October 21 is 'Jam Echelon' Day

samsonite writes "For those familiar with Echelon, 21 October 1999, has been set as the day for everyone to put harmless, yet "subversive" words in emails and postings to overload the Echelon machine. Echelon was once considered a mythical machine that watched all email, internet traffice, phone calls, etc. for "key" words - maintained by the US, among others. " For more information on Echelon, click here. Now, it's time to run my script with verboten words - check out the article for a list.

I wish you were right...

...but maybe you'd feel different if you found out more about COINTELPRO [google.com].

I can also echo the comments of the poster who observed that large-scale surveillance of "subversives" (eg CND organisers) was certainly in place in the eighties, and by many indicators has not slacked off.
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Double duty: Encrypt using these special keywords!

The keyword list is about the right length that you could use it as a sort of base-64 encoding for encrypted mail. (There are more than 64 key words, but several of them group in phrases. You could define a set of 64 symbols pretty easily from this list.) Instead of using PGP-style "ASCII armor", you could use "Echelon armor" on your encrypted emails.

Now how's that for fun? Anyone care to write a quick-and-dirty perl filter to convert base-64 into echelon-64 and back? :-)

--Joe
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Re:Reality check

Lots of college kids have these ideas. Lots of college kids talk about these ideas. They are discussed so often and openly that they have almost become part of the establishment - a rite of passage for white yuppie larva passing through on their way to productive careers as Cogs in the Machine.

Exactly. And isn't that what rites of passage are for? Young people need to believe that they are important, that they are a threat to The Establishment, and that The Establishment is a threat to them. If young people didn't have these delusions of subversive grandeur, they'd become so overwhelmed by the pointlessness of it all that they'd just shut down and never become productive little Cogs. Cogs need to fantasize that one day they'll rise up and overthrow the Machine. It's what keeps them going day after day.

It happens on the right as well as the left. While one side crusades against capitalist exploitation, greed, and The Patriarchy, the other battles moral relativism, secular humanism and Political Correctness.

And BTW we are, every one of us, beautiful unique snowflakes. And although every snowflake is be beautiful and unique by itself, it looks like every other snowflake and it's a big nuisance to boot when there's countless billions of them on the sidewalk and you have to shovel them.

We've got a beautiful, unique snowflake's chance in hell of overthrowing the government... unless we work within the system. Play by the system's rules, and use those rules against it. In the U.S., the government is designed to be overthrown every few years. It's called an election, and it works.

Important Link Missing

This is being run by Hacktivism [hacktivism.org] and the URL with all the relevant details for participating is http://www.echelon.wiretapped.net/ [wiretapped.net].

Here's a sample from their random Echelon jammer message generator [wiretapped.net]:

From: Colonel Robert Worley, 50th Operations Group Commander, USAF

To: Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency

Ussama bin Laden made a broadcast this morning. We just got translation back and they're claiming that they will get agents to insert malicious code in year 2000 fixes Waco next week Additionally, The Commander in the 850th Communications Squadron passed on some new information. Theyve no choice other than to buy some documents from the JNTF contact when she's in Auckland tomorrow. Further to that, We're going to inflict minimal casualties on DoD personnel at London just before changeover to 2000. Finally, If we're to succed in halting the INFOSEC community, theres no better time than now to drive a tanker full of fertiliser and diesel across the border from Mexico then fly out to Manchester next week

Trigger Keywords

I found the list of keywords in the Wired News article [wired.com] about this somewhat bizarre (among other things). The word which initially caught my attention was the would militia which has a completely different meaning here in Canada than it does down south in the US. Up here, the Militia is the common name for the Primary Army Reserves (in which I'm a soldier) dating back to the days of adhoc armies made up of a few professionals leading a rabble of locals with rifles. Anyway, I digress.

I find it so bizarre that whomever is running this Echelon program would waste time, money, hard drive space (I started to try to calculate the amount of disk space required but got distracted by a beer and it got too complex), etc... tracking email because of key words, especially when words can vary so much based on context, location, etc... And how likely is it that these "bad guys with guns" would do all of their master planning over email? Personally I think these guys would be too busy using what little money they have buying up guns and explosives and stuff rather than buying computers so they could ICQ their ideas back and forth.

Instead, I think the wasted time and resources would be better spent employing a national gun/rifle/rocket launcher registration system. Then build an expert-system which monitors these registrations looking for "pecularities," much like the system that Visa uses to check for abnormal purchases.

No I'm not trying to start a gun control flame war, I'm simply expressing my complete and utter disbelief that an Echelon system could exist. You Americans are funny that way; but we still like ya. :)

Re:Reality check

I know that back in the 60's and 70's it was quite real that members of the SDS would have files with the FBI. But the early civil rights movement and the Vietnam war with draft were more intense issues perhaps, and Hoover's FBI was different.

My father attended Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH in the early 60's, and organized a campus group to fight the in loco parentis rules that were in effect at the time. They had a "demerit" system for misbehaving students. You got twenty demerits, say, if you weren't in your dorm room with your pajamas on and under the bedcovers with your slippers next to the bed at 11:00 PM. There were people who went into every room to check up. If you got too many demerits, you had to spend a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the quad or something.

So my dad and a few other people campaigned to put an end to all this, and the authorities flipped. Especially after he started publically speaking out in favor of people like Martin Luther King. They sent letters to the parents of the students involved, saying "Dear Mr. & Mrs. Soandso, your son or daughter has joined a Communist-affiliated organization."

Back in the days of Hoover, the TLA's probably really did think they could keep files on every would-be radical, but they probably don't waste their time with it any more.

Re:Double duty: Encrypt using these special keywor

I must have been crazy but I did it. I put it up, there's a copy of the code that runs it and a CGI that lets you play with it with small things.

You can enjoy at http://ben.reser.org/echelon/ [reser.org].

Have fun, but please don't kill my server. If the CGI is too big of a problem I'll have to take it down.

This won't work that well.

Eschelon doesn't use a keyword search, instead it works like this. Eschelon does not use a dictionary search, but instead searches based on a very elegant but simple method which utilizes the frequency of occurances of unique strings of characters. Also check out this link to the [164.195.100.11]NSA on their searching technology [nsa.gov].

Jam Eschelon day is a really good idea, but using keywords is the wrong way to go about it. Instead, a story generator which generates subversive letters would be better.

(Thanks to Hacker News Network [hackernews.com] for the links.)

My attempt (humor)

so I say we raid the FBI and CIA hopefully the NSA won't catch us and send the IRS after us with the ATF and BATF using half the budget of the DOD that was mostly waisted on WACO. We will meet at RUBY RIDGE while we plan to drive to OKC OKLAHOMA CITY and meet with the local MILITIA in order to trade GUN for HANDGUN. Hopfully the MILGOV will meet us there with fruit and cake. ASSAULTs on our freedom to write drivel like this RIFLE me into a TERRORISM state. BOMB, I mean damn, that sucks. Gonna have to go find some good DRUGs in order to get over this HORIUCHI KORESH.
DAVIDIAN wow, he was a nice guy, strange name though, but what did you think about KAHL and his POSSE of COMITATUS. BTW the other day, I ran into RANDY WEAVER who said he was really sick and tired of VICKIE WEAVER and is going to send the SPECIAL FORCES out on her ass. LINDA THOMPSON didn't think that was such a hot idea though, and said that the SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP would do a much cleaner job. SOGgy wet diapers in my pants SOFa btich. I'm starting to get bored with the DELTA FORCE who thinks they can constintly subvert the CONSTITUTION, and BILL OF RIGHTS. WHITEWATER, what whitewater, what happend to the good old days when everyones water was a nice brown. POM PARK sat ON METER ARKANSIDE and said that his IRAN CONTRAS was giving him a pain in the OLIVER NORTH. VINCE FOSTER said I should really stop writing this but he PROMISed that MOSSAD from the NASA would come with his MI5 and blow the ONI out of its CID. AK47 more things to gp. So where's my only M16 is it in the C4 in MALCOLM X's pants. she REVOLUTIONs at CHEROKEE sometimes HILLARY knows. BILL CLINTON and GORE for 2000 GEORGE BUSH's with WACKENHUT hammers TERRORISTing the TASK FORCE of 160 SPECIAL OPS from the 12TH GROUP or was that the 5TH GROUP
of SF.

Reality check

Let me first say this is a very funny joke to play on the NSA if they indeed are still running the Echelon program. I can imagine them drawing straws to find out who'll be the poor schmoe hitting the reboot button all day long on Jam Echelon day...

But in response to some of the alarmist posts I saw in the old, archived Echelon discussion, may I just remark "The Man does not care about you! You are not interesting to the Man! The Man consider the lint on his Armani suit to be more important than your entire existence, the existence of your parents, and those of your future children, spouses, and pets! You are a nobody! Wake up and get a life!"

While in college I hung out with a pretty leftist crowd. Lots of megaphone demagoguery on the quad about starving babies in Iraq, etc, etc. Well, okay, let's just be frank and say quite a few of my acquaintances were just polishing their manifestos for the day when the socialist revolution happened and they would be called upon to lead their brave comrades into a People's Utopia. Not that I didn't largely agree with them, but they were definitely nuts.

Anyway, these people were obsessed with the notion that the FBI/CIA/NSA/Shadowy NWO/paranoid three-letter-acronym(TLA) du-jour was spying on them. They had read more biographies of Dr. Spock and Mumia Abu Jamal than was quite good for them, and since those activists were their heros, they were convinced that the Powers That Be would treat them as shady characters worthy of a File in the Black Room. Frequently I would overhear these people in their little cells talking in hushed but excited voices about a "friend-of-a-friend" who had gone to CIA headquarters and demanded his file, "and it was verrrry interesting..."

(Aside: when they set up the FOIA over the web, I actually sent in a request to the CIA to pull references to my name. After several pieces of correspondence taped shut with duct tape, they formally declared they did not know who the hell I was and would I please stop sending them letters?)

Now you see, the CIA/FBI/NSA simply has better things to do than track every punk college student who thinks Castro's Cuba would probably be a sea of golden grain/ring of frolicking workers/god's daisy chain if only the nasty US government would stop trying to sanction it out of existence. Lots of college kids have these ideas. Lots of college kids talk about these ideas. They are discussed so often and openly that they have almost become part of the establishment - a rite of passage for white yuppie larva passing through on their way to productive careers as Cogs in the Machine. Why would the CIA give a fuck if yet one more kerchief-bedecked hashhead had stumbled upon the notion that, whoah, we're like only ciphers in this like vast capitalist machine!

Similarly, why on earth would the NSA give a rat's ass about anything you have to think or say? The simple, undeniable fact is that you and I are totally irrelevant. As they go around chanting in Fight Club "I am not special. I am not a beautiful unique snowflake." Damn right we aren't. We couldn't destabilize this country if you tried. What would we do? Put pr0n up on all the major homepages of the information infrastructure?

No doubt there are some people that the government is watching, even today. These are people who are coordinating real revolutions, underground sects, militarized religious organizations that dream of dropping acid into the water supply someday. Political enemies of the Republicrats, Black Panthers, whatever. Not slashdot readers.

Let's repeat that. Not slashdot readers. We are irrelevant in the grand powergames of nations. Sorry for the depressing news. I can already hear some of you squawking "Speak for yourself! You have no idea of the dark byways I travel! I am unique! I am dangerous! I am special! I am unlike the common man!"

Ok, sure. Maybe you are. Just remember the quote: "The common man believes he isn't."

Moderation bombs away!
-konstant

Conspiracy: www.echelon.net and www.echelon.org

I looked up echelon.net. [echelon.net] Many things strike me as sinister about them....

1) They are based in Canada, one of the Echelon countries.

2) They promise free internet access. An obvious ploy to sucker in naive Canadians...

3) Their main page has animation of 3 people marching in line, with the first one being blue (an obvious ref. to IBM) and the last one being red (take a guess).

4) They use devious techniques to trap you into sending them your subversive ideas. For instance, at the bottom of their news [echelon.ca] page, they innocently ask you to "send us your ideas at [e-mail], and we'll include information and content that you want to see each month.".
Yeah right.

Click on the "about" page and it says - "What an amazing time to be alive!" That's a strange statement....

In short, the whole thing is fishy. And did you notice they didn't use the standard Canadian end-of-sentence indicator, eh?

Oh, and at echelon.org, check out the page's source code....it has a weird arrangement of unnecessary blockquotes. Very odd.

---- (Hint for the clueless - don't reply pointing out inconsistencies in my theory. If you can't get it, you won't.)