Echelon, surveillance, the Cold War

Probably each of us had heard or at least thought about the possibility of being watched. By your parents, neighbours, envious partners, private eyes, police. There are many ways and many who would like to do so. But when we move the scale, we might see, that the biggest institutions are really curious about everyone's privacy and they don't spare money to persue their needs. The budgets for operations such the monitoring of telephone (either celuar or conventional), e-mail, fax messages, teletype and almost any possible links easily break six-digit numbers. You don't believe? Well, the official spots have made they points. According to an intelligence study IFIP/SEC '92 (Fortrie I.F.B. "IT Crime - An Intelligence Report") presented in 1992 the US government is capable to monitor 100% of satellite links, 90% of telephone links, 85% of radio telecommunication and 75% of mail services. Similar figures had been officially confirmed in a report to the European parliament in 1998. "All European telephone, fax and e-mail communication are systematically intercepted by the NSA and all important information are transfered to Ford Mead, Maryland from the key center in North Yorkshire, UK."
  The system providing the necessary technical background was named Echelon and is maintained all over the world by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Surprisingly, the system was build up in some of these states even without the approval of the whole governments, only with the silent "go ahead" by the secret services and highest politicians. However, it couldn't be kept secret forever and this situation led to some security leaks in New Zealand disclosing the whole covert operation. (see N.Hager's, "Secret Power"). Although this whole has a touch of the cold war, the system is a non-military operation designed to watch non-militar targets such governments, administrations of state, industrial, financial organizations and/or people.

All I can add to this is: good work! Several giant facilities build up in the US, UK and all over the world, plus satellites hoovering above our heads, all worth millions of dollars (dollars of the taxpayers, which they watch :-). It might sound weird, but you pay for being watched. The strings are pulled by specialized institutions formed for only one purpose: monitoring communication. This includes surveillance and decryption. The names? Oh, as always, some strange acronyms like the NSA (National Security Agency in the US) and GCHQ (Goverment Communication Headquarters in the UK).
Now, you ask what does this all has to do with me? Well, ommit that it's a severe strike against privacy and other moral stuff. But the government too often shows, these information aren't secured as one would think. The just recent strike against top secret, highly sensitive servers in Pentagon, MIT, US government research centers and other "break-ins" speak for itself. Although, the government surely denies any loss of important data (well, would they confirm if it was true? I doubt) this clearly shows how vulnerable the data systems covering vital data are. Well, and imagine, how information like, let's say, credit card numbers and personal information required for authentification, could be misused in the wrong hands.

But there is a very shadowy line between protection and exploiting. Governments not once, not twice, used gathered data for the good of their economy. Bugging the communication between negotiating parties in a deal, gave their own firms the possibility to give the correct bid and win the deal. The only necessary thing is a big dish, somewhere, and a someone to hand the correct information to the correct hands.
The numbers: A German firm lost a high-speed train deal to a French counterpart. Worth: 2 billion USD
French Thompson-CSF lost a radar system deal to Rayeton. Worth: 1.4 billion USD
Airbus Industrie lost a deal to McDonnel Douglas and Boeing. Worth: 1.6 billion USD
And these are only the most known cases, where the one betrayed party alleged secret services of helping the other side. But as always there is a large amouth of smaller cases in which the total sum may climb into even higher numbers. How high, noone can even guess.

Kinda scary. But the whole thing is wrapped up in a neat tissue to cover its real purpose and to give it a reasonable purpose to make people believe, it's for their good. This has been applied for loooong times, only the tissue has changed. Now we are presented a picture of all bad guys dwelling all over the world with only one thought in mind: To attack our democraty and our national security. So we must develop systems to be able to know what are these bad guys planning, what are they talking about, etc. And this is best done by a monitoring system watching all communication. Then some powerful search machines look for certain keywords filter out the dangerous stuff and send it to human processing. That's the official part we are presented. Just THEY know how far these keywords go and how much of the communication is ranked as "maybe useful". Because the basic rule is: "Know your enemy" and who knows, who's gonna be next.
And the government has confirmed this. (At least indirectly) Like:
They are fighting against introduction of long-key (>64 bits) password systems and they are not very happy about the use of public key systems which are the top of today's encryption security. And why? They said, that if allowed, they couldn't be able to monitor (aha! here we are) the talk of the bad guys and not know what they are up to.

The results

At the end, let's have a look what information actually you send into ether when log into the internet:

• Your name
• your e-mail
• your on-line passwords (sometimes poorly encrypted)
• your interests
• your address and other data
• you open a path to your local drives to the servers. They may (and probably do) search your computer for additional info about you
• your friends
• your plans
• what you're buying
• what you're using

I'm afraid of thinking of all the nasty things you could do with that...

---