Inside Echelon 164
kris writes "German magazine Telepolis has an article by Duncan Campbell about Inside Echelon. The article gives a nice overview about what Echelon
is and how it came to be. This article is available in a German Version as well." Somewhat lengthy, and written with an agenda, but very interesting. Although I have to say it's wierd seeing banner ads in german ;)
They ain't no brighter (Score:1)
Here is how the Gov beats hackers. I was there 15 years ago. Without a name it was open knowledge. It was working on voice.
It was an ARPA & NSA joint project.
Why does the Gov win? How many hacker projects are there 15 years in the making? And it was not new 15 years ago.
What is going to be fun is when some hacker finds a way to shove "cue" words into a packet invisibly such that Echelon can be overwhelmed with useless packets.
Remember that a million messages are more than anyone can handle. Give them ten million.
Client FTP? (Score:1)
Please answer these question (Score:1)
Now, why couldn't the NSA put up a listening station on US soil?
Let's look at it this way: if you wanted to spy on your own citizens, but there was a law preventing you to do that on your own soil, wouldn't you put up listening posts in your backyard? If you look at the network maps, the alledged NSA listening posts are exactly in those places where any traffic goes out of the USA.
I don't understand why the NSA couldn't set up a listening facility on US soil if they are listening on Europeans, for example. If the NSA wants to listen to US citizens (but can't do so on US soil), then putting the stations into UK, New Zealand and Australia would make perfect sense. Am I missing something?? (a few braincells of course, but is there a logical flaw?)
Gov't monitoring is like speeding. (Score:1)
Getting back to gov't. Disbanding the FBI/CIA/NSA/Police/etc., would mean anarchy and chaos (Modern Russia is a good example of this). On the other side, Soviet Russia had very safe steets, even in the dead of night. But that is not acceptable either. The question then becomes, how much gov't oppression is considered acceptable? Every crime popularized by the media seems to incite gov't to "do something" and some new law is made. Naturally, these laws are never ever repealed. Thus, by definition, things can only get worse and never better. Eventually people get wound up so tight that revolution is the only option. Throw all the laws away, draft a new set of general guidelines and start the process all over again. This was the basis for the formation of the USA. Unlike back then, though, there's no more unclaimed land on the planet to move to and set up a new nation. Hydrographic nations anyone?
Banner ads in German? (Score:1)
Re:1984 (Score:1)
Jeesh. Get over it.
I can spy on anyone and everyone with a cell phone. All I need is a police scanner, make a few minor alterations...
Intelligence collection along this line has been going on forever. The tools are just getting better to go with the increasing communication load.
Shall we do away with intelligence gathering? Let terrorists have their way? Quit trying to anticipate enemy actions? Quit trying to keep tabs on the weapons development of other countries, real threat or potential? Shall we hide our heads in the sand and assume nothing bad will happen?
Your communications are mundane, contentless, nonsense. Of no importance at all to the world, to the government, to intelligence agencies. Get OVER yourself.
IF, however, you begin to play with Hamas, or other terrorist organizations, then damn straight I want you to be watched and spied upon. That is what is SUPPOSED to happen.
Without intelligence gathering, myself (former military, Desert Storm combat vet), my comrades, our allies, etc, would face defeat. We NEED intelligence gathering of ALL types. We need sigint information on all emitters produced by any country, allied or otherwise. Why? Our allies and enemies sell weaponry to those who we may have to fight at some future point, depending on how their social development goes. You cannot always be assured that even an ally today will be an ally tomorrow in some cases. You need to know what their are doing, what the capabilities of their systems are, who they are selling to, etc, so that we will not be unpleasantly suprized at some point.
Part of MY job during my military career involved sigint - gathering information from radar emitters/weapon systems. One way (often the ONLY way) to get some of the information that is NEEDED is to approach a country's airspace, even penetrating that airspace, in order to get them to bring up their emitters to take a look at you. THEN you can gather the information which can help determine what the weapon systems (in this case air defense) are capable of and what countermeasures might be effective against them.
Ooooooh. Big evil. You also need to know how their communication is setup, where the nodes are, what codes are in use, etc. You then can plan on how to disrupt or destroy communication if necessary in a conflict. You can also get information on their plans so you can take action to counter them or prevent damage to us. That is reality. That is the REAL world, not your little, false, comfy front room with TV and VCR. You people need to get out more and learn what the real world is. Intelligence gathering is done by ALL countries against ALL other countries, both allies and opponents. ALL COUNTRIES DO IT and it is expected. Big freakin' deal. Everyone nails everyone when they are caught, but then it continues, no one is REALLY angry or hurt, just embarrassed. Important and REQUIRED intelligence collection continues. As it should.
A lot of you people appear to live in a silly, fantasy dreamworld with no connection to reality or necessity.
Re:Why both Echelon and Carnivore? (Score:1)
Echelon = NSA (foreign only)
Carnivore = FBI (domestic only)
It's a Trick! (Score:1)
NO CARRIER
Come and get Slashdot, echelon/carnivore! (Score:3)
Re:The other side of Echelon (Score:2)
It's a shame that humanity's greatest concerted efforts of high-technology have usually been destructive in nature. (I don't claim exceptions are non-existant -- look at Apollo.)
Actually even Apollo has roots in destruction. Why were we in the space race to begin with? Well, if you can orbit a satelite, it doesn't take much more to strap a big ole bomb on the rocket and have it pointed towards Washington or Moscow.
Sputnik scared the USA because our rocket program wasn't good enough to orbit something and therefore not reliable enough to make an ICBM. Sputnik wasn't about a tinny beeping satelite. It was about sending the USA a message.
Apollo grew from the race to build better rockets and evolved into a "we're better than you are" competition. I'm glad it was done, but we haven't been back, and don't seem to be going back anytime soon. What a waste.
Re:Banner ads in German? (Score:1)
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:1)
Regards, Ralph.
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:1)
Well, it ain't arranged though is it ... it just happens. Automatically all the intelligence They want is just ... available. "Well, jeez schucks we didn't ask for it did we?"
And, look, I didn't even touch on your naive trust in the oversight of NSAs compliance with their own charter, did I?
Regards, Ralph.
Re:The other side of Echelon (Score:2)
Yup - as the article says:
Put that technology between you and Slashdot, and watch First Posts and the like disappear; pretty soon the penis bird will become an endangered species.
Big shock (Score:1)
Inside DSP technology (Score:1)
It's no suprise then that their DSP technology is a quantum leap forward over what we have. Their technology would put all the 3D graphics accelerators on the market to shame.
So, you have massive signal processing capability.. whadda do? Build a few dozen supercomputers and a distributed network to feed them in an automated fashion. Today's society is flooded with signals - microwave dishes, cell phone, satellite, GSM phones, cablemodem, Voice-over-IP, ${BUZZWORD}, etc. You can't *possibly* process that in the time you need given the volume of information out there. It'd be like searching for a needle in a haystack. And the EM spectrum is big. Really big. So most of the network MUST by necessity be automated.
The interesting bits are sent from the autonomous nodes that make up Echelon into a centralized repository (the supercomputers?) for further processing. Interesting information is probably e-mailed to the desk of the agent who made the query (or printed out, if they're like most of us and still don't have "paperless offices").
Hell, what they have we'll have.. in about 5-8 years. Biggest threat - accidentally triggering the damn thing. :) bomb, president, anarchy, nuclear storage, timing....
Re:Inside DSP technology (Score:1)
Just stay online for another minute so I can complete the trace please.
Re:Inside DSP technology (Score:1)
Uhh.. DSP stands for "Digital Signal Processing". I didn't say DAC, I said DSP. All those chips on your card, whatever the architecture may be, is using digital signals. Infact, the card has dedicated circuitry to perform things like FFTs very very fast, as opposed to a CPU which is more generic - it can handle everything.. just slower.
Your entire computer, in a loose sense of the word, could be considered a DSP.. although realistically probably only your video card and sound card would legitimately qualify.
Re:Inside DSP technology (Score:1)
"(DSP) Computer manipulation of analog signals (commonly sound or image) which have been converted to digital form (sampled). "
Definition of SIMD [ic.ac.uk]:
"(SIMD) (Or 'data parallel') The classification under Flynn's taxonomy for a parallel processor where many processing elements (functional units) perform the same operations on different data. There is often a central controller which broadcasts the instruction stream to all the processing elements."
As you can see, SIMD is architecture and DSP is the actual I/O. Superior DSP means more I/O. Bigger images - higher resolution. More bandwidth, the precise problem the NSA (as well as any group which monitors lots of data) would need to combat to meet the demands for Echelon. I will reiterate that this is the main problem the NSA faces is one of bandwidth management. The best board in the world won't be able to do anything without decent bandwidth.. there is a certain amount of entropy which must be transmitted between each component and compression cannot help beyond that point! Bandwidth is key to Echelon's success.
does echelon exist? does it matter? (Score:2)
So, it stands to reason that an actual existing echelon system is not nearly as useful as the threat of such a system. Much like although Fort Knox has no "pop-up machine gun turrets", the tour guides don't hesitate to let people believe such things for the deterrent factor.
Not that I know anything about national security, but it just seems logical.
Re:Baby monitors (Score:2)
Just asking, I'm new to Ottawa...
--
Here's my mirror [respublica.fr]
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:2)
CIA has been cought selling questionable stuff before. Iran/contras anyone? Weapons for heroine?
Dunno about aliens
Black Helicopter... Dunno about Black Helicopter different from KA51 Black Shark. Which is Black. Good machine... If on your side. If not on your side also a good machine though you do not admire it for long...
Re:Economic boom loosely tied to Echelon? (Score:1)
I hate to be a downer.. But Amateur (ham) radio folks have been doing this for years. It's called moonbounce or EME (I think: Earth Moon Earth or something). I've been out of the ham scene for quite a few years now, but I'm sure someone else can verify my claim.
Heck, I know an old guy who does this with a simple beam antenna and off the shelf radio gear. There's certainly nothing amazing about it.
l8r
Sean
Re:Validity? (Score:2)
encryption, people, encryption! (Score:3)
The default presumption must now be that someone is reading your email and parsing your logs--it's almost certainly automatic, but it's there. You should check your personal website logs and see what interesting
So, today's moral is USE ENCRYPTION. I have my 4096 bit public key on the standard servers and on my
Re:I paid for that, and you might have also. (Score:1)
I am not surprised at all that the US and others collect information on both allies and declared enemies alike. There are no "friends" among nations, only common interests. How many times in history has a nation formed an alliance, entered into a war in their ally's support, then later in the same war shifted loyalty and fought against their so-called "friend"?
The world is not the friendly place we would sometimes like to think it is. The keeping of secrets and the discovery of the secrets of others has been part of maintaining a country since the beginning of recorded history, and will likely remain so for a long time.
Great Icon (Score:2)
I could use it on my website as sort of an "anti-TrustE" logo. Or how about "feedback powered by Echelon".
MSNBC/. ? (Score:1)
An agenda? Oh dear.
I've always depended on Slashdot to take a neutral stance on all issues, especially subjects like free software and Linux. What will now become of this bastion of impartial reporting?
Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:1)
Although, there is nothing more fun than watching the black helicopter crowd froth at the mouth...
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:1)
Heres a question.. (Score:2)
Re:We can't vote on every single thing... (Score:1)
-Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
That's "Democratic Poll", as in "everybody votes on everything".
Americans (of which I am one) have some strange belief that if enough people vote, somehow the optimal solution will be selected, independent of whether the people who vote are capable of making rational choices.
Think about what the signal-to-noise ratio would be like on Slashdot if everyone got to moderate equally. (Hint: think seeing "penis bird" content while browsing at +4)
Personally, I like the suggestion Kurt Vonnegut had: when you go into the voting booth, you're presented with a simple quadratic equation with small, positive, integer roots. Input the two correct integers to proceed....
Re:Hahahaha (Score:1)
If they labeled thier equipment as such they would have to filter out those labels later when they automatically extracted them from images in page views. Thats the real reason...
Re:Encryption is not the answer. (Score:2)
First, I'm a fan of Hushmail. I think they do a moderately good job (as opposed to some of the clowns in the field), and Genevieve is a sweetheart. That's well and good for them, but the problems with browser-based secure email are still substantial.
1. No code review. Hushmail's code is available for review, but as of this writing it hasn't been security-audited by a respected infosec house. There is no security without a security audit. [*]
2. Susceptability to Trojans. Okay, so they have a certificate from an appropriate CA... how many people actually check the certificate for authenticity?
3. Complexity. Believe it or not, a lot of people can't understand that "if you send email from a Hushmail account to another Hushmail account, it's delivered securely; otherwise, you take your chances". I've had people send sensitive information to my Hushmail account (here [mailto]) from a Hotmail account, believing that the Hushmail address was some magic pixie dust that made everything secure.
4. Distinguishability. There are certain "secure" email services which get laughed at, lots, by people in the security field. There are other services which get careful and qualified respect. By and large, the userbase is oblivious to this; they make their decisions based on marketing. There are some services I've seen advertised in national news magazines which make themselves out to be superhumanly secure--and then, in the fine print, mention that "oh, by the by, we escrow your keys just in case". It is extremely difficult for an average consumer to make an even mildly informed decision as to which services to patronize.
... None of these problems are Hushmail-specific; they plague all of the browser-based email providers, some moreso than others. While I wholeheartedly agree that browser-based email services can provide a simpler, more secure way to send mail, they're just an evolutionary step towards where we need to go--they aren't a panacea.
[*] Unfortunately, the reverse isn't true--just because a product has passed a security audit doesn't mean it's secure.
Answers (Score:2)
Depends on what you're trying to do with it. It's just a tool, nothing more. A hammer is pretty useless when what you need is a screwdriver; same thing with encryption.
If you're sending a love letter to your sweetheart and you want to make sure that it won't get intercepted in transit, encrypting your email is very effective. If you're sending details about your Hizbollah contacts and how you're building a nuclear weapon for them, you probably want more tools than just encryption.
Are we sure they can't break it?
No. Hell, we're not even sure we can't break it. Much of cryptography is built on math problems which are conjectured to be insanely, mind-bogglingly difficult. These math problems have never been formally proven to be as difficult as we think they are, though. Some people think that simple, elegant solutions exist to these problems exist, but so far they're in the minority.
This is not a death-knell for cryptography, though. So far, we're pretty certain that we can't break it by conventional means, and we've got reason to be optimistic that governments can't break it by conventional means, either.
Of course, the government has decades of experience at unconventional means--planting eavesdropping devices, shadowing people, bugging their phone lines, bribing people to give up their encryption keys. Encryption can't really help very much against these unconventional methods.
Now that the USA seems to be relaxing its control over exportable crypto, can we take this to mean that they know they can defeat it?
Absolutely not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. We do not know what inferences we should draw from the Government's relaxation of crypto regs. What we do know is the following:
1. Federal courts have decided, at the appellate level (one step below the Supreme Court), that source code can be Constitutionally protected free speech.
2. Federal courts have decided, again at the appellate level, that cryptographic documents (whether published conventionally or on the Web) are Constitutionally protected free speech.
The inference that I draw from those two events is...
<INFERENCE>
After losing those two almost back to back, the Government didn't have much choice but to relax the export regs--because the Federal courts had declared the export regs to be unconstitutional!
The government is not relaxing the export regs because they want to; instead, the Executive Branch of the government is relaxing the export regs because the Judicial Branch has told them, in essence, "if you don't relax these regulations, we will relax them for you".
Remember that the Government has three branches, and each branch thinks the government would work much better if the other two branches would just shut up and do as they're told. The Executive Branch often fights the Judicial and Legislative branches, the Judicial fights the Executive and Legislative, etc.
</INFERENCE>
Also, if PGP is effective, what key length is necessary to really be secure?
1,024 bits is probably secure for everyday use. I use a 2,048-bit key.
There's not much point in going beyond 2,048 bits. Really. PGP (particularly the unauthorized ckt builds) will let you exceed 2,048 bits, but there's not much point in it.
Encryption is not the answer. (Score:3)
Lots of people have done studies of how easy it is to properly use encryption software. In one study, something like half the test subjects were unable to send out a PGP-encrypted message--this wasn't using the (arcane) command line of the 2.6 versions, but the much slicker GUI of the 5.x versions.
Guess what? It hasn't gotten much better. In some respects, it's become worse. The vast majority of people are unaware of the scope of automated surveillance, and as such, they don't care. Of the minority that is aware, the majority of them are unaware of how useful encryption tools can be. Of the minority that is aware, the majority are unable to look at competing products and come to an informed determination about which product is the superior of the two--"Honey, this one says it uses `superhumanly strong 40-bit Blowfish email encryption', and the other one just says it uses Triple DES, which do you think I should buy?".
Of the minority which IS aware of the scope of the problem, which is ALSO aware of the existence of tools, which is ALSO capable of selecting the proper tools and using them properly...
... most of them find encryption to be too much of an inconvenience.
Passphrases are hard to remember; at 1.2 bits of entropy per character (roughly), you need about 120 characters for a good passphrase. That's about two lines of text from a novel. Assuming you can type 60 WPM, or five characters a second, you're going to be spending 24 seconds just entering your passphrase.
That's inconvenient. How do most people deal with the inconvenience? They simply choose not to bother, or else they choose trivially weak passphrases, or they cache their passphrases for an absurdly long time, or...
Encryption, by itself, is not the answer--not unless you're so rabidly paranoid that you're willing to put up with the inconvenience even for something as simple as an email to your girlfriend saying "hey, I'm going to be home early from the office tonight, want to catch a movie?".
Some people are. I'm not. I use encryption for the things which are important--truly confidential material; company secrets, or communications with my lawyer, or other things in that vein. But otherwise, it's just damned inconvenient.
What we need is not "more encryption, dammit!". What we need is more usable encryption. This means:
* Encryption which is EASY TO USE
* Encryption which is HARD TO SCREW UP
* Encryption which is CONVENIENT
* Encryption which is TRANSPARENT TO THE END USER
We don't have any of that right now. We're not even close on most of those counts.
-- And by the by, there's absolutely no point in an average person using a 4,096-bit key.
Re:In which the facile is dismissed (Score:1)
Re:Great analogy (Score:1)
Re:Great analogy (Score:1)
Re:Great analogy (Score:1)
Democrat & Republican are orthoganal terms. Democracy and Republic are not mutually exclusive.
Re:1984 (Score:1)
I for one am sick of it. We need to stop this kind of thing before it gets out of hand.
Unfortunately, the deal is done, signed, sealed, and delivered. I'm reminded of a Denis Leary song; "...Why? 'Cause we got the bomb, that's why, two words, Nuclear fucking weapons..". In a way it's sad, but the power structure that exists currently will likely be in place until the end of (our) civilization. There's too many countries with nukes and other even nastier weapons of mass destruction (It amazes me this dropped right off the radar with the "end" of the cold war; Oh well). It is extremely unlikely that any of the nuclear-capable nations will fall without unloading their aresnals. For the kind of change you're talking about, you're effectively talking about an outight revolution, which is no longer possible. The right to bear arms was not taken; It was made moot.
I get more jaded by the day, but I'm happy I can write what I want, for now. Unless I reverse engineered something. Or if I want to talk about drug or improvised weapons manufacture. (Anyone remember the *real* Improvised Field Munitions Handbook, published by the US Gov?) Or if I want to write excessively explicit or amoral thoughts down. Oh well.
Heh, that's kinda depressing. Oh well. :)
Re:Inside DSP technology (Score:2)
Biggest threat - accidentally triggering the damn thing. :) bomb, president, anarchy, nuclear storage, timing....
I would suspect any system capable of real-time monitoring, decryption and filtering of terabytes of data is sophisticated enough to avoid a simple spam keyword attack. It might get by the quick filter, but I would imagine that the profiles of terrorist activity are much better. I don't know many (intelligent) terrorists who would communicate about C4 in email without disguising it; For example, "I got the baloney (C4).. we just need some mustard (Detonators) and bread (casing).
I've done a little "signals gathering" of my own. It's very easy to decode pager traffic in your area (In my case, I can get the whole freaking province!) using a sound card and a good scanner. You can tell who's doing what by the number codes they leave (you just drop a lookup table off to each of your "associates", and I would assume any monitoring by the NSA also works along these lines. It's interesting though. Maybe I need a life.
It is also quite possible to distingush who wrote a particular paragraph from the syntax and vocabulary used; I would expect for longer emails it would be as good as a fingerprint. I was invovled in a project to post-process digital elevation data taken from a plane. You could tell what data was taken by different pilots by the "error signature". Nifty. I assume liguists can/do the same.
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:1)
Validity? (Score:3)
A) Knows a lot about this
or
B) Is making all this up in an attempt at a good story.
or
C) A little of both
Those pictures of "interception stations" are strangely similar to every other large, white satellite dish you see around. In fact, there is one of those on top of the building I'm in right now. Is this a conspiracy?
Some of this stuff ("Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognise the content of every speech message or telephone call.") sounds sorta wrong. I believe that the technology is there, maybe not to do EVERY call, but to single calls out by region or randomly sampled conversations.
I'd like to know if anyone can truely verify what this article says as truth.
Re:Great analogy (Score:1)
Why can no one get that right
It even says it in the pledge of allegiance, remember?
"I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the USofA, and to the republic, for which it stands..."
HAHAHAHA (Score:1)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
Re:We can't vote on every single thing... (Score:2)
Getting people interested in voting again will be a harder task to accomplish, but I've seen lots of figures regarding the websites of elected officials and candidates, and overwhelmingly people are calling for them to post their voting records. This stuff is publicly available but most of us (me included) don't have the resources and/or the time to look it up through conventional means. I think the web can do wonders for voter turnout in that respect.
Now, I don't think getting rid of Congress is a good idea, either, but getting rid of corrupt Congresspersons and all the fscking special interest parasites sounds great. The question is, what will happen when the lobbyists move from pestering Congress to spamming citizens? Ack!
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
It's prolly small comfort for the paranoid, but... (Score:2)
>controls the military (rather than, say, an
>elected body of citizens), you are only one quick
>coup away from dictatorship.
You might try reading Norman Schwartzkoff's (I'm SURE I spelled that wrong) book: "It Doesn't take a Hero".
Not the growing up part, or the Vietnam or Gulf war memoirs (though they DO paint an intresting picture of the army's evolution over the years (from elite force guarding western Europe from socialist aggression, to degenerate mob during vietnam, back to an elite force of professional volunteers with the best training and hardware in the world (granted the author *IS* a little biased))).
What you should DEFINATELY read is his description of the selection process to become a General (OR, for that matter, an Admrial). It's a VERY rigourous selection process just to get to one star. Above that, the regular promotions board goes away, and advancement requires the approval of damn near half of Washington. In fact, IIRC, a four-star slot actually requires the confirmation of the senate, just like a cabinet post or supreme court chair.
I think it's a pretty good bet, that any soldier who would, at the behest of the president or anyone else, drive his tanks up Capitol Hill, would *NOT* have passed the selection process to become a general and get command of those tanks in the first place.
Of course, I COULD be an irrational optimist, or Schwartzkoff COULD have lied through his teeth (keyboard?)...
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Re:Gov't monitoring is like speeding. (Score:1)
I wish people would stop equating anarchy with chaos. How is Russia an example of anarchism?
Well, anyway. The way I understand the internet is that its just a connection of other computer networks, that anyone can join. Considering that, no one really owns the internet. Theres no one single form of authority, or atleast there use to be none.
So, what justification can gov't have to intercept and monitor it and other communication networks? I dunno, just curious...
Re:Great analogy (Score:1)
How? Most countries will not readily accept immigrants who are not highly skilled and experienced in certain "in-demand" professions. Some countries -- such as France -- currently have imposed a zero-immigration policy.
While many health care and IT professionals enjoy a comfortable degree of international mobility, the average Joe, regardless of his political persuasion, is stuck where he's born.
Regards,
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. but old (Score:3)
For example, Campbell cites "TOP SECRET UMBRA" as the top level compartment for SIGINT. Well, it was -- in the 1960's. (It doesn't matter that much as the entire system is being completely revised eliminating TOP SECRET entirely -- see FAS's web site [fas.org] which is generally much better on this kind of thing when John Pike has time to update it.)
It's an important issue, but it would pay to use better sources. To see how old this information is check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers [borders.com] or William Burrows's Deep Black [amazon.com].
there are few things more irritating than a crpto geek . . . ask my wife . .
Re:Validity? (Score:1)
How do you know he has even signed the official secrets act? You need to sign it, but you knew that right?
The work is referenced and there is evidence through the freedom of information act and the eye witness testimony of former GCHQ employees, in addition to the film footage.
As for a D-notice on his writings, it would let the cat leaping out of the bag as well as raising issues of human rights abuse if he simply ignored the notice. Worst case he'd move, and even the mighty British home secretary can't D-notice a report commissioned by the European parliament.
The only official line is plausible deniability and for fools like you that seems to be enough. Keep scoffing at the poor unwashed masses and their tabloid mindset being taken for a ride here, but who's really the gullible idiot?
There's ample evidence that Echelon exists and if it didn't that would be the real surprise here.
What kind of a nut job sit's smugly pointing to the draconian powers dating back to the last world war and the complete lack of accountability and public oversight on this issue and says it can't be going on because there's no evidence?
Re:Best location for privacy? (Score:1)
--
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:1)
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:2)
Echelon is a NSA playtoy for foreign signals intelligence. So the NSA can hear the phone call from the Iranian fellow to his Russian buddy asking for thirty kilos of Plutonium, and the call to Red China for a rocket motor.
See the differences now?
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:2)
Example: Some AOL users in Canada still use SprintNet and Tymnet dialup banks. While technically a part of the 'AOL network', anybody sniffing the Tymnet routers can get an eyeful, NSA included. Or if they have the dialup lines, in Canada, tapped. Relitivly easy to 'play back'.
'Sides, Echelon is sigint. We haven't heard about their global data intel operations, yet.
Re:Heres a question.. (Score:2)
NSA's full charter is classified. You're thinking of the CIA, who has an obligation not to do domestic intel work. That isn't even in their charter, it's a standing executive order meant to keep the FBI happy.
Re:Not so fast... (Score:1)
As for them keeping slaves, that is something which I'm sure most people cannot agree with. They also had a large number of habits, personal, public, and socially exceptable at the time. They smoked things and snorted thing I'm sure some people do not agree with.
In the end they wrote down a document which include freedom for all, which included an ideal. Something more than just the simple words. It was something worth dying for. People did, and more than once.
I like the idea of US companies earnig their way into the world market without my having to pay for a spy system. A spy system that is being put to more uses than you are told about.
Let's forget about human rights and such. Just tell me what is being done with all that information they collect. I doubt you know and I doubt you could prove it in any case.
The truth is that it's a closed system, with some information going to some companies to compete unfairly in the world market. Who pick which company gets the information? As a closed system, those who control the government are powerless to say no. We are being left out of a country which we own and have paid for, and keep paying for in taxes and blood.
No matter what you say it's all just speculation seeing as you are in the dark. I'm in the dark also. I just don't pretend it's a good thing.
Re:Not so fast... (Score:1)
Again, it's not worth the price that was paid. Yes, it's known that it's common for bribery to be used. Just look at the olympics. This does not justify the US's actions and the fact that the US sunk to a lower level than bribery.
The price is simple. We cannot and should never trust our goverment's hidden actions and deeds. We should never be content not knowing, or sinking to that level.
I thik your support of a spying government is a foolish thing. I hope you realize that you will also be spied on. If you have childern, so will they.
I think the Hitler summed it up best "Only the guilty have something to hide." He used that phrase to gain access to the homes of some of the political compition. He used that power to bully more power.
It's still far more power than any government should be trusted with. I'm sure that time will tell. I am equally sure that you will see that this is a very bad pill my friend.
I paid for that, and you might have also. (Score:4)
Items like this have a cost in, building, maintaining, and expanding. This system, I'm am very sure, it also keeping track of efforts to avoid it's watchfull eye.
When we speak about PGP or using encryption to keep our conversions secret, the NSA is listening. I'm sure they claim this is a valuable service.
It reminds me of something I once saw at a large company. There was a man high up in management who had little to do and few people working for him. He wanted to change this, so he had a plan to inclease his value to the company. He hired some lawyers and asked that all documents, internal and external, went through his department to make sure that there was nothing in those documents that could hurt the company legally.
This seemed like a good service to the company and it only required two lawyers. Well as the company was forced, and got used to, sending their document to these two lawyer there was far too much work. So the manager asked for more lawyer, because the demand was too high. And so on...
His empire withing the company grew and grew. He has added many other non value added services to his group, and I assume will continue to.
This sort of activity is know as "Justifying your position" or "Making yourself needed" This guy knew nothing other than how to make the company feel he was needed and providing a needed service. In reality the internal news letter never had andproblems and never would. The NSA is "Justifying their position."
The NSA and other organizations can spy on people to the Nth degree, and they might find something. They then often keep that information secret from the people paying them, but let higher ups in the goverment know. This information makes these people feel important, and maybe protect there jobs.
In the meantime, we have done this spying by trampling the good names of those who broke from such a spying goverment to found the US. We have teken the values that they penned with wisedom for us all to read, and now claim that they do not appliy to everyone, or all the time.
See under the US constitution you have rights. These are rights which we agree on one day belong to every single person. Human right. On an other day, during a war or a day when oil is lacking, or when a US company wants a contract over a French company, those rights don't apply. Seme people are more equal that others it seem.
Once we drew the line and said that one some days others (outside the US) don't the same freedoms and right under the US government, it was easy to slowly claim our own people didn't have rights also.
Where does that leave us, the peole of the world. If you live in the US your are automatically part of the goverment. After all it's "We the people." If the goverment does something monsterous, then it's because you sat back and let it happen. You are lazy because it's only happening to those people over there, or maybe just to the people down the street. Well now it's happening to you, and you just sit there and hope it does not stop Monday night sports.
I live in the US. I've lived here my entire life. The US should be held to the standards of our fouders, and nothing less. How have we honored their ideals. The same ideals that gave us this country and the American dream of living free. I do not include being spied on one of the freedoms our counties founder envisioned.
Unless the people of the US get off their fat asses and do something, they are to blame. Not the goverenment, because we are the goernment. We paid for it, and let it happen. If we were not told that means little seeing as we choose not to ask.
The buck does not stop with the leaders in DC. That is a lie. We put that person there. The president might be the countries leader, but we are his rulers. We let him know what can and cannot be done. If we are quite the world can assume correctly that we areee with the monsterous deeds of our goverment.
Re:encryption, people, encryption! (Score:1)
It's currently very down...
Here's my [redrival.com] copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
Re:Encryption is not the answer. (Score:1)
Maybe my post wasn't clear: Hotmail was offered as an example of a "browser based e-mail service" (as I think the grammer would suggest -- but who counts?). The post in the reference has the links to the services with encrypted e-mail.
Note: I haven't used these services -- see the post for a reference to the original article on FIRP.
---
"Where do you come from?"
Re:Encryption is not the answer. (Score:2)
Yes, encryption is hard, but see this post [slashdot.org] for some references to browser based e-mail services (a la Hotmail et al.) that offer strong encryption. Let us know what you think: does this satisfy (some of) your requirements from the list at the end of your post?
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"Where do you come from?"
Not Duncan Campbell again! (Score:3)
Seriously guys: this man goes on and on and on... A quick search on AltaVista [altavista.com] for his name and Echelon turns up more than 20 pages of hits.
This guy never stops. He appars to be totally paranoid and he has -- as far as I can tell -- done no original research on his own.
Yes, it is worthwhile to discuss Echelon, the implications of Echelon, and, more generally, the role of intelligence services in democratic and civilised nations. But the ravings of this guy is not the right place to start a sensible discussion.
Please, can we get back to technology now? Try to read about flesh eating robots [newscientist.com] (seriously!) in the New Scientist for something more interesting than this guy.
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"Where do you come from?"
Countermeasures article on FIPR (Score:3)
FIPR [fipr.org] has a rather nice article [fipr.org] on how you can protect yourself. The article is aimed against RIP, the draconian UK legislation that is currently winding it's way through parliament, but it is genrally useful.
It is a well written, balanced, and informative article, with useful pointers to resources on the internet.
The two mail services that offer encrypted e-mail are probably worth mentioning explicitly:
The article concludes:
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"Where do you come from?"
Yeah, so? (Score:4)
Wait, no, I'm thinking "Pentagon" again....
Best location for privacy? (Score:3)
Personally, I have not done much international travel and I don't know much about security/privacy practices of other countries. Where could I go (besides SeaLand) that affords me better protection?
This is not flamebait, I just am looking for more info.
Thanks.
their own fault. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. (Score:2)
Baby monitors (Score:3)
Anyone know where I can get a 128-bit key encrypted baby monitor ??
On another note, I wanted to try something out: They can see my house from the base, so I wanted to buy an old (huge) satellite dish and aim it at them, but not connect it to anything... :-)
Then I would just aim a video camera at the dish and see marines come in at night and dismantle the dish
Jehreg
Hahahaha (Score:2)
I'm surprised they didn't have photos of the Seti@home accellerator too!
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
Re: NSA technology spinoffs (Score:2)
Some of it has. NSA has a search engine patent [164.195.100.11], for example, and it's an impressive technology.
In the Cold War years, NSA was in the forefront of computing. The first digital tape drives were developed for NSA shortly after WWII. The first automated tape library (Tractor) was developed for NSA by IBM. NSA supported much early computer, supercomputer, and networking development. Much of this was published in "IBM's Early Computers", part of a history of IBM. Most of it made it into commercial products eventually. NSA may have a better technology spinoff record than NASA.
There were dead ends. Twenty years of effort went into cyrogenic computing in the '60s and '70s. ("I want a thousand-megacycle computer. I'll get you the money!" - Director, NSA, circa 1960.)
Since the 1980s, though, when the commercial sector pulled ahead of the military sector in technology, NSA has fallen behind. This problem has become embarassing enough to have been investigated by Congress. [jeffrense.com] This is a generic problem with Government computing; things are changing too fast for Government procurement cycles, and the Government penchant for custom systems built to specified requirements holds them back.
1984 (Score:2)
If the government(s) slowly start taking our privacy like this, when will it be too much? Will it be eneough when they start reading all our mail? will it be eneough when they start searching houses at random, just to make sure you are being "good"?
I for one am sick of it. We need to stop this kind of thing before it gets out of hand.
Re:Menwith Hill (Score:3)
Have you looked at any Oradanance Survey maps of any "normal" RAF bases at all, and tried to correlate runways on the ground with runways on the map? No? Try it. It's rather difficult. Why do you think that might be? Perhaps because they might want to make it a little harder for enemies to bomb them to smithereens?
The argument that things don't appear on maps because there is something ultra-secretive there is just plain stupidity - it's not on any maps not because the governments concerned don't want people to know that it exists, but because they don't want to hand the enemy a scale drawing of where all the buildings are. To do so is just plain ridiculous. Especially in the case of Menwith Hill where there are large red-bordered road signs directing traffic to it all over the place (as RAF Menwith Hill).
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. He is a poor quality comedian at best and funnily enough Channel Four in the UK have commisioned a high-profile show all to himself because he's "right-on" and tackling "the system". If he didn't do this sort of stuff he would be a nobody with no show of his own.
I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. Had it come across anybody's mind in this thread that Echelon is just a huge pile of baloney cooked up by the NSA to get extra funding so they can have some really great coke-fuelled paries? No? Why, because the Washington Post didn't write an article about it?
--
Re:Validity? (Score:4)
I think he's a twat.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you ever got through the UK education system and do a modern History curriculum you will be taught about how it is far more important to be able to evaluate evidence on it's own merits rather than being able to spout out figures and statistics and dates. You will be taught that whenever you read an article by any individual that is supposedly fact with some opinions expressed, you must understand the biases that the writer may have, and what the motives for writing those articles are.
Duncan has made a great living out of writing this sort of stuff. People want to read it, because it confirms their darkest suspicions, allows them to fantasise about what secret agencies really do, and in general lets them slip into a sort of "James Bond"-esque world that perhaps they wish to be a part of themselves. It never crosses their minds that it's a good thing that the NSA is intercepting a load of traffic, or the fact that maybe they aren't doing it at all - they want to believe this stuff so badly, they'll read anything that confirms it.
Therefore, we come back to Duncan's motives. He makes money out of writing this stuff, and has written several books that have afforded him a very nice life indeed. He has yet to come up with one single piece of concrete irrefutible (sp?) evidence to confirm any of his claims, and yet editors lick his writing up like cream - it's good column inches.
Furthermore, if any of Duncan's claims were in any way true, seeing as he lives in the UK and is therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act, by now he would have been arrested and his writings D-noticed. You would have to find them in the darker corners of the net rather than splatterd all over the UK National dailys, ZDnet, etc. Nobody cares about this though, because it allows the agencies concerned to ask for bigger budgets from those in power who think this is all a very good thing, instills fear in those criminals who believe that their major drugs operations are being monitored (now that's cheap policing if ever I saw it), and gives Duncan piles and piles of cash. It also entertains the rather moronic tabloid minds amongst our society into believing that Really Exciting Things happen down at NSA.
It's all spin, and you're expected to believe it. If you believe it, so do the criminals, and perhaps that's the point.
--
Economic boom loosely tied to Echelon? (Score:2)
It's interesting to speculate whether the increase of wealth in this nation hasn't been helped by national corporations being "supported" by Echelon-collected data.
ObArticleQuote (bold added):
One of [the Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea] more spectacular features was a tracking dish used to pass messages to the United States by reflecting them off the surface of the moon.
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Re:Republic vs. Democracy (Score:2)
On the other hand,
You can see tremendous overlap between "republic" and "democracy", perhaps explaining the term "direct democracy" for when people vote on all issues.Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
Information warfare but against whom? (Score:3)
I couldn't agree more with this conclusion. The main reason Echelon and other privacy invading projects such as Carnivore can thrive in the first place, is that the people don't use crypto and anon-services. Why?
People in general seem to live under the impression that their lives are not interesting enough for anyone to snoop on. "Why should anyone spend money and time reading my e-mails or listening to my phone conversations? I've got nothing to hide".
This is exactly the kind of an attitude that benefits the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and, as a result, people aren't encouraged to use crypto -- even if at the same time the very same agencies keep on hyping how dangerous a place the net is and how much more funding they need to counter this threat. Furthermore, and not surprisingly, major software companies have not, so far, put much an effort into producing an easy to use e-mail system that would incorporate strong encryption and authentication. On the contrary, Microsoft (let's face it, Microsoft's products dominate the market) seems to be hell bent on producing software that's full of security holes and whenever encryption has been included, ominous NSAKEYs and other intelligence agency connections seem to be involved. I don't know about you, but MS doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzy feeling when it comes to security and privacy.
It is also wrong to assume that your, mine or Joe Sixpack's life is not interesting enough to warrant occasional or even constant surveillance by the authorities. Joe Sixpack is a part of the body politic and, as every citizen, is also a potential criminal. To the big business, he's a consumer and his habits are valuable information. Oh yes, he'd be very well worth of watching if you just could do it.
And with new technology, you can.
Current technology provides the law enforcement community (and why not the business community as well) possibilities that even the hard core technophiles do not always fully comprehend. In the past, in order to keep an eye on someone required a group of people to operate the equipment 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Unless you happened to live in a full fledged police state, like DDR where half of the population had been hired to spy on the other half, the authorities just couldn't keep an eye on everyone.
Nowadays, as the article points out, e-mails, faxes and phone calls can be screened automatically based on keywords or even your voice. Automatic face recognition is making its way to mainstream surveillance allowing a more effective use of those cameras you can see in any major European city center (don't know about US). It's becoming so easy for the authorities to monitor the bulk of the population that the tempatation to gather dirt illegally on political opponents, keep an eye on special interest groups and collect brownie-points for cracking down on crime by spying on everyone even remotely connected to the case must soon be overwhelming. Obviously the authorities aren't the only threat. Spammers and people who are in the business of profiling netizens also benefit from the complacent attitude towards privacy.
Is new legislation controlling the new technology answer then? I doubt that. There is not enough political will or technological know-how within the legislative branch to do it. However, as long as using strong encryption is legal, we can at least retain our privacy in the net. Unfortunately, it doesn't help if only the people who are interested in technology use encryption when all the majority of the people know about encryption is that "only criminals use it". People need to be educated about privacy, cryptography and their right to keep things hidden even from the government.
Menwith Hill (Score:2)
It's a site produced by British political comedian Mark Thomas, who presents a "humourous political documentary" program on UK tv.
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
(But then again), opening people's mail is what they do in other countries, isn't it? :|
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
You've gotta love the paranoia, I know I do. I'd like to point out that we are a democracy (as much as we have ever been). You've got to understand that we elect people into high positions, and they make decisions or appoint people to make decisions for them, that's the way the system works. We can't vote on every single thing that happens in the government. We've got to allow the people we elect to do their jobs, or elect someone else to do them.
I don't think our national security was ever handled democratically. Could you imagine our troops standing in the woods waiting for the votes to come in on where to attack next?
You may not agree with everything that goes on in the government, I know I don't, but you can do your part to change it. You can eather sit back and bitch about it and let things get even more messed up, or you can go out and try to change things...
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
And you call me uninformed? Your paranoia is taking over again. Who pays the bills to run these operations? People in elected offices (the congress) do. Sometimes the people in charge (who aren't elected, but are appointed by people who are) get out of the loop, but they can get back into the loop, and they have the power to control what's going on.
If you don't like how security is being handled, you can vote for people who will investigate these agencies, people who will reform them, and people who will shut them down if they're in violation of our rights. No matter how carried away they get they still must obey the constitution and secure our basic rights. I'm not saying that they always do, but I'm saying that they are required to, and if they're not then we have the power to do something about it.
We can't vote on every single thing... (Score:4)
I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand. I'm not sure which Presidents have lost the public vote, but ended up Presidents because of the electoral college, but the technology, if not actually present, is at hand for online voting and direct democratic participation in the government. We could dispatch the electoral college entirely. In fact, I'm somewhat at a loss as to its current utility. We've had what it takes to eliminate the electoral college for decades, as far as I can tell.
Certainly, I will not sit on filibuster.gov or something, waiting all day to cast my vote on every little thing, but, I don't have to vote on every little thing right now. I could conceivably vote on the issues which were important to me.
This technology could start at the county/city level, move up to the state level, and then eventually federal.
Also, we need not control the troops in the woods. How about people casting simple, "let's get out of Vietnam" votes? We need not try to vote in every little thing, all the time. We could concentrate on some of the broader issues.
Mind you, some of the Greeks thought that this would be mob rule, and the elitist in me cringes at the thought of millions of sub-100-IQ Americans punching away at the "Let's have gladiators on national holidays and public torture of criminals!" option on their WebTVs, but with a small but bold experiment at a local level, we could see how it works out.
Re:Wow! Everybody move to Russia! (-) (Score:2)
People seem to misunderstand. It's not about how the economy is run, or about how the figureheads get put into power, but about who has responsibility for the security of the state.
Re:New IBM big iron? (Score:2)
I'm working on a mod for Half-Life that will allow me to bribe the President for money under threat of a H-Bomb! The Rockets are controlled by terrorist teams. I'm planning on charging a lot of money for this mod.
Re:Great analogy (Score:2)
The CIA and the NSA are not handled by any democratically elected official, nor by anybody appointed by such an officail. There may be an appointed person who "oversees" these branches, but they sure don't run them.
Jean-Louis Gassée (Score:3)
"I am afraid of what voters will let government do in the name of national security. I fret about the power of the NSA."
Red Herring, December 1996
http://www.bedope.com/qjlg/ [bedope.com]
Great analogy (Score:5)
The moral of the story is that you're using a public network when you use email. While it's certainly immoral and usually illegal to snoop, governments will always do whatever it takes to insure their power. We've seen it time and time again with the US's relationships with other countries.
Knowing that, we know that in general they will be watching for all threats. If a coalition decides to form to watch these threats, like Echelon, it will happen. If you insist on using these postcards, at least encrypt your data.
Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State. (The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically). There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.
In which the facile is dismissed (Score:2)
If it was based purely on whistleblower accounts, you'd have a point. They're rarely reliable.
The bibliography, however, includes a large number of more official sources, FOIA releases and congressional testimonies: the story is credible enough that political action (albeit in the European Parliament, a fairly weak institution) has been taken on the strength of the various reports that are cited.
As to the other stories you cite, there really is no point of comparison (except maybe the one about the CIA). Echelon is a story about a group of nations doing, by their intelligence services, something in their direct strategic interest using the best technology available and disregarding the law to do it. What's so lacking in credibility about that? The real surprise would be if they weren't up to something like it - and up to the point where they break the law and infringe my privacy without my having given them cause to suspect me, I approve of it.
Re:In which the facile is dismissed (Score:2)
It's illegal by domestic UK law without an appropriate warrant, for radio and telephone communications, and, with the passing of the RIP Bill into law, it'll be illegal for email too (one of the no doubt unintended good side effects of the soon-to-be-Act). It was this I was referring to as illegal.
As to other countries' transmissions, there's a treaty which required countries to respect the privacy of private communications - the article that provoked this item contains a reference. So it's illegal there as well.
As to monitoring diplomatic transmissions, that's covered by the Vienna Conventions or one of the Protocols thereto if memory serves: they're sort of "diplomatic bag".
Foreign military and espionage traffic is, quite rightly, fair game to one and all.
Re:Economic boom loosely tied to Echelon? (Score:2)
As for the second item, hell, the Moon's big and predictable. They bounced radar off of it when -- the fifties? Maybe Campbell has a lower threshold of spectacular then I do...
Lojack (Score:2)
Not so fast... (Score:2)
First, I'm not sure that Echelon-like programs are useless. There are a variety of threats to the public safety that existed during the cold war and continue to exist now, which can be prevented to some extent by the information gathering that Echelon provides. Admittedly, organisations, particularly those in the government, will tend to try to justify their own existence/collect more funding/etc. But more is required to demonstrate that the NSA has overstepped their bounds.
Additionally, it is easy to talk vaguely about the universal human rights that our founding fathers established, but, frankly, its rather naive. Remember, many of our founding fathers were supporters of slavery. And just in case you thought they were ardent supporters of freedom of speech, read about the Alien and Sedition Act. Essentially, it limited voting and free speech to prevent opposition to the party in power. Fortunately, it did not last long.
If you want to talk about rights violations, state what rights you're talking about, how they're specified in our constitution and how they're being violated. Its not sufficient to mention human rights, and then expect us to all agree that the NSA is evil. I've lived in the US all my life, too. And I am not proud of all the things the US government has done. But until you can provide me with examples supported by sound reasoning, I see no reason why I should be ashamed. And even then, I reserve the right to disagree with your judgement.
Jam Echelon 2 Day is coming up soon! (Score:2)
http://www.sheepdot.org/raize/jamech.htm
I don't provide direct href links since that tends to give the
For those of you who didn't already know, Jam Echelon was considered the biggest failure ever set forth by an online community. Not only did it do absolutely nothing favorable, but you had hundreds of people spamming newsgroups with ridiculous postings.
Not to mention the words that were in the hotlist, like the letter "a", "bugs bunny", and other really stupid things.
Think about it folks, if there is a system to monitor *us*, it is going to monitor everything we say in any email, not just particular emails.
Such a system could exist, but in my opinion doesn't. We've got more important everyday loss of freedom on the Internet that doesn't have to be part of a scam that some New Zealand company came up with.
The other side of Echelon (Score:3)
Can you imagine all the CPU power backing it up, the massive amounts of bandwidth, the sophisticed language parsers (something tells me it's a bit more complex than "does this message contain 'bomb'?") and the satellite and ground-based listening posts?
It's a shame that humanity's greatest concerted efforts of high-technology have usually been destructive in nature. (I don't claim exceptions are non-existant -- look at Apollo.) I wonder what that says about out nature.
How cool would it be if some of technology involved would trickle down sooner rather than later. Think about all the incredibly cool -- and useful -- things we could do!
yours,
john
European Union takes it seriously (Score:2)
http://europa.eu.int/comm/ebs/s hotlist/ref15543.htm [eu.int]
http://europa.eu.int/comm/ebs/s hotlist/ref15545.htm [eu.int]
There are also five volumes packed with good stuff (some by the mentioned author himself) at http://www.europa rl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/publi/pdf/98-14-01-1en.pdf [eu.int]
(and 2en.pdf, 3en.pdf, etc.)
Enjoy your reading!