--- Begin Message --- From "Rop Gonggrijp" <rop@xs4all.nl>
Date Thu, 21 Oct 1999 22:30:23 +0200 (CEST)
----- Forwarded message from Rop Gonggrijp ----- >From discussion-request@hippiesfromhell.org Thu Oct 21 20:03:00 1999 I've spoken out about jamming Echelon the last time the idea came up, and I vowed to keep my mouth shut this time. But I have received just too many mails on too many mailing lists that had this crazy list of all-capitalized naughty words stuck at the end. N o w l o o k h e r e: The people you're protesting against are professionals. They've been systematically monitoring citizens like us since the early sixties. In their history, they've spied on much larger and much more powerful popular movements with more determination to have an impact on government interests. They have yet to show any sign of being impressed by anything less than a direct hit from a nuclear warhead on their Fort Meade facilities. I say that these people are not going to lose any sleep over these protests. But much more importantly: Suppose you own a global multi trillion dollar SIGnals INTelligence operation that can detect keywords in speech on _many_ simultaneous channels in many simultaneous languages, as well as demodulate all the modem carriers in these channels, and do speaker recognition as a bonus. Suppose your operation is also nicely plugged into the Internet. Then how hard would it be to write a little script (in whatever scripting language you are already using to detect interesting content in your normal operations) that detects this is one of those 'Jamming Echelon' mails ? If this is the case, all that is left from these protests is some extra information in the databases. For instance: have you noticed everyone picks different words? The spread of certain words from individual to individual and the selection of them for the signature probably gives away more about the image this person has of the NSA as well as of his/her activities then most stuff written in their e-mails. Think about it. The only way this protest would disturb anything is if the NSA did not have their act together. And then we would not need to protest, right ? Now don't get me wrong: Generating attention so that people understand what the NSA does is nice. But let's not do it by spreading misinformation about what can be done against it. Believe me: next time I stand before a non-technical audience and talk about the need for mass-encryption, someone will get up and say: "Oh yeah, that Echelon thing. That was a real problem until people started jamming it. I heard it basically exploded from reading all these keywords." Let's instead focus on getting the mass of people to understand that their only way out of this is to use encryption. It's much more difficult, less glamorous, and the satisfaction is less instant. But it needs to be done, and all this half-assed crap diverts from that mission. Grtz, Rop P.S.: Feel free to repost this in any forum you feel is appropriate. -- SEX GROUPSEX TRIO BESTIALITY FISTING PREGNANT CUNT DICK GAY ASS HORNY TEENAGE NAKED YOUNG WET PUSSY DILDO VIBRATOR 69 ^ | +--- I hereby claim that including these words and then posting to Usenet will waste infinitely more government time. Lots of government officials have Internet to their desk PCs these days. ----- End of forwarded message from Rop Gonggrijp ----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net--- End Message ---