Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper

[Owen Lewis]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> [mailto:ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk]On Behalf Of John Young
> Sent: 06 July 2001 15:24
> To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> Subject: RE: Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper
>
>
> Owen Lewis writes:
>
> >It also needs saying from time to time that in the last half
> century and in
> >terms of his relations with 'friendly' states, Uncle Sam has,
> beyond doubt
> >(unless your name is Khomeini or Pinter) been more sinned against than
> >sinning.
>
> This astonishes. Only a biased understanding of US foreign policy,
> especially that exercised by way of US intelligence agencies,
> could produce
> such a patent falsehood.

I did say that there are some who disagree.

The small amount of information that come
> from secret archives and the greater amount that has come from
> targets of covert operations belies this claim of
> disproportionately sinned
> against. A prime argument the intelligence industry uses to resist
> full disclosure of sustained perfidy is that "means and methods"
> must be protected. It is these means and methods which are the
> shame of governments, and not only the US, but it is the US with
> help from its friends who are by far the investors, inventors,
> promulgators and users of the technologies of political control.

My dear John, if there is bias in an appreciation of this matter, pluck
first the beam from thine own eye and resist the call to hyperbole. Whatever
dear old Uncle Sam may or may not have got up to in this century, he has
not, in the quest of 'political control':

	-	Effectively eliminated one or more races from an entire continent.

	-	Exterminated, by shooting, burning, starvation, disease and slave labour
untold millions (20M+) of his own people.
	-	Eliminated political dissent within his own borders or anyone else's.

	-	Preached race or religious hatred as state policy at home and abroad.

	-	Occupied the land of others at the point of a bayonet, claiming some
ancient, God given right apparent to none but himself.

One could go on but you get the point I think. Balance in all things, mon
vieux. Uncle Sam surely is not perfect and - like the rest of us - he makes
mistakes from time to time. However, he is not the vicious psychotic thug
that some (stand up K & P) would like to depict him as.

To begin the search for balance, one might begin with the following properly
researched, painstakingly detailed and peer reviewed studies:

	'A Study of Tyranny'

	'The Gulag Archipelago'

	'The Mitrokhin Archive'

But you have studied these already, I'm sure. And that makes your view as
given above all the more incomprehensible to me.

> To make myself clear, the United States over the past 50 years
> of intelligence guiding foreign and now domestic policy has
> become extremely dirty-handed and extremely adept at
> camouflaging underhandedness. Nothing has so corrupted
> US culture as has secret government and its spread to
> other nations under guise of open democracy.
>
> Examples abound, just ask if you don't know them or believe
> them secret.
>
> Echelon is a mild diversion, and the technology so far revealed
> of global surveillance and intelligence mongering for political
> control -- see Steven Wright's 1997 STOA report -- has been
> cloaked by Echelon hand-wringing. When all the means and
> methods Wright describes gets the attention Echelon has
> gotten, a bit of progress will be made. Until then, as the EP
> report demonstrates, it's all blowing of smoke and, in
> Owen's case, of sunshine.
>
> These whitewashes of black deeds are the favorite means
> and methods to shape public opinion in the age of spook-led
> and -fed government/commerce.

Somehow I don't think we are going to agree. Some of the issues you raise
(snipped here for brevity) may be real enough concerns. However, they are in
no way related specifically to Uncle Sam. Rather, the concerns are global
and have to do with a combination of technological advances and a growing
consensus among people that they prefer to have others (govts in the main)
manage their lives for them, relieve them of risk and responsibility and
cross their ever-open and outstretched palms with silly sums of money
whenever they should suffer harm.

Owen