October 21 is 'Jam Echelon' Day 223
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.
Re:Trigger Keywords (Score:1)
-Chris
(fnord)
Re:This isn't going to work. (Score:1)
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:1)
it would take my home computer a billion years to crack the 1024 bit key (brute-force, that is). if their computers are a billion times faster, it still takes them a year.
plus, if i add a bit to my key length, it would take them twice as long. so it is a matter of effort: the race stays even when the cracker doubles his computer power, and i add a few puny bits to my key length. just to stay on the safe side here, i choose to add 1000 bits to my key length. no one can crack it.
and just for the record: the Echelon is not some fantasy of weirdo paranoids. the European Parliament has officially acknowleged its existence - ALL communications between the US and europe pass through echelons servers - e.g. not just email and packets, but also phone conversations. i seriously doubt that anyone can actually do anything with this amount of data - but i don't doubt they have the machines to process it all.
email generated with `M-x spook' (Score:1)
Date: 21 Oct 1999
From: Your.Name@domain
To: Some.Lucky.Friend@domain
NORIEGA,
I am glad to hear that our TERRORIST friends in HONDURAS and ALBANIA have received the latest shipment of GENETIC WEAPONS, MUNITIONS and BOMBS we SMUGGLE past those COUNTER-INTELIGENCE NAZIS at the FBI in containers of QUICHE!
I will never forgive the them and the CIA for the ASSASSINATION of CHEWBACA!
Ever since we discovered their PLOT with the NSA to use that PLUTONIUM and COCAINE on KENNEDY, I haven't been able to stop thinking about DOMESTIC DISRUPTION, REVOLUTION, JUNTA, and/or JIHAD!
The FSF really has been helpful in our SUBVERSIVE activities by supplying AK-47s, CRYPTOGRAPHY, and that DELTA FORCE training for our MILITIA!
Once we expose NORAD's lies about the SERBIAN-SOUTH AFRICA-WORLD TRADE CENTER-SDI incident, we will alert our PLO and SOVIET COMRADES that the CLASS STRUGGLE has been reborn and the time for playing PAC-MAN is near!
By THE way, I think something IS wrong with MY ``Caps-Lock'' KEY!
--MOSSAD
P.S. Hello to all my friends in domestic surveilance!
Re:How right is the Right!! (Score:1)
Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK
The people at WACO where all religious nuts
No Project Phoenix in Vietnam
No testing of Radioactive material on Cancer patients in the 40's
All minorities in jail's are criminal's
The justice system recognises equality of economic circumstance
There is no MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
There are no special lobby groups swaying our politician's
No large Multi National's have a say in Government Policy
Nothing happened in Cambodia under Pul Pot
The USA never deposed the Shah of Iran
Never exported chemical weapon's either
All defendant's during the Macarthy period where guilty
Had no IDEA OF THE EFFECT OF THE BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN!!!!
Re:What is the existance of Echelon? (Score:1)
Crypto is not ready (Score:1)
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:1)
I wonder if its all just some sort of fraud. Such a system would be incredibly easy to fsck around with, but if its an NSA directors nephew owning the company supplying the hardware, maybe the actual usefulness doesnt matter.
Re:Hey! (Score:1)
Re:Wackenhut? (Score:1)
Wackenhut has an "interesting" history, according to that article...
As much as Tom Clancy's literary style (OK, what literary style?) has gotten worse as he continues to write, he sort of hints well at some of the special relationships companies can have with the darker elements of the govment pretty well...(I just finished reading "Rainbow Six". It was OK.)
BFD if Wackenhut Corp. allows its guards to "rape and beat the prisoners", when the "real" guards have done this all along. Separate the "rape and beat the prisoners" (which is just be plain wrong) from private company vs. govment. But, also, prison isn't supposed to be fun, either.
I wish you were right... (Score:3)
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.
--
Re:ummm.... (Score:1)
Besides, any fool can make a scanner for listening to cell phones. Any fool can make a packet sniffer for their cable modem segment (heck, just get the software for Linux...). What the NSA can do is use some derivative of the SETI hardware to easily packet sniff an OC3 or DS1 in real time, etc., plus the integration, despite silly laws to the contrary.
Why should Congress pass silly laws to "protect" cell phone users, when they would never think to protect other cordless phones (you don't use one, right), instead of saying, "Well, Newt, you were a silly, narcissistic fool for thinking that your cell phone conversations wouldn't be listened to by your political enemies. You should have gotten a PCS or GSM phone"?
And, while the FBI or other police agencies might not be able to directly monitor without a warrant, it does nothing from stopping you or me from wearing a wire all the time and recording interesting stuff on our own, and then later giving that info to someone else (Linda Tripp ring a bell? But there have been others wearing white hats, such as the two guys profiled recently on one of the network shows who got involved with the Mob and started taping stuff ON THEIR OWN and later gave it to the Feds, but were ratted on/found out, and died while in the Witness Protection Program...)
Sure, there are stalking laws, but if you're being harassed by a neighbor, and the cops don't believe you, so you set up a web cam or two to do your own surveillance system, and take the tapes of the guy poking around your yard at odd hours, peering in your windows, etc., to them to make them believe you...
bomb (Score:1)
Re:Great. We're lumped in with militias. (Score:2)
's why I did a shorter list, FBI, C4 Mossad, Kill,
President, NSA, a few others... Things that are sure to be relevant.>:)
Kintanon
Keyword: Slashdot (Score:2)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Re:60's voice echelon is pretty implausible. (Score:1)
I don't think such a thing would have been possible in the sixties.
No, you are wrong. Remember, the British invented radar and a whole lot of other implausible things long before the technological tools we have grown used to an now depend upon became available. If you absolutely had to solve this problem, and you had to do it all with analog circuitry, or offline computation, going back & forth & back & forth over regular analog tape, whatever, you would, even back in the 60's. E.g., spectrum analysis has been around for some time, methinks you're carrying around a pretty good spectrum analyzer in each inner ear.
I'm not saying that this was actually done, just that it's not implausible.
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
It's a warning. (Score:1)
"Shut up about this Echelon thing or else we'll launch congressional investigations and media crusades to make you look like a big national security threat, like we did with the militias after the Waco operation."
"We" being "THEM" -- the sinister conspiracy that seeks to complete their domination of the world from beyond the shadows.
You just gotta read (and possibly write) between the lines.
It's easy to bash pretentious college students (Score:2)
The more I hear about echelon the more of a joke it sounds, but it is an attention grabber. A little bit ago the British government admited to having their own 'echelon' in the 60's which scanned voice phone transmission to Ireland looking for certain words. That was the 60's. Am I going to say how much more powerful technology is today. Nope. I just wanted to point out the lack of civil liberties in this situation and the case in point is not science fiction.
The main worry is that the government wants to monitor communications traffic. Remember FIDNET or that new proposal to block encryption? Only the very paranoid, pretentious, or criminal types think they're actually being watched. The rest of us should be worried enough to not let the government compromise our rights.
Hopefully the stir from from this will show people that their privacy is in jeopardy and the fight to keep these rights is going on in congress right now. Most people's actions may be irrelevant, but their rights certainly aren't so.
If we're ending with quotes here, how's this one grab you? "The price of freedom is eternal vigilence."
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
Right?...
----
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you....
Wonder if the filter is already running? (Score:1)
sitrep: echelon report: key word hit rate %20 -->
"some plutonium and am ready to start Operation
blow up the white house"
-- origin: sweetooth@sweetooth.org
(/stupid hollywood terminal mode off)
Meanwhile, down in the depths of NSA...
"Hey, some guy named 'sweetooth' is planning to
blow up the white house with plutonium"....
Re:Can we really do much? (Score:1)
-------
CAIMLAS
What about.... (Score:1)
Also, hold my order of anthrax. I'm having problems locating a suitable missle delivery package. If you can provide both, i'll double the original bid.
How about just using crypto? (Score:2)
Why not just use crypto, and be certain that no one is reading your email. Widespread use of crypto would make scanning email completely impossible, since the computer power required to crack it all would be unattainable.
Complexity isn't the problem... (Score:1)
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:1)
As far as we can tell, yes. With today's technology, a 128bit Symmetric key is unbreakable, provided the underlying crypto algorithm isn't flawed. No flaws are known in SSL at the moment - but it is a field where you can't prove the negative
--
Kickass! (Score:2)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
Ok, we do consider ourselves more important than we actually are but you make the same mistake by placing superhuman powers in the hands of the Man. The thing is that the Man cannot enter your head and even if he could that woudn't help him much in case you're a looney. So the Man _has to_ screen everyone because he simply isn't able to distinguish the resolved ones from the talkers.
Today I'm a college nut who talks about drawning the capitalist pigs in a bloodbath. Everyone is laughing at me. Tomorrow I find another nut who gives me money to buy me bombs. I blow up a shopping centre. Who could have anticipated that?
Everyone knows how huge the Internet is. So an uneducated guess would be that it would be difficult and expensive to watch it all. But it would require less manpower than to open everyone's letters in a single city.
So what we have here is both the necessity to screen the data flow in order to catch at least a small percentage of the active terrorists, for example, and the technology to do it quite efficient and in real time. What government, which can afford it, would miss the opportunity?
Now comes the scary part. After all the job is done by humans and you happen to be in their perimeter of interest just because you constantly tell jokes about revolutions. Ah, but how would the Man be able to tell how serious you are unless you are scrutinized more closely? So there.
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:2)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Yea.... right.... (Score:1)
Oh wait... an act of congress says they can't, oh i guess they don't then... puhlease...
The government must be overthrown... (Score:1)
Re:Double duty: Encrypt using these special keywor (Score:1)
Send E-Mail Here! (Score:1)
Come on! Let me feel the wrath of
Double duty: Encrypt using these special keywords! (Score:3)
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--
Great. We're lumped in with militias. (Score:2)
-lx
Bomb the FBI plaza today (Score:1)
Remember, the NSA and CIA have screwed us out of our Rights, as stated in the Bill Of rights, the early part of the Constitution, especially Bill 1. It is time for a revolution. Remember what the ATF did at Waco.
Screw Bill Clinton and Hillary!!!!
Wasted Effort (Score:1)
Re:Reality check (Score:3)
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.
Who's it supposed to find? (Score:1)
A BETTER Word List (Score:1)
realistic. The NSA could care less about
the Davidians, or even the FBI for that
matter. Permit me to suggest a better
list:
Weapons: Nuclear, VX, Sarin, Stinger,
AK-47, Anthrax, Back-hoe
Bad Guys: Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosovic,
Mad-Dog [Qu|K|Kh][a|i][d|dd]a[f|ff|ph]i,
Kim Il Sung, Osama Bin Laden, Lucifer,
Bill Gates
Good Guys: Bill Clinton, POTUS, Slick, Burger boy,
Al Gore, Tony Blair, Linus Torvalds
Verbs: nuke, assasinate, attack, defenestrate,
hack, mung, frobnicate
Countries: Cuba, Libya, Syria, North Korea,
Afganistan, Redmond
Targets: White house, Congress, Cheyenne Mountain,
Pentagon, Washington, New York, L.A., that-big-
area-between-the-coasts, Fry's, Poke-Joe's
Organizations: NSA, NRO, MI5, Interpol, IRS, BBC,
B.B. King, Illuminati, FSF, Slashdot, We'd-tell-
you-but-then-we'd-have-to-kill-you
HOWTO for Pine users (Score:1)
You can stuff arbitrary words into your message headers with most mailers. They generally won't be seen when the recipient looks at the message. If you are a pine users, add a line similar to the following to your .pinerc:
customized-hdrs=X-HiEchelon: tempest anthrax fissile ebola revolt CIA pentagon jihad
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
the full keyword list (Score:2)
Now what would be convenient... (Score:2)
Of course, the ultimate message would be something like, "Dear Mr. Smith, the echelon system has looked over your terrorist manifesto, and has decided that you are correct. Please submit a list of people you would like the system to keep tabs on. Fight the power."
Re:ummm.... (Score:1)
-Legion
Mr. Subliminal Strikes Again (Score:1)
Sincerely POSSE,
==================================
neophase
Re:give them some credit. (Score:1)
Of course you are. The latest rumours going round are that
the NSA uses Echelon for business espionage for US companies
as well - and they don't care whom they spy on,
be it friend or enemy. Of course, most European gouvernements
don't want to touch on this topic, as officially, the US are still
our allies and friends.
I believe the "friends" part when it comes to the US people,
but not when it comes to businesses...
My opinion is: Get rid of all that stuff.
My EUR0.02,
Thomas
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
obviously you dont know how elections work. Its the electoral college that matters.
The electoral college only applies to the election of the president. It doesn't apply to Congressional ballots. (And of course, Supreme Court justices, which are appointed.)
The president (executive branch of government) is only one of three branches of government -- the Congress arguably holds more power.
But do you know where the real power lies? It's in the ballots themselves. How many times do you recall a write-in candidate being elected? You have to be on the ballot to win -- and you're only going to get on the ballot if you pass through several layers of filtering. So in the end, most elections in this country end up as a choice between Candidate A and Candidate B, where A and B are so similar there's not much point to selecting either of them.
(Sorry, topic drift detected... aborting....)
Not a Good Idea (Score:1)
Not a good idea to give mythical beasts real practice.
Attempted subversion here might just be assistance.
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:1)
Or maybe I've misunderstood, but I though that this was the reason people don't see a reason to encrypt with a 10 char key.
Re:A BETTER Word List (Score:1)
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
www.deja.com at Echelon (Score:2)
Customer Support-Nuking Dept.
Deja News Inc.
9430 Research Blvd.
Echelon 2, Suite 300
Austin, Tx. 78759
This address is about a mile from the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation [mcc.com], aka "MCC". MCC's first director was National Security Agency director Bobby Inman [niu.edu].
Deja News' location within the Echelon building barely a mile from NSA-associated MCC is simply the result of a concentration of high technology businesses in the Austin area combined with some real estate developer's perverse sense of humor in choosing the name "Echelon" for that particular office building.
"Some of you look dubious." -- Larry Wall
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
Actually I do know about the electoral college. I didn't say that elections are perfect - I just said they work. They do. I personally think they'd work a lot better without the electoral college, but that doesn't invalidate them. Compared to the other methods of overthrowing governments, democratic elections (even with the electoral college) are far better for all concerned.
Re:Or, even better (Score:1)
Of course this could simply be a code for something completly different. Sending misleading, but believable, information is a well tried and tested technique.
Re:Wackenhut? (Score:1)
Wackenhut's a large, nationwide security organization, not unlike Pinkerton in size.
Re:Yeah, I think they picked stupid keywords (Score:1)
I wonder if they would trigger if someone were to mention "tube alloys"... Any terrorist organisation would be be using terms like "a full crate of oranges" or even "the stuff".
Re:Double duty: Encrypt using these special keywor (Score:1)
I've increased the message size limit on my mirror of the echelon-encoding script
to 4096 bytes so it should be a little more useful.
http://www.httptech.com/echelon/ [httptech.com]
Re:Great. We're lumped in with militias. (Score:1)
(The NSA must have fun with BackTo1913, though.)
Joe
Re:This isn't going to work. (Score:1)
have a field-day every 'Jam Echelon' day
Anyway if they are semi bright they will use codes which are either deliberatly misleading. (e.g claim they are going to kill Clinton when they are really after Gates) or which will be ignored by any algorithms intended to catch "subversive" messages.
Re:Reality check (Score:1)
Work WITHIN the system? Give us a break! Nobody believes that anymore, just look at the voter turnout numbers for *any* election. The system works, for the RICH, not for us little guys and gals.
Expect to see alot of changes soon though.
Go Anarchy!
www.infoshop.org [infoshop.org]
Re:Trigger Keywords (Score:1)
I wonder if even enemies have paranoids?
Feasibility of Echelon Overload (Score:1)
Incidentally, as an Australian, I'm proud to say it was one of our own who let the cat officially out of the bag. We access Echelon as part of the defunct-ish UKUSA treaty. But anyone could have found that out from reading Peter Wright's Spycatcher biography.
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:2)
Re:Send E-Mail Here! (Score:1)
Quantum Encryption (Score:1)
Also sounds like Chris Farley's best skit ever (Score:2)
Re:give them some credit. (Score:1)
This is the letter I sent to everyone I knew (Score:2)
Please feel free to plagerize this since I borrowed some of it from the article above:-)
-crispy
C U T A L O N G D O T T E D L I N E S
-------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
Echelon is the near-mythical worldwide computer spy network that reportedly scans all email, packet traffic, telephone conversations -- and more -- around the world, in an effort to ferret out potential terrorist or enemy communications.
It is an invasion of our privacy and in an attempt to bring awareness of this issue to the general public the "gag Echelon day" event has been organized. I am merely helping in the effort.
If the hunch of a loose-knit group of cyber-activists is correct, the words below will trip the keyword recognition filter on a global spy system partly managed by the US National Security Agency. If everyone sends out email containing these words then we might be able to bring the system down or at least slow it for a while.
Please forward this email to as many people as you know FOR TODAY ONLY!!!! This is not a chain letter. Do not forward it unless today's date is 10-21-1999. For proof that I am not making this up please check out this URL:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,31726,00 .html
Here are the words. I have tried to link them all together in a paragraph of some sort since their system is likely to filter out anything as obvious as a slew of these keywords chained together:
The FBI and CIA, together with the NSA, IRS, and ATF are government agencies; As are the BATF and the DOD. The MILITIA's are all convinced of the government's involvement in WACO and RUBY RIDGE and have done sick things like the TERRORIST bombing at OKLAHOMA CITY (OKC). If you have a GUN (or HANDGUN), ASSAULT RIFLE(AK47, M16, etc), or a BOMB or EXPLOSIVE (ie. C4) of any sort do not use it in any sort of TERRORISM or DRUG related crime. Note that I do not support DAVID KORESH, the BRANCH DAVIDIAN's, the MOSSAD, or any other group involved in MILITIA or TERRORIST activities. I am merely trying to bring the echelon situation to the attention of our contries leaders (HILLARY CLINTON, BILL CLINTON (lots of nuts are still worried about WHITEWATER), AL GORE, GEORGE BUSH, OLIVER NORTH (he was involved in that IRAN CONTRAS business), VINCE FOSTER (he's dead now), etc). I believe in our CONSTITUTION and the BILL OF RIGHTS, do not allow the government to spy on us. forward this email. There are other keywords but putting them all in seems a bit excesive. It's the number of emails that matter after all!
Please feel free to not forward this if you do not agree with it. Thanks,
:wq
-------------------------------------------------
Christopher M. Eppstein
Caltech
<SIG>
I think I lost my work ethic while surfing the web. If you find it, please email it to crispy@crotch.caltech.edu.
</SIG>
Don't harm us! Please! Don't waste our time! (Score:1)
If all of these people use an average of 1-2 minutes to be notified of new mail, stop what they're up to, check the mail, wonder a bit about it, delete it, and then continue to go on, we've just wasted about one hour of worktime.
Multiply this, and think about how much time that has been wasted in total!
I just recieved a "Let's cheat Echelon!"-mail from somebody I don't know. The address, he had mailed to, was my old e-mail when I worked as a supporter for about 1½ years ago! I've probably mailed him once at that time, but my guess is that he don't know who I am either - he has just mailed to every e-mail-address, he've ever got in his mailreader!
In total, I guess that I've recieved the mail somewhere between 9 or 10 times (mail from family, friends, colleagues, customers, a few times in different newsgroups).
Seriously, my best guess is that this effort is doing much more harm on us "ordinary workers", than it would ever do on Echelon. Don't harm us anymore... please?
Re:Who's it supposed to find? (Score:1)
> give the military-industrial complex something to do after the cold war.
Now see, I get the feeling that "terrorists" are to the military as "protecting the children" is to the special-interest groups who are looking to censor the internet -- a convenient excuse. The American public, no matter how dazed and hypnotized and not encouraged to think for themselves, still has a few lingering concepts of civil liberties -- if the public as a whole learned of some of the things Our Fine Government pulled off on a regular basis, they would be incensed. So the powers that be need a smokescreen to justify their actions, and what better way to justify those actions than to invent a mystical boogeyman that must be protected against?
Please note that I am *not* saying that terrorism is not a threat. It is. I just do not believe that the desired end justifies the stated means. The problem is that when rights are forfeited on an "emergency" or "temporary" basis, it is very difficult to get those rights back -- and very easy for the slippery slope to set in. I believe that there are a few lines that should not be crossed, and many civil liberties lie along those lines.
This is also why I object so much to the dearth of civil liberties in American public schools. We are raising a generation of children who believe that it is acceptable for someone to demand to see their identification, that it is acceptable to have their personal property searched (sometimes on a daily basis), that it is acceptable for those in authority to detain and question them whenever they appear to be doing something "suspicious". This is breeding a generation of people who will believe that it is acceptable for the NSA to monitor their communications, that it is acceptable for the police to detain and search them at any time, that it is acceptable for anyone in authority to walk into their houses at any time to search for drugs or guns or terrorist plans. That idea scares the crap out of me, and I don't even consider myself all that passionate a civil libertarian.
Insert Benjamin Franklin quote about liberties and temporary safety; I'm sure you all know it by now. But perhaps Bruce Cockburn fits better here: "'It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first' -- but the trouble with normal is that it always gets worse."
Hmm. I think I need more coffee.
The Collected Wisdom of the Experts (Score:1)
How many people here think Jane's is going to write an article based on the comments here?
Joe
Surveillance and Intelligence: Not that funny (Score:1)
What with small active service units, severe informer penalties, and 'no go' areas for would be undercover infiltrators.
Largely due to intelligence difficulties this is a war that cannot be won on the battlefield (fortunately).
The occupying forces may be inept but I do not want them to be any better.
Echelon (Score:1)
Re:Reality check -- Revolutions (Score:2)
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.
Real revoulutions??? Do you think they're possible? Real revolutions need to change fundamentally the power relations within society, not just the people who happen to be sitting in the various seats of power within the structure. WHen has this ever happened? How is it that the relations of power replicate themselves? Grand social revolution is a pipe-dream. So what can we do? Resist! The Man, as it's being called, likes to marginalize but accept a certaqin social level of subversive ideas. Because it's accepted, but marginalized in newsgroups and universities, subversive thinking becomes neutered. On the other hand, only by operating from within the margins and perpetually engaging in creating localized sites of resistance can we hope to effect any kind of change or challenge to the system. In this way, we can all be a danger (at least theoretically -- most people don't have the will to adopt constant struggle).
In short, slashdot readers can be a danger. No, they're not going to effect a large scale revolution, but those groups that are trying are far less significant to the monitors of society than those who can create effective resistance. The criminal justice arm of things can handle bomb-maker and terrorists (albeit ineffectively). Anyway, what is a slashdot reader? Someone who does nothing else with her life? Right.
So yeah, for what it's worth, append some nasty keywords to your emails today. It'd be really funny if it did something. Better, yet, get used to trying to throw a wrench in the gears whenever you can.
this is an NSA test (Score:1)
the machines.
don't fall for it, don't use email today!
Re:Operation Mayhem (Score:2)
Survey says... (Score:1)
MindStalker, ol' buddy, you've been outed. You are definitely a computer. :) (So much for the Turing award, eh?)
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
Re:Great. We're lumped in with militias. (Score:1)
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
Anyway, I want to take issue with your portrayal of the Black Panthers. They are a nationally co-ordinated community action group that happens to advocate carrying guns for self-defense--nothing more. They certainly don't belong in the same category as "militarized religious organizations that dream of dropping acid into the water supply someday". I don't doubt that the government spies on them still, and we all know how the police basically assassinated Huey with no provocation. But they are not fanatics, no matter some reactionaries might want you to believe.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
What is the existance of Echelon? (Score:1)
If someone knows of a place I can find real information about this let me know. Otherwise this seems like we(America) don't have anyone else in the world to pick on except ourselves.
Important Link Missing (Score:3)
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
Or, even better (Score:2)
Trigger Keywords (Score:4)
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:Survey says... (Score:2)
the NSA (Score:2)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
I agree this is not the target of Echelon (if it exists.) What I've read on it suggests that the target, if any, is commercial espionage. Do you think that it wouldn't be advantageous, say, to do keyword searches on a Japanese or European company's e-mail for what they're working on, and possible difficulties and solutions? To a greater and greater degree war is about economics these days.
Oh come on... (Score:2)
If you really want to make them sit up and take notice, encrypt all your stuff with 4096. It takes them at least 15 seconds to crack that, and they HATE that.
Re:Reality check (Score:3)
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 (Score:4)
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. (Score:3)
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) (Score:3)
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 (Score:5)
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
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
Unfortunately because of the political apathy of the British and our lack of a tradition of constitutional rights there was no uproar.
It might interest you to know that this type of activity isn't confined to the public sector either. Up until a few years ago there was a semi-secret private organisation in the UK called "the Economic League" which kept records of a similar nature on a phenomenal number of people. They would scour local papers and petitions which had been filed for the names of anyone who had ever dared to stick their head up over the parapet. They then sold this information to anyone who would pay. It is well known that the human resources departments of large corporations such as the major banks would routinely vet any job applicant against these files.
The League, whose records were all on paper and thus fell outside the remit of the UK Data Protection Act, apparently closed their offices a few years ago, around the time that the Internet started to take off. Anyone see anything fishy about that?
It may be that they realised their activities would no longer be tolerated. On the other hand it's just as possible that they went underground or moved overseas, in order to continue their business using the new technology and unmolested by tiresome laws about protecting private information.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:How about just using crypto? (Score:2)
There are two major forms of encryption currently in use - one is Public key (or asymmetric) encryption, the other classic(or Symmetric). The types differ in the number of keys - PK uses a different key to encrypt than to decrypt - you can give the encryption key to whoever you chose, or even post it to the web, and only your decryption key can extract the message again.
Creating a copy of the decryption key, even given the Encryption key, involves solving a "hard" mathematical problem - usually factoring a large number into two primes, or a similar problem in the area of discrete logs. This is difficult, computationally,but doesn't increase as a strict multiple - each five or six extra binary digits doubles the time taken to crack one key, on the average - current estimates are that 1024 bit keys are unbreakable in any realistic time (yes, a major government agency may be able to break *one* a year, if their computer technology is vastly greater than ours, and they devote their entire budget to it. Experts in cryptography believe even one a year is unrealistic, and even one a *century* might be an understatement, but suggest you use 2048 bit keys anyhow
Symmetric encryption uses the same key to decrypt as encrypt, and if it is well designed, the only attack is to try each possible key, one after the other. for 56bit DES, this takes about three days (on the average) for even a modest-sized company; but in this case, adding a single bit to the length DOES double the time taken, so a 57 bit key would take six days, a 58 would take twelve and so forth. The most common length of key in use for symmetric encryption is 128 bits - again, it is barely possible that a major government could break one by brute force *per year* but I doubt I am important enough to be that one
Passwords are a different thing again, and often much easier to crack. A "dictionary attack" is an attempt to try passphrases from a list to see if a real word or two have been used as a password - this works more often than you would expect, as people tend to use normal, english words - not a good idea.
One point that is worth remembering though is that many UNIX based systems limit you to a maximum password length of only eight characters - 56 bits .... and your key is therefore limited similarly.
PGP is probably the best known example of dedicated, unbreakable encryption. You may wish to check it out, or the Gnu varient Gnu Privacy Guard - they both use the same basic file formats and methods, and for a decent key size, unrealistic to break into by pure cryptography - but if you are paranoid, they are relatively easy to break if they break into your house and modify the copy installed on your PC :+)
--
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
These are just the major findings condensed, all the details and the evidence have been published in that report. In an earlier report, An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control [jya.com], we get the very welcome conclusion:
It's pretty much certain that ECHELON exists, (the 1999 report contains interesting technical details and speculation, for those interested) and it's doing more than just monitoring those seeking the downfall of global capitalism.
Given that they have these capabilities, and that they are well known for paranoia, they'll more than likely be using these things to "ensure national security isn't breached". So, if you send round mail containing made up stuff about, say, TEMPEST, bacterial cultures, etc etc, they'll probably have filters to detect those signatures; too many keywords will strain the system AND its operators who have to check its output. So go ahead and jam up the bugger :-)
Hey! (Score:2)
By the way, when I first submitted the above, I was returned to the Preview, with the message "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted." I can only assume this means Taco has achieves Strong AI and his code knows how lame it is.
Seriously, this is not a "troll"; I have the deepest respect and appreciation for the work that has been done to create Slashdot, but right now I'm kind of pissed about having a perfectly good post censored for no reason. This is not offtopic, either; it's partly a meta-comment, but it also adds a clarification and draws an interesting parallel.
I cut the two blocks of "mystery text" into 40-character lines instead of giving them each as one big long word, and it accepted it. Presumably the filter detected words over some cutoff length and concluded that I was one of those jackasses who make huge garbage posts to waste bandwidth and vertical space. It's a noble goal, but the implementation is faulty. In my opinion, false positives are worse than false negatives in something like this, and this seems pretty vulnerable to both.
Anyway, I broke them up, with the result that the post now takes about 50% more vertical space than it would have, and anyone interested in my cryptographic challenge might be thrown on a wild goose chase by the line lengths. Let me assure you, the lengths are irrelevant; the original contained no whitespace at all.
Something else that struck me: how weird is it that, on a story about the "spooks" scanning people's communications, I should discover that Slashdot itself has a mechanism that scans the text of comments for certain undesirable content before allowing them to be posted? Not to mention that I was wrongly victimized by it, in sort of the way that we're all afraid of having happen for real. Could it be? Is Rob... one of Them?
David Gould
60's voice echelon is pretty implausible. (Score:2)
--
Conspiracy: www.echelon.net and www.echelon.org (Score:3)
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 editor@echelon.ca, 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.)
Re:Reality check (Score:2)
Sure. That's what they told you.