Re: (Fwd) Re: Echelon en Hacktivism (fwd)

[jesse hirsh <jesse@tao.ca>]

[: hacktivism :]


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 16:08:13 +0200 (CEST)
From: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>
To: Maurice Wessling <maurice@xs4all.nl>, evel <evel@xs4all.nl>, jesse@tao.ca
Subject: Re: (Fwd) Re: Echelon en Hacktivism (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 10:06:32 -0400
From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>
To: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>
Cc: Eveline Lubbers <evel@xs4all.nl>
Subject: Re: (Fwd) Re: Echelon en Hacktivism

(feel free to pass this on, obviously)

geert@xs4all.nl (Fri 10/08/99 at 12:43 PM +0200):

> Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 10:03:36 +0200
> From: Eveline Lubbers <evel@xs4all.nl>
> Subject: (Fwd) Re: (Fwd) Re: Echelon en Hacktivism
> 
> Just to let you know how things ended,
> Maurice tells me:
 <...> 
> The idea originated at the hacktivism mailing list.
 <...>

grtz.

fyi, the idea of doing it *for a day* may have originated on the
hacktivism mailing list, but the idea is close to a decade old--
it's called 'spook fodder.' tim may, author of the 'cyphernomi-
con,'[1] has been putting a block of 'interesting' words in his
.sig for at least seven years (see, for example, the cypherpunks
archive[2]); lots of other people have, too--i remember seeing
X-Spook-Fodder headers in email years ago.

like most 'hacktivist' projects, it's amazingly naive. if indeed
this action will cause problems for echelon etc., the people who
run it (and other such systems) will be well prepared to circum-
vent *one day* of technical difficulties--because, of course, they 
know about the action in advance. but it *won't* cause them prob-
lems, afaik, because NSA analysis techniques aren't based on sim-
ple dictionary searches of signal streams; on the contrary, if
this action has any effect at all, it will probably be as a nicely
defined case study for analyzing vectors of transmission and met-
rics of participation and of what people *think* is 'threatening'
to the establishment. that kind of an argument is never a good
reason *not* to do something, that's not my point in saying it.

echelon is an ongoing problem, and it's only very dimly understood.
has anyone actually bothered to review the US Patent and Trade Of-
fice patents filed on behalf of the NSA to *see* what techniques
the NSA might be using? i haven't, but i'm told they're there[3]--
and that they're much more oblique and sophisticated than just
grepping for text. the recent announcement that the CIA is spon-
soring a venture capital firm[4] suggests a much weaker link in
the intelligence establishment--that their efforts to function ef-
fectively forces them to reveal some of their technqiues indirect-
ly, through patent filings and so on. 

doing kind of thing would be much more useful that misleading tens
of thousands people into thinking they're making a difference when
they're not--and letting them sit back after a hard day of 'hack-
tivism' to rest in a false sense of security.

[1] http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/
[2] http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/cyphernomicon.contents.html
[3] http://www.uspto.gov/
[4] http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/22004.html

cheers,
t


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