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20 January 2012 Mega Echelon Option
At 02:12 PM 1/20/2012 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 01:52:01AM +1300, Peter Gutmann
wrote:
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:21:11 -0500 Harking back to the Echelon era, it is worth noting that those five countries - US, UK, AU, CA, NZ - are in the forefront of mega-managing the security of the Internet, no doubt refining and expanding the technological tools and sneaky extra-legal practices to work their combined will on global communications. Gaining access to MegaUpload's emails, business records and financial affairs likely required several multi-jurisdictional actions not only by the Echelon partners but also by allies such as those in NATO. As often discussed here, the use of military capabilities developed for national security for civilian criminal affairs matters is amply indicated in the MegaUpload indictment. Indicting MegUpload in the US, in particular in the Eastern District of Virginia, the pre-eminent national security court, also indicates a bias toward national security undergirding arguments for economic security threat. That too was often debated here in the crypto wars of the 1990s. Recent defense funding authorization of holding alleged terrorists indefinitely, keeping Gitmo alive, SOPA, PIPA, MegaUpload, Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, huge funding increases for openly hiring hackers and paying those undecover to rat on cohorts, also reminds of the extra-legalities and betrayals of the early public crypto era. From those crypto lessons -- aspirations to use technology to beat government, then gradual co-optation by legal threats, bribes, scholarships, contracts, stigma, isolation, betrayals, call that the After Echelon Option -- it should be expected that the same means and methods will be used in cyber wars, offense and defense mutually aggrandizing one another. Backdoors and trojans in widely trusted comsec, crypto and browsing tools; deep packet sniffing and co-optation of sysadmins; false flag attacks, virii, bots and Stuxnets to boost protection funding; super-enhanced capture of EM emanations from every electronic and digital means; unfettered black bag jobs and KVM loggers; enlisting thousands of covert cyber agents as "freedom fighters;" recruitment of educational institutions as cover for spying; promotion of books, articles, news reports and lectures for indoctrination about external threats to divert attention from the internal; these and more are the legacy of Echelon and its new, social media counterparts adeptly mega-managed through legal, extra-legal, illegal and secret access to private data of citizenry worldwide. Once the Echelon enemy was a few other nations, then global terrorists, now it is everyone who questions authoritatives. Note that there have been a slew of seeming public interest comsec initiatives -- websites, mail lists, bloggers, conferences, research, public relations, anonymouses, just about any that have gotten unusual attention -- in recent years to address cyber threats combined with threats to privacy, veritably in lock step with cyber war open and secret funding. Observing the particpants in these activities there are quite a few recognizable warriors from the crypto-comsec-privacy wars. Fine minds and good hearts still proposing technological solutions to the issues, warning of legal if not military opposition, oiled with a bit of venal self-advancement in the Jason Granier and "Mudge" mode. Op-eding and ginning up more technical-legalistic fixes to comsec and privacy, reminding of past errors and promises gone awry, sniping at one another, admitting NDA withholdings, apologizing for aiding government and commerce, shading arguments as exquisitely as highest-paid lobbyists and academics, parading an impressive list of coms, edus and orgs after the nyms. Optimistically, using the wind down of the Cold War as a precedent, when crypto wizards came of out of classified realms due to decline of nat sec jobs, the wind down of GWOT could lead to comsec wizards coming out of similarly classified realms to aid civilians against those comsec wizards remaining in the world of secrecy worldwide. It would be a swell outcome of classified research to heed its inherent dual use once again on the dual use Internet: between those who want to control it with an iron hand of government and commerce and those who want to free it from that hand. That will depend upon who gets paid to betray the public and those who defend the public. It is not easy to tell who is who since both copy one another's language, behavior and promises -- most of the charges against MegaUpload, and allegations against Anonymous, could be applied to official spies and globalist "justice" cartels both backed by big-iron-fisted militaries. Call that duality the Mega Echelon Option.
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