Mastering the Internet

[Kevin Townsend]

Not strictly crypto, but pertinent to whether our defenders can be trusted...

Many, many years ago I wrote an article for Computing (or CW, can't
remember) on The Green Networks. This was before The Internet, and before
general purpose email. I found a member of, I think, FOE, who agreed to
talk on the phone. At the end of the conversation he said, "You do realise
that just by talking to me your phone will now be monitored?" I laughed.
But the fact remains that my phone behaved slightly oddly for the next six
months.

On another occasion, at the very first signs of the original Star Wars
(Reagan, not Lucas) I was asked to do a piece on computers in space. No
emails, remember. I researched by flooding the PR market with requests for
info; and I always got stacks of paper. One plain brown envelope appeared
on my desk. Nobody remembered taking it out of an envelope, and it had no
marks on it to indicate where it had come from. But it had brilliant copy
material. It talked about satellites controlling satellites, of airborne
command and control, of computer-controlled space-borne lasers. So I used
it.

Shortly after delivering my article, the plain brown envelope disappeared
again. But, unconnected I believe, and as a postscript, the day after the
article appeared I got a phone call. He sounded a bit odd - a bit, sort
of, Eastern European. He asked where I had got my information, and could
he have a copy. I asked him who he was. Oh, just an interested
apple-grower in Kent. I didn't bother telling him that the phone was being
monitored...

So, it could be that I am just an inveterate conspiracy theorist, or it
could be that few of us realise how much we are monitored nor how we are
played. Can we trust our defenders? To do what they think is right? Yes.
To have any concern over our privacy and personal liberty? No.

>
> On 4 May 2009, at 22:33, signup@bealoid.co.uk wrote:
>
>> Quoting Peter Fairbrother <zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> Moreover, even GCHQ cannot intercept without a warrant, which for
>>> domestic communications (those not going to or from someone outside
>>> the UK), must be only for communications to/from a specific person
>>> or premises which must be mentioned by name therein, and which must
>>> be signed by the hand of the relevant Secretary of State.
>>
>> That was the point of having 5 countries as part of Echelon.  We ask
>> the Americans to spy on our citizens, they ask us to spy on theirs.
>> We hope they won't steal commercial aerospace secrets while they're
>> doing it.
>
> The problem with investing your opponents with super-powers is that it
> renders you powerless.  The thing that always amuses me about bores
> who tell you about 9/11 conspiracies, universal tapping, drugs in the
> water supply and the Illuminati is that they think they are clear-
> sighted geniuses from an elite able to see the higher truths that
> lesser people cannot, but in reality they are making excuses for their
> own sense of utter powerlessness.   Ask them why, for example, a
> conspiracy able to launch aircraft at their own cities citizens
> doesn't just kill a few troofers to shut them up, and they have no
> answer.
>
> Echelon as a thing to keep children awake at night with made some sort
> of sense when a large portion of communications went by radio.  Today,
> I just don't see it.  How would the US government convince UK
> companies to hand over subscriber details and real-time DHCP and NAT
> logs --- without which mapping intercept back to people is for
> practical purposes impossible --- and keep it secret?  How would the
> UK government do the same thing in the US?  Moreover, if they _are_
> doing this, how come we are (a) unable to prevent terrorist attacks
> that do happen and (b) unable to convict or even charge the majority
> of people that are arrested?  As a global inter-governmental
> conspiracy goes, it's all a bit crap, isn't it?  And if the argument
> is that ``ah, to use the product would be to reveal the conspiracy'',
> just what is it _for_, then?  A programme, don't forget, which has
> allegedly consumed billions under governments of a wide range of
> political hues without ever leaking.
>
> I don't believe that there is currently any significant amount of
> illegal domestic surveillance, simply because the complexities of
> keeping it secret and using the product for any purpose render it both
> impossible and worthless.    It suits campaigners on the left to
> invest the government with super powers, just as it suits the hard
> right to invest their beloved zionist conspiracy with super powers, or
> the soft left to invest Murdoch with super powers: it allows them to
> explain away their failures as the result of a conspiracy, rather than
> their own inability to organise and mobilise.
>
> Echelon is the perfect device for extremist groupuscles: it explains
> any failure, it gives the `elite' something to mark themselves out
> with, and it acts as a unifying force for recruitment.  All objective
> evidence is that it simply doesn't have the powers invested in it.
> But it fulfils for headbangers the same role Satan does for
> biblebashers.
>
> ian
>
>


-- 
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