If you believe the ALCU, the Echelon Organization is monitoring ALL of our communications - the web, phones, TV and radio, etc. (emphasis on ALL)
Personally, I find this hard to believe. Does this technology exist?
Here’s a link to get us started: http://www.echelonwatch.org/
Your thoughts?
The odds that the bread will fall butter side down are directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
None of the documents posted on this web site said anything close to what it was said they said. The letters from Australia’s DSD was a statment of general policy concerning operation of legal wiretap operations in pursuit of international criminals. We do the same thing here, its not a secret.
I don’t know what the ‘European Parliament’ is, but those web pages look pretty hokey to me - and since they appear on the same host they have no credibility.
I doubt the ACLU is even behind this - I imagine they are pirating the ACLU brand to try to get some credibility for their nutcase paranoia.
The ACLU is very definitely behind it. You can see this just by going to the ACLU’s home page, www.aclu.org - follow the “Privacy” link.
BTW, the European Parliament is the legislative body of the European Union - exactly what it sounds like, I would have thought …
This issue has been discussed before. I refer you to: http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/003199.html
Felice
“Everything, once understood, is trivial.” -WES
I’ll reply here, since the old debate seems more or less dead.
First, I’ll confess not having read the entire UCLA website, but I came across these passages in the report for the European Parliament, and I quote:
" 55. Routes taken by Internet “packets” depend on the origin and destination of the data, the systems through which they enter and leaves the
Internet, and a myriad of other factors including time of day. Thus, routers within the western United States are at their most idle at the time when
central European traffic is reaching peak usage. It is thus possible (and reasonable) for messages travelling a short distance in a busy European
network to travel instead, for example, via Internet exchanges in California. It follows that a large proportion of international communications on the
Internet will by the nature of the system pass through the United States and thus be readily accessible to NSA. "
While basically true, it’s definitely not accurate. It does not “make sense” to move IP packets twice over the Atlantic if it can be avoided, those lines are expensive. European ISPs interconnect their networks as much as possible and so, I would suppose, do American ISPs. It makes economic sense to do so.
In other words, IP traffic can take many different ways through the network, and Echelon operators would need to plant a LOT of wiretaps to get at even a small proportion of the traffic.
Of course, different IP packets containing data from the same e-mail (or other communication) may be (and often are) transmitted on separate lines, making “scanning” even more difficult. Not only do you have to scan all of the lines, you have to merge the data somewhere - meaning of course, that you have to have a parallel transmission capacity of about the same size as the lines you are monitoring. (Am I making sense at all ?) Of course, I or one of my colleagues could on a whim decide to reconfigure the routers in order to redirect the traffic, making Echelon’s task even harder.
MAN, this post is getting long. What I’m trying to say is: The nature of the Internet makes bugging it on a larger scale a hard task, not an easy one. (On a lighter note, I might add that the nature of most Internet engineers would cause them to yell bloody murder if they suspected foul play on what they consider their private playground.)
Being worried is the thinking man’s form of meditation.
It would probably only happen if certain routes were down in Europe. I’m positive that by design, packets are never routed across the pond twice.
I’m surprised no one else finds it significant that that web page is basically lying about what the DSD documents really mean - its insulting, as though they expect me to not even read them.
Crazily enough, this was just the topic of the day in my Politics of the Internet class. Contrary to what has been said here, packets are often bounced around between continents. Once, when my professor was in Italy, he found that all his email was routed to the united states before it went back to Italy.
Telephone monitering has been happening for a long time. In I think 1996 on the coast of England, an old goverment owned tower was sold. It ended up that the tower was right in the line of microwave telephone transmissions between Ireland and the UK. Trasmissions could be blocked, monitered, and sent right on through.
Germany even passed a law about that sort of thing. They said that info gathered form electronic evesdropping can be gathered for national security purposes, but that that info could not be disclosed to the police. Having a law about it certainly seems to imply that it exists.
Granted, I probably got the details wrong and my professor could be a complete kook, but it seems to me that Eschelon is a reality.