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Echelon Speech By Duncan Campbell 6

Posted by michael from the IPSEC dept.
Yet another anonymous reader sends the following: "Dr. Dobb's Technetcast is carrying an informative presentation about the Echelon intelligence gathering system by Duncan Campbell an investigative reporter who wrote one of the first reports about the system in 1988."
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Echelon Speech by Duncan Campbell More

Echelon Speech by Duncan Campbell

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  • the govt. wanting to keep tabs on the country with snooping like this to stop potential terrorists, one thing that just occured to me is what happens if you piss off someone who works on the Echelon project? I mean it's bad enough if you piss a friend off who know some of your secrets it's bad enough that your secrets get spread, but if you piss off someone involved in Echelon they could REALLY screw you over. While I agree that govts. should prevent terrorism any way they can (growing up in England I grew up with IRA pricks blowing up my country) the potential for abuse of Echelon is just FAR to great.

    I know this isn't entirely on topic with the story, but I just made a mental note of which friends may be involved with the project. Scary.

    ---

  • We have a detailed archive of Echelon articles on our "Who Watches the Web?" page:
    http://www.tecsoc.org/persec/webwatch/echelon.htm [tecsoc.org]

    A. Keiper
    The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org]
    Washington, D.C.

  • You needn't worry, according to my thorough invetigations Echelon only track this canadian ISP [echelon.net].

    Phew.

  • The biggest problem with the echelon system is that it is designed, monitiored and managed by people and that is probably the scariest part about the whole thing. If I thought for one second that the government could manage to dig up 100 or so people (that's my humble estimate as to how many people they need minimum) that had absolutely no pre-bias towards any group or person. I might think that this was a halfway decent approach to stopping terrorism. The problem is that the keyword list, AI logic or whatever is automatically skewed, because there are already so many ingrained ideas. People are just that only people, I can't honestly believe that if I used some keyword in my e-mail that also happened to contain bank information that certain individuals working on this system might not pocket the information. Or if I expressed certain views that may not agree with one of the administrators, a simple edit and save and I've been mysteriously identified as the man on the grassy knoll by e-mailing my confession to a friend/psycologist/religious advisor. I don't think that the system is flawed I think that the people who run the system are flawed. remove the .spam to e-mail me tj6581@cnsvax.spam.albany.spam.edu
    "Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
  • remember that according to the british government of the 18th century, george washington was a "terrorist." ECHELON's potential for abuse outweighs its usefulness by about a cubic centimeter of a neutron star.
  • some [theregister.co.uk] say that there is not enough processing power for ECHELON to monitor communications effectively. however, the combined processing power possible with today's networks have produced calculation speeds reaching the terraflop domain, and this is what is publicly known. assuming that classified computing is five to ten years ahead of declassified computing, we're getting close to having networks of computers advancing towards neural-net capabilities i.e. artificial intelligence.

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