Echelon Confirmed by Australians

Arctic Fox writes "The BBC has a story reporting that Australian intellegence confirms the existance of Echelon. " Obviously there is no "Official" confirmation, but its still pretty interesting. "They" are definitely watching.

Anybody Remember?

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*

Re:Not only do I remember...

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.
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What the Investigative Reporters Missed

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."

Start with the multinationals

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.

Who cares?

I don't understand why so many people are upset about Echelon. I don't know about everybody else, but I don't write about assasinating the president in my e-mails, and thus they don't get read by Echelon. Furthermore, IMHO, not being bombed by terrorists is a bit more important than maintaining my personal privacy.

The entertainment industry is mostly to blame. Shows like the X-Files (don't get me wrong, I love that show) and similar movies have taught us that the CIA, FBI, and especially the NSA are all out to get us. However, as my .sig suggests, the NSA is in fact working for the good of the people of the United States. That is why they are called the National Security Agency. The idea that they are trying to harm us is downright silly. The concept of government conspiracies is pure myth, perhaps rooted in the fact that there are inevidably a few somewhat corrupt people in the government that have done a few inconsequential things, like having oral sex with interns.

Getting back to Echelon, so what? It is a computer that collects international electronic communications that include phrases like "bomb the Whitehouse." If you are talking about bombing the Whitehouse in your e-mails, frankly, I want the government to take a closer look at what you are doing. And if you don't want Echelon to look at your e-mail, don't talk about bombing the Whitehouse. Efforts like "Jam Echelon Day" have done nothing but help terrorists get a chance to get by our security. I think that we should instead all do our part to avoid writing e-mail that might get picked up by Echelon to lighten their work load and let them take care of the important stuff.

It's 10 o'clock. Several Russian suitcase-sized nuclear warheads are missing. Do you know where your priorities are?
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Used for private gain!?

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.

Disinformation

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)

Re:Who cares?

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.

Re:Remember the KAL shootdown - 1983?

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.

Re:Disinformation

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.

Some information among the noise

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....