Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper

[Brian Gladman]

From: "Owen Lewis" <oml@eloka.demon.co.uk>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 1:40 PM
Subject: RE: Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper


> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk
> > [mailto:ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk]On Behalf Of Brian Gladman
> > Sent: 06 July 2001 11:52
> > To: UK Crypto Posting
> > Subject: Re: Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper
> >
>
> > if press reports are to be believed one outcome of the European
Parliament
> > study is a conclusion that Echelon is a 'fact of life' and that there is
> > little that the EU nations can do to counter it.
> >
> > If this truly is a conclusion, the European Parliamentary group have
been
> > badly briefed since nothing could be further from the truth.
> >
> > But whether it would be in their interests to undermine Echelon is a
much
> > more difficult issue since the main need for such assets is in areas
where
> > US and European interests largely coincide.
>
> Quite so, and not just European and US interests perhaps. That this
> important point you raise was, seemingly, entirely missed by the EPG -
even
> to mention, let alone evaluate - is one indication of narrowness of vision
> and of purpose in their study and report.
> >
> > The failure of the US and Europe to seriously discuss these issues is
> > dangerous since we need to remove the privacy and industrial/commercial
> > espionage concerns raised by Echelon without undermining its
> > value in other
> > areas.
>
> How would you propose that such a precise sorting of sheep from goats
might
> be effected? This seems to me to be a fundamental issue and very much at
the
> heart of the crypto debate.

The concerns that have arisen in Europe over Echelon relate largely to
whether the US can be trusted to use the information it gains via Echelon
only in the way that it says it does.  Many in Europe clearly do not trust
the US in this respect.

And being an issue of trust, it is most unlikely that it can ever be
resolved if the parties involved are not prepared to sit down and discuss
the concerns and what might be done to remove them.  And here the apparent
willingness of the US to meet with a European Parliament delegation,
followed by a complete refusal to meet with them once they arrived in
Washington, is hardly an effective way of building trust.

I don't blame the US entirely for this but I do consider that they carry the
greater part of the blame.

However, to answer your question more directly, the critical factor in
building trust is the sharing of the raw intelligence data. One way of
removing the lack of trust is hence to make all EU nations fully paid up
members of Echelon in this respect.  Of course it is not going to happen
because the objectives are only partially overlapping, which, of course, is
why we have the problem in the first place.

But rather than trying to change the behaviour of the US, the EU can easily
remove the threat of Echelon if it wishes to do so.  All it has to do is to
promote the rapid and ***universal*** deployment of end-to-end cryptographic
information protection (voice and data).  It does not matter that much of
this protection will be weak since it is the universal use of end-to-end
encryption, not its strength, that will completely devastate Echelon.

In my view a determined EU plan to do just this would have created a
situation in which the US would have talked to the European Parliament
delegation!

Brian Gladman