - walk over this at the wrong time of day and watch the hairs stand up on your head (like a Van Der Graph generator). Extremely cool .. but I cannot tell you what it is for :)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Funny, and I agree. Someone moderate this AC comment up.
  • Abortion has little to do with Echelon.

    But by its definition fetuses are the subject of the action, not babies. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that a women's right to an abortion is protected by the Constituion. It is a hard choice to make, but a women's right to choose what happens to her own body is an absolute necessity for equality of the sexes.

    Though it may seem a little sad, recent studies have linked the present decrease in crime in the U.S.A to safe and legal abortion. I don't think they count the anti-abortionists who shoot health care providers and volunteers in these statistics though.
  • Actually the NSA is restricted from a few things:

    1. They may not collect in the US.
    2. They may not collect in the country they are in.
    3. They may not collect on US citizens.

    The obvious caveat to all the conspiracy nuts is that they are only barred these actions in their public rules.
  • "The government has never been against anyone citizen or corperation of the United States"

    Well, maybe not overtly, but check this out:
    http://www.bullatoms ci.org/issues/1994/nd94/nd94bulletins.html [bullatomsci.org]
    http://dilbert.daily.umn. edu/daily/1995/10/03/news/spray/ [umn.edu]
    Those friendly guys in our government lied to us. This is not the only case, I'm sure (and I got tired of trying to separate the wacko (my opinion) sites from the real ones in tracking down coverup info). If our government is willing to do things like this to us and lie about it, why should we believe anything they say about invading our privacy to catch terrorists, etc. Hell, for all I know they only set up this Echelon crap to get around the rules about spying on the public and they are gathering as much dirt on us as they can, just to have in case they want to mess with us. If it exists. :)



    -beme

  • Pay no attention to this. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Return to your homes.
  • A lot of posters here could save time editing their messages in emacs and calling M-x spook a few times.

    For example: jihad AK-47 explosion Cocaine Waco, Texas North Korea Khaddafi Kennedy
    Saddam Hussein security Legion of Doom quiche Delta Force Clinton
    Serbian. I'm not too sure about "quiche", but everything else seems consistent.

  • The law in question is Executive order 12333 or 12456(can't remember which) which states in essence that the CIA, NSA, NRO, military intelligence cannot perform intelligence gathering operations of any kind against US entities, unless evidence can be shown that there is a legitimate foreign intelligence interest, such as tips that XYZ country club is really a front for a foreign terrorist group or intelligence or special forces agency. If there is simply a drug operation going on at XYZ country club, according to the order the FBI, state, and local law enforcement has jurisdiction. If its really an insertion point for North Korean SOF troops, the CIA, DIA, NSA and intel components of the armed services take over. If Echelon is in fact all its supposed to be, and in fact scans all communications, it would be required to either filter out all US communications or pass them along to the FBI. If Echelon fails to do either of these things, it is illegal and I hope Bob Barr finds those responsible and has them executed for treason. The power of Echelon is great, and with great power comes great responsibility. I don't believe in an all or nothing view regarding security vs freedom, too much security and we have no freedom, too little and we have no freedom(because then ANYONE with bigger guns or more money can take it from us)
  • ...the most recent abuses of the Clinton regime: over a thousand FBI files on political opponents delivered to the white house, individuals jailed for asking non-scripted questions at "town hall" PR events, the use of the FBI and IRS to persecute political enemies - oh, and the recent allegations of sening in US military forces to "help force a resolution" at Waco because the whole thing was getting politically embarassing.
  • North America
    Are you talking about Canada and Mexico, or just the U.S.?

    another [mother] "owns" her baby It is about fetuses, not children. It is not about ownership of the fetus, either.

    I am pro-choice because it is not up to the government to decide what a woman can and cannot do with her own body.

    ...communists think capitalist society is screwed up?
    Um, which communists are you talking about? And what does this have to do with what you're talking about?

    p.s. -- Late term abortions were extremely rare even when they were done. The technique you describe is a mis-representation of what occurs in these cases. Sensationalism may get you readers, but it won't get you thinkers.
  • If people overusing the term "Nazi" in a negative sense reduces the true horror of 6 million murders for you, I'd say you've got some issues of your own you should be worried about... If you wanna say it's too harsh a term to be applied to Echelon, I'll agree with you there. But in my opinion, the attitude that misuse of the term "Nazi" trivializes what they did is part of the mentality that allows things like Echelon to exist in the first place. Worry about people remembering that killing 6 million people is a horrible thing. As far as people remembering in 500 years that the Nazis actually did so, well, you know what they say.. any press is good press
  • Needless to say, this is bad news. At least assuming from the story if this is being used to protect American business interests, this is the worst sort of nationalism. Geez.. they should rename it from NSA to NZI. Too bad we can't, uh, vote the NSA out of office. Who the fuck comes up with things like that? Democracy, my ass.

    SA
  • Reasons are:

    1. The government finds major criminals fast because they don't want the american public breathing down their neck. Thus, the more of a public issue it is, the more they devote to solving it.

    2. They construct a plausible theory, declare it true because it fits the available evidence, ignore the 50 other possibilities that fit the available evidence as well, stop looking for more evidence, and declare the case solved.

    I'd be willing to bet a whole years pay that the vast majority of quickly solved major crimes and terrorist actions are the result of either one or both of these issues at work, or stupidity on the part of the criminal/terrorist, rather than any Echelon system.
  • That's why it's secret. Get PGP, get a PGP phone or build your own personal encryption device. The lack of oversight really does bother me, but if you get in the puppet master's way, you'll just end up dead from a "self-inflicted" gun-shot wound.
    --------------
    The NSA works for the NSA, they don't give 2 shits about you. Unless you're in their way.
  • What if something like the Y2K bug is a plot to make us turn to the government to help, and then they seize total control?

    Total Control? As opposed to the limited control the US Government has now? By definition, the government is in total control. If they weren't, they wouldn't be governing.

    As for fear of the Y2K bug being a government plot, there would have to have been a LOT of people in on this plot, and none of them have broken yet! Amazing! Remember, never attribute to malice what can be explained with stupidity. Y2K is the result of incredible managerial short-sightedness, nothing more.

    Is Eschelon a Bad Thing? Yeah, because governments are made of people, and it's inevitable that someone is going to abuse the system. Right now, that's far more likely (probability approaching 1, if the contract story mentioned by the BBC report is true) than the US government going Fascist. It's the same problem with Key Escrow for encryption: who guards the guardians. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago.

    Now put back on your aluminum hat so that Eschelon can't read your brain waves.

    -jon

  • Anybody Remember? (Score:3)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @08:58AM (#1565982) Homepage
    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).

    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" :-) ) that were meant to trigger the monitors.

    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*
  • The BBC article, as well as the Wired piece mention Austrailia, the US, and Britain, but no others. Are other countries involved? How wide spread? I've heard everything from "some radio communications" to "all email, phone, fax, and other communication". I've also heard from paranoid friends that they're being listened to right now. I'm also pretty sure there's no "good" sources out there with "true" information, because no one outside the NSA/other national equivilants knows. Where should the interested individuals go for info?

    In the meantime, wave KILL BOMB WACO GUN ECHELON hello to the NSA ;)

    The Good Reverend
  • First of all, I don't even know what a petabyte is.

    Second of all, I don't feel like looking it up.

    Assuming this is the next larger value than a terabyte, where, exactly, were they storing this information in 1989?

    I think my father had a computer with an 80 megabyte HD that year. Assuming there was publicly available technology to store a gigabyte then, in a format they could get all the data off of in 30 seconds, is a stretch. Six orders of magnitude ABOVE that...?

    I don't think it unlikely that they could store this much info, but to be able to get access to it in 30 seconds, no. I won't bother dealing with the bandwidth issues here. Its more probable that they invented teleport technology and just beamed the data across the US. :)

    >>>>>>>>> Kvort
  • This being aired can mean good things--like a reason to fight for privacy instead of letting it slowly eek away. As Echelon gets uncovered more and more, it has the potential, as soon as the big media outlets get ahold of it, to really freak out mainsteam types who don't realize the absolute insecurity of email/cell phones/ and evidentally even some land-line voice communication.

    They're doing it. No surprise. Y'all saw the story about warantless peeping-tom via thermal imaging, right? The faster these come, the more likely people will wake up and fight for privacy. Or at least download GPG.
  • hmmm ... the Masada, and the destruction of the Temple, fair enough. But the Masicure at York? I doubt you'd find one Jew in twenty who knows what the hell you're talking about.

    I certainly don't.

    jsm
  • The actual disinformation scenario I've seen described involved keeping it secret as long as you can, but if you find out it's likely to leak out, leak an exagerated version to something like the Weekly World News. Then no reputable news source will touch it.

    You don't call attention to it until it's going to be revealed anyway. Then you make sure that unbelievable exagerations are revealed too, and anyone talking about the true version, will be assumed to be talking about the ridiculous version and thus ignored as a paranoid lunatic.

    As for R.A.W., yeah he's a crackpot, but it's an odd sort of crackpot who spends half of his books telling you "This is what happened to me, but don't believe me, I might be lying or crazy, try it yourself."

    thejeff

  • Re:Not only do I remember... (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @01:02PM (#1565990) Journal
    Processing power has to be expended on every message, or else Echelon will fail.
    Implementing the kind of sorting that's necessary to find the wheat among the chaff is sufficient to get rid of this stuff.
    A terrorist could send out junk mail with junk tripwords in it for a few years, then be relatively secure from the NSA's snooping. That is the problem with this type of system. You have to watch everything, all the time or else you'll miss the most important event, the one you're looking for.
    You have to scan everything all the time, and that gets twice as cheap every 18 months. What you don't have to do is read it. For instance, take these "Eschelon keyword lists" that people love. They usually have zero grammatical content, and any string that registers 80% trigger-words (esp. with no coherent subject-verb-object structure) is probably going to be tossed by the analyzer on the first pass. It will definitely be flagged as "boring" the second and subsequent times, no human intervention required; saying the same thing over and over again carries no information.

    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.
    --

  • Of course. Thats why the _real_ terrorists use those fields to send the messages, since they're filtered out.

    Or maybe filtering the crap would make the whole exercise pointless?
  • You people all make me sick to my stomach. The NSA is there for the sole reason that you can sit on your cushy little butts and send this crap across the internet. Why did we win WWII?? Any real history buffs here? Because of the NSA and Britian's counterpart decoded Germany's encrypted messages. Germany would have won hands down if it wasn't for misinformation from the NSA. Look it up before you reply with something stupid. "I don't want the NSA reading my emails...blah,blah, blah.." Does anybody remember Oklahoma City? Unfortunately I do, because I lived there at the time. 300 people dead including innocent children. Dead. That doesn't mean anything to everyone who is invincible behind their little computer monitors typing anti-government hate mail. But, if the NSA had decided to tap into Mr. Mc Veigh's transmissions and heard the word "BOMB," tagged him and saved hundreds of innocent lives, then God give them the power to do it. And screw all of you for hating what they do. Why do we have technology such as Echelon. Because not only do we have ignorant bastards like some of the people posting on Slashdot and elsewhere, but the world is NOT a nice place and without the NSA and CIA then this country would be run or attacked by the likes of people such as the IRA (Irish Republican Army) or attacked by any little country with a nuclear weapon in a briefcase. They are there to protect you. If you don't like this country then LEAVE.
  • Has anyone else noticed that the year is 1999 and there has *not* been a successful terrorist attack against the USA of UK with a weapon of mass destruction, such as a biological agent? I find it utterly astounding now, unlike say 1995 when it would have been rather unlikely, that this has not happened. Of all the people with a grudge against the USA on the entire planet not one of them is capable of pulling off such an attack? Call me an optimist but maybe Echelon is actually working! It would be nice if the spin merchants within the security agencies responsible come out with some good news occasionally about how such monitoring might have it's good points because sure I'm they'll get canned for all the bad points.
  • Of course, things like planning terrorist attacks could easily be done with no grammatical structure. And it would be even easier if you could use all trigger words as much as possible.

    Then again, things like Echelon are basically an exercise in futility. You simply cant scan the content of that amount of data and catch anything you didnt already know, if youre dealing with people who know they're being watched. The amount of CPU power that would be needed to catch even the simplest evasions doesnt even come close to existing. Just look at the processing power needed to do even minor filtering on a corporate basis to attempt to block out some stuff from employees. And that _is_ pure text search. Add to that lexical analysis and associations and you realize it doesnt even begin to make sense.

    Unless, of course, the NSA directors nephew owns the company selling the hardware, in which case I can see at least how someone is getting some benefit. And if thats the deal it doesnt really matter if it works or not.
  • I'll promise to go back to school, if you promise to someday attend school.

    By the way, which trailer park do you live in?

  • I am pro-choice because it is not up to the government to decide what a woman can and cannot do with her own body.


    It may very well not be up to the government what a woman (or man) does with his/her body. That's why suicide is illegal ... oops ;-).

    "The Government" simply speaking, has nothing to do with it, they are simply to enforce the view of the general public in a democratic society. It seems that the general public, at this time (and just barely) sympathises on the side of "pro-choice" which is a term to indicate exactly what I said -- that the mother "owns" the baby inside her which is labelled a "fetus" because it is still attached to her womb.

    If you believe that there is a difference in value between a human life inside a woman as yet unborn, and a baby one week old smothered by their teen mother, you need to rethink your system of beliefs. If you realize that their is no difference, you're stuck either saying that abortions are wrong or teens murdering infants that no-one else knew about is wrong. "She should have had an abortion instead of killing the child" is actually often stated in these cases.

    Think about it.

    PS, asking which communists I'm talking about it pretty numb -- communists are anti capitalism. And in the mid 1900's, the low moral values of North America in general were used as propaganda against capitalism.

    PS #2, the technique I described is still in use in many circles today even though we tend toward others which are equally violent but considered less harmful ... to the mother (who isn't a mother because she doesn't have a baby, just a fetus, right?).

    - Michael T. Babcock <homepage [linuxsupportline.com]>
  • How many terrorist acts haven't occured because of Echelon? Those we never hear about coz the gubment doesn't publicize (often) terrorists that are caught before they commit a crime...guilty until proven innocent? If ever actually given a trial...
    Ok. City and Columbine were internal acts (or so everyone believes). Echelon monitors international traffic. No reason any within the US should worry about this, eh? Only if you're calling/emailing/etc overseas. I seriously doubt most of my general email, posts, and Quake traffic flips overseas before arriving at it's US destination.
    The one they SHOULD have caught was the World Trade Center bombing- that was international terrorism (or so everyone believes).
    Perhaps those jerks relied on carrier pigeons.
  • It is only natural that in an environment where information is becoming more and more open that people would be concerned about privacy. However, I am afraid to say that another person posting is quite correct in saying that the battle is already lost. If you use credit cards, ATMs and internet connected computers as well as half a dozen other convience technologies you have effectively given away your privacy for the ease of living in a quick fix society. If you don't like that then please give up the technology and leave the building immediately.

    Also, the president of the USofA can't get a blowjob in the oval office without it making its way all over the front pages of every paper in the universe and yet people believe the same government can turn around and keep its stuff together long enough to pull off all this conspiracy crap? That is bull. Does the US and other intelligence agencies come together to monitor transmissions especially from foreign powers they don't like or organizations that scare them? Sure. Are they some all powerful force running the world behind the scenes? Nah. People are giving governments and their agencies far too much credit.
  • Why monitor every conversation & for such obvious information? As the organizers of Jam Echelon day figure, thats gotta be a quite a bit of work.

    Most terrorist who are serious about such nefarious activities are going to be quieter about such operations. Speaking in code. The stuff we see in movies. The NSA keywords would only stand out long enough from the noise for the spooks to install a noise filter. Just like we can filter out the AC first post freaks.

    But what if the intent of the system was to watch for signs of that kind of activity? Transactions for the supplies and infrastructure for ugly activities. On demand tapping of a particular person's conversations. Searching email for people with dangerous questions or dangerous knowledge. Searching for people that warrant further watching.

    Then other options can be brought to use. Tempest to check out whats really behind those PGP messages. A quick background check to determine idealogical motivations. Action would then be taken as necessary.

    Imagine your personal profile. Maybe a risk scoring system with a few different variables based on what you've written, emailed and said. Maybe a few higher points on the 'personal independance' score cause you post the NSA keywords. A few less on the 'knowledge' score cause you barely passed Physics and Calculus in college. Hmm, a wife and kids? Knock the 'motivation' score down a little. So your Jam Echelon keywords never make it past the first stage, they aren't even interested in you. But now take your terrorists. Hmm, their motivations may be known by their religion, their public postings or published papers. They or someone they know has the necessary knowledge to cause major disruption. Echelon tracks everything they do and say.

    Is Echelon tracking US Citizens? They didn't know Ted K. was hopping on the bus and mailing bombs. Of course, he was pretty low key, low tech. They didn't know those guys bought a bunch of fertilizer and diesel and packed it in a truck and parked it outside a Federal Building.

    They didn't know about those guys that blew up the parking garage under the World Trade Center.

    Of course, one could get very conspiritorial and say they did know about these things. There were other motivations that made the NSA allow them to happen...

  • I feel bad for those who fall prey to the wolf... I would rather be the paranoid I am and not be fooled by the lies, than have to come to terms with reality when it rears its ugly head.
  • I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and think you're only drunk.

    Nobody said you have to monitor EVERYTHING. You don't need to build another Echelon, only a few select pieces. You might even be able to pick out which pieces to monitor because the transmittion will have to include where it came from.

    Chill out, it's an idea - I'm not going to steal a billion dollars for you to build it. Who would have thought SETI@home could have processed all the data they had so quickly?
  • Oh shut up.
    -FBI files: It hasn't been done in the past? This was the first time a prez got info from the FBI? Sure... This was just the first time the Prez (or his underlings) were busted. Just like the intern-sex. Clinton was the first unfaithful US prez...sure... And regardless, SO WHAT? It wasn't 'fair'?
    -Individuals jailed: Point me to the evidence? This is the first I've heard of such a thing!
    -Using FBI/IRS for persecution: Again, show me some evidence. What kind of persecution are you talking about?
    -Waco: I'm pretty aware and up on the news, and I hadn't heard of Waco as a problem spot until the 'siege' began. "US military forces"- who? The ATF?
    Before posting such silly arguements, you should have facts (or at least coherent reasoning) to back them up.
  • I, however, fundementally trust my government to protect the interests of the people of the United States.

    Even (or perhaps especially?) in a democracy, I think such sentiment is a little simplistic. I don't trust the government. I don't fear it, but don't trust it, either.

    The beauty of democratic government is that trust is only a minor part of the equation. Rather, checks, balances and oversights keep the government in line, and more important, keep it in touch with the wants and needs of the people.

    Much of the U.S. government is under significant representative oversight. This is simply not true when it comes to the intelligence agencies, including the NSA.

    The troubling part about ECHELON, specifically, is that it allegedly allows the U.S. to spy on its own citizens, thereby circumventing legal safeguards. Those safeguards exist because information is power, and too much power in one place has, historically, been bad for things.

    If you're trying to argue against the rabid anti-government conspiracy theorists out there, I agree with you. The other extreme, however, is untenable. A middle ground must be struck, and ECHELON, if it lives up to its billing, goes quite a bit over the line.

    Kythe
    (Remove "x"'s from

  • None of them have broken?

    None have them have lived to tell about it. . .
    http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/397.html

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".

  • What the Investigative Reporters Missed (Score:3)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @01:30PM (#1566010) Homepage Journal

    Fact 1 -- Deja News is in the Echelon building: [citivu.com]

    Deja News, Inc.
    9430 Research Boulevard
    Echelon II, Suite. 350
    Austin, TX 78759

    Fact 2 -- Cycorp [cyc.com] makes what are arguably the best tools for scanning the web for concepts.

    Fact 3 -- Cycorp was a spinoff of MCC [mcc.com].

    Fact 4 -- Deja News, Inc., Cycorp and MCC are within walking distance of each other.

    Fact 5 -- Bobby Ray Inman [surnameweb.org] 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" [cmu.edu].

    As Seymour [ucar.edu] 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."

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • First, in principle I agree, they probably aren't spying on me. I don't do any international calls and don't have many spirited political discussion via email. On your other points I think you're being a little naive. For isntance:

    > For starters, it is illegal for the NSA and the > NIC (National Intelligence Community) to spy on > American Persons

    It's been illegal for our gov. to do many things they've done. Since WWII they've taken the approach that the end justifies the means. This would include things like CIA drug trafficking, arms-for-hostages deals to Iran, etc. If you were them and believed a person to be dangerous, you mean to tell me you wouldn't ask your Brit spook-buddy to send you their data? See, you didn't collect it, so it's OK now.

    >Out of respect for the countries of NATO, we probably don't spy on them either

    How about Israel? We spy on each other like crazy. Can you say "Jason Pollard"?

    And why wouldn't geeks with guns count? Do you think they *know* you're just a mild-mannered geek with a ton of ammo?
  • Doesn't anyone wonder how the government manages to catch every major terrorist. One wonders how many of those directly responsible for the Africa bombings were caught. As well as many others, it seems like the only person who it took us a long time to catch was the Unabomber, who, surprise surprise, didn't use any electronic communications at all. We must also remember that for every time the FBI or CIA fails, there must be many many successes
  • Hidding the existance of a message is called steganography. Its more common to high the message in a single image or MP3 as they have more bits to obscure the payload.

    Absolutely. And, they have more bits to analyze. I'll bet I could write a program that would identify images very quickly that have been so modified. How? Just a simple statistical analysis against a baseline sample of such images. Gee, the low bits of this image are very unlikely for a JPEG. I'll just take a closer look....

    Yeah, that kind of analysis is probably part of the NSA's automatic filtering already, and you can bet that they've got a full USENET feed watching the binary newsgroups for just this sort of thing. Funny that we would pay so much money in taxes for our government to collect and analyze porn ;-)
  • hmm.. I wonder if I can sue echelon operators under dutch law for invasion of privacy and/or breaking of
    "lettersecret" - no idea how to translate "briefgeheim", so this is a litteral translation. If someone knows the correct term.. please say so :)

    //rdj
  • The fallacy of your argument is that you believe that the US Govt. serves the interest of the people of the US. It does, but only a minority, of rich, powerful, and influential people (hmmm, influential, that means they have influence, right?). As long as YOUR interests mesh with theirs (I know mine do in some degrees, being a pretty average (statistically speaking) suburban middle-class white family guy), that's okay. But if you're out of that elite group - say your skin color is about a shade darker than beige, or your income is a bit less than $20k/yr, or you're beliefs are a bit Marxist, or perhaps you're a tad to the right of Billy Graham, religion-wise (not economics-wise - excellent confusion of issues there), or if you are not a US Citizen, your interests perhaps are NOT being looked out for by the US Govt. Even if you're a voter (not the case of non-US Citizen).

    Now, that argument of emotion aside, the logical argument on why Echelon is bad, bad, bad, is when you learn the basics of how the US Govt. is set up, with it's system of checks and balances (never mind the lobbyists and Political Action Committees), you see that it's carefully set up to prevent any small group from gaining total unilateral control of the whole shebang. The Executive branch is answerable to the Legislative branch, the Legislative branch is answerable to the Judicial branch, and the Judicial branch is answerable to the Executive branch. Unfortunately, the NSA branch is answerable to noone. Therefore, pure evil.

    Oh, enough of attacking your arguments. I'll attack you now: You're ugly and your momma dresses you funny.

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • The NSA is keeping track of you. Think you can hide behind "Anonymous Coward"? Think again. The NSA KNOWS WHO YOU ARE. You can run but you can't hide. I for one am willing to contribute a little extra $$ to the NSA for them to come and get you while you sleep. You will wake up in a cell in Iraq?, Moscow?, Colombia? You won't be able to tell since your cell has no windows. All you know is your guards don't speak English. You will be taken to the torture room several times a day. You will confess everything you've ever done in your short wretched life. They will cut your pecker off with a dull knife. Then you will be returned to your room in your parents' house where you will try to continue an otherwise boring existence.
  • Can someone tell me how they have all the codes to break satellite encryption????

    THor
    mozkill@yahoo.com
  • B for me. but I still don't trust the Govt. Though I DO think a lot of "conspiracy theorists" dramatically overplay the power the government has. Especially the survivalist whackos, who seem to WANT the apocolypse to come as some sort of "social purging", so they can restore their sense of meritocracy to the world (guys with bunkers, jeeps and guns deserve to survive, bankers don't).

    "Bah!" I say (as I polish the ramp and throat of my vintage M1911)

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".

  • One more thing...

    Most of the stuff you hear about Echelon is here say. The NSA never opens their mouth, because thats their policy. People scream about privacy issues, but the truth is that the NSA is a passive organization. They just watch and gather information. I'm not saying the potential for abuse doesn't exist. What I am saying is that the NSA takes action on nothing. They have no field agents. They just provide informaton.

    Now one thing about Greenpeace being spied on by the NSA, I believe that to be the oldest urban legend ever to exist about Echelon. Even if it were true, I wouldn't doubt it being because some zealous nut was planning to blow shit up. I have a lot of confdence in the NSA.

    The only thing I have issues with are the rumors that they've been stealng corporate secrets from Eurpean nations. But I like to keep one thing in mind: If the French had this capabilty I have no doubt in my mind that they would not think twice about exploiting it. Hell the French steal from eachother, why the hell should they have any respect for evil America?
  • Agree with JD. Look at their web site. Some very sophisticated systems there. Maybe 10 years ahead of the market.

    Though any international corporation which doesn't encrypt all WAN traffic deserves everything they get.
  • Pay-per-View? No. A broadcast channel. On the big screen in Times Square. On all the Demo tv's in the stores. Execution would be an excellent unquestioned deterrent if people saw it. They'd say "I let my anger get out of control and kill my wife that will be me!" It won't stop everyone, but it will at least get some borderline evil/crazy people who would otherwise commit murder from crossing the line.
  • Your analogy states that Echelon hasn't been created yet, but the hype has, and when the hype dies down it will be. Heh, which I certainly didn't claim. What I did say that drawing attention to someting ISN'T good disinformation. Making up excuses why this thing isn't important, which takes attention away from it, is.
  • I hope they put the executions on pay-per-view.

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".

  • Its all those sub-space communications channels they're using.

    A Peta-byte? I don't believe that for a second. Not by today's standards, let alone 10 years ago. That woman was talking out of her ass. When you talk about bandwidth lke that you're talking about wide-range conspiracy of the masses.

    The military's technology has always trickled down to the private sector very quickly, because the private sector designs 90% of it. What you're talking about is an insult to the competence of the architects of the Internet2 and the entire academic world behind it.
  • With me, the real issue is not that I do not trust my government... though that might chaneg at some point.

    I just feel that we have the right to be informed (as I posted above). Obviously, a lot of money is being pumped into this program... well, that is our money. I want to know where it is going, and I want to know if it is working (which we really have no idea). I am not demanding that I should have the choice of where my money goes, but only the knowledge (if I want it). This should be our rights as citizens... no matter what they think our best interests are. Especially something like this, that could greatly effect our lives (the potential is certainly there).

    Do you see this point?
  • possibilities: Family doesn't want the publicity, or the identity of the agent could cause a compromise of security, or lead back to the family which would then be a target of foreign agents hoping the NSA guy told them something they shouldn't have.
  • assuming that abortion was not much more prevalent under communist governments

    You accuse me of making an assumption I have not made. I'm not even sure that the individual I'm debating with has made this assumption.

    My words: "Um, which communists are you talking about? And what does this have to do with what you're talking about?" and "Please, this time can you tell me what this has to do with abortion?"

    I don't see any assumption, only questions.

    In the future, before criticizing, jsm2, please read a little more carefully.

  • Start with the multinationals (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @10:39AM (#1566036) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • I think the point was that the Nationalsozialistische Partei Deutschlands (er, spelling, sorry) did not just rise to power in a day, and kill all the Jews before anyone knew what happenned. the point is that the NSA's efforts to oversee all communication paralells the efforts of the early struggling nazi party. yes, the Nazi's also had problems becoming accepted, and many germans attempted to rebel against their rule (ever hear of Die WeiBe Rose?). And perhaps we should not call anyone a communist, lest they would be assocciated with Stalin, who murdered more Soviets, and whose 5 year plan totally raped the environment of the USSR. Nor should we call anyone an Aztec, or perhaps we should not call anyone a "white man", as historically the white people (yes, i am white) have been gerally the most oppressive toward people who they see as "different". And the Romans had been declining practically ever since Sulla's reign (around the last century BC), who also coincidentally murdered a bunch of people. It was a combination of internal weaknesses (the slave to citizen ratio in Italy during this time was 3:1) and pressure from outisde. Sorry if this is too off topic, but it a reply, so technically its not too off topic. :P
  • I think most people who do the keyword thing are well aware, by now, that it does not trigger Echelon.

    on the other hand, on that web site that was doing all the Jam Echelon Day advocacy, there was some kind of text generator, which actually generated a little block of text that made grammatical sense, and used the keywords, but was randomly generated. THAT is what I used on Jam Echelon Day, and that's what I told all my friends to use, because if Echelon is CONTENT sensitive, that's the sort of thing that would trigger it.

    Folks who otherwise relied on dumb keyword lists, didn't read the whole Jam Echelon Site day, and get points off for not following directions. Go stand in the corner.

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
  • Hmmm...I'm pretty sure the NSA does have field agents. Some of them have been killed in the line of duty (as evidenced by their "They Served In Silence" memorial).

    As for geeks not being good at killing people: It depends upon the method. Geeks have designed the world's worst weapons, and at the NSA, could conceivably enable those who do the killing directly.

    That's not to say such things are not sometimes justified. I'm a liberal at heart, but I'm well aware of the need to defend the U.S. militarily. Hell, I've even considered applying at the NSA. We need agencies like the NSA. I'd prefer, however, that they were kept on a much-shorter democratic leash.

    Kythe
    (Remove "x"'s from

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?
    Nothing to do with Echelon, satellites or anything remotely as sexy. The radio transmissions were monitored by a USAF RC-135V/W "Rivet Joint" SIGINT (i.e., SIGnals INTelligence) plane--a glorified 707 covered with antennae and stuffed with computers. The U.S. sent SIGINT planes snooping along the boundaries of Soviet airspace on a regular (well, frequent) basis during the cold war, where they listened in on all sorts of RF transmissions and made (from the Soviet point of view) a serious nuisance of themselves. The theory that floated around at the time was that the Sovs were gunning for the RC-135, hoping it would stray into their airspace where they could shoot it down. They shot down the KAL instead, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  • Who cares? (Score:3)

    by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:07AM (#1566102) Journal

    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?
    -------------

  • 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?

  • Used for private gain!? (Score:3)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:11AM (#1566119)
    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.
  • 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

    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 [cam.ac.uk] (among others) for more info.

    -Henry

  • It's time again: (kool-aid for the kids, please)

    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 ;-)

  • Disinformation (Score:3)

    by adimarco ( 30853 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:18AM (#1566140) Homepage
    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 [rawilson.com] 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)
  • This is exactly the same mistake people make when they say "I don't mind if the cops search my car. Why should I? I don't have a dead body in my trunk..."

    Amendment IV

    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

  • 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.
  • 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.

    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/ECHELO N/echelon.html

    (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.

  • Re:Who cares? (Score:3)

    by Rabbins ( 70965 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:24AM (#1566156)
    Well the obvious concern would be that we have a system in place where a lot of abuse could occur.

    To be honest, my largest problem with this is not that they are monitoring for key words... but that we, as citizens, do not know about it.

    Yes, if we knew about it, we probably would not be writing KILL PRESIDENT ALLAH NUCLEAR JIHAD ASSASINATION as much in our e-mails or phone conversations... but I would imagine that the majority of terrorists are a bit paranoid and would refain from those obvious word phrases as well.

    It seems like a large waste of money to me... I wonder how many terrorist acts have been prevented through this technology. Perhaps it has been helpful... I tend to think not.
  • This is such an obvious troll yet I can't resist:

    How do you know Echelon has done one thing to help you? You assume it works and cleans out terrorists. That statement is about as silly as assuming they're watching you right now.

    What we do know is that there are no protections against using this system to further other political and economic agendas and corruption, especially in the US, is always a real concern.

  • It's not personal privacy we're really concerned with, it's protection *from* the government. If the government goes bad (I mean, more than just conspiracies and such) how can we stop them? We could conspire all we want, but unless we use hand-written messages written in jello, there's no way we can successfully overthrow them. Sure, the government isn't too bad right now, but what if they're planning something big? What if something like the Y2K bug is a plot to make us turn to the government to help, and then they seize total control? It's more than just privacy, my friend.

    Yes, I'm one of those paranoid conspiracy theorist freaks. It sure helps melt away daily boredom.
  • I get the impression they aren't too good at finding the important stuff, if they were unable to determine that Pakistan had been building nuclear weapons for a quarter of a century, and took the US by surprise by testing them.

    Maybe they should start focusing on the important stuff in the World?

    A revolution would do a lot of good in a lot of Western Countries right around now - they've mostly long stopped being democracies.
  • 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 ???
  • I can't believe this got moderated up as Interesting.

    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.


    -----------

    "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

  • Re:Remember the KAL shootdown - 1983? (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:56AM (#1566203) Homepage Journal
    Oh, that. According to the "Discovery" channel, the entire incident was arranged between the NSA and President Reagan.

    The pilot was asked/bribed to fly over Russia in a manner as to trigger their early-warning systems, so that the Americans could locate where everything was.

    Interestingly, the US version of the recordings differ substantially from the Russian version, and the US presentation given to the UN was later retracted. This makes me wonder whether they had the real recordings at all. Sure, they could have doctored them, easily enough, but if they already knew the jet was going to be shot down (and Pres. Reagan had a pre-written speech to this effect), all they would have needed would be someone who could speak Russian and a fair guess as to what the routine transmission would have been.

  • In Australia, if you want to read a discussion about Echelon you need to have R-rated authorization. Think these two articles are a coinicidence?!?!

    "Name, address, credit card numbers please.."

  • Re:Disinformation (Score:3)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @09:41AM (#1566210)
    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 of course assumes a powerful organization can never do wrong, when really they spread disinfo to cover their mistakes. No matter how big and powerful your organization is it can never be perfect. Not to mention theres lot to be said about how the bigger you get the less secure you become.

    Your disinformation example only verifies the existance of the listening network through untrustworthy sources, yet calls attention to it which leads to serious investigation of the rumor. Its like painting a sign that reads, "500 megaton ICBM silo" on a 10 megaton ICBM silo and expecting no one to see if its really a missile silo.


    This concept is explored at great length in Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.

    Heh, this guy defines crackpot. You cite a guy who claims to have talked to a multi-dimensional alien named Mescalito and, according to his own disinformation theory, spreads disinformation himself. I always thought of him as an ignorant new-age version of RA Heilein.
  • 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.....
  • I insert an X-Spook header in every one of my outgoing mail/news messages with keywords like that... I used to call it X-NSA-Fodder, actually.
    And you have to know that the NSA's filters just ignore that stuff.If you're using this as anything except a joke, you're only fooling yourself.
    --
  • 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.

  • Re:Who cares? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Obvious troll my ass. You're the obvious troll.

    How do you know that Oxygen has done one thing to help you? Sure, your 8th grade science teacher said you needed it to live. But perhaps she was just part of the Vast Oxygen Conspiricy.

    Just because the poster's views don't jive with your own doesn't make him a troll. The guy was polite and presented a differing viewpoint in an agreeable fashion. What the hell more do you want, moron? Do you really think all posts should be divided into "Me, too!" and "F*ck you!" ? Open your eyes and increase the resolution of your brain. Or else everyone will end up ranting like me.

  • In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract.

    If this is true (somehow I smell yellow journalism), why is the NSA spending the time and money to help out private corporations make money?

    Because the French use their intelligence apparatus exactly the same way, to promote their own country's businesses with the industrial intelligence that falls out of their other activities.

    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?)
    --

  • Some information among the noise (Score:5)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs@ajs . c om> on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @10:10AM (#1566252) Homepage Journal
    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....

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