open letter to alt.2600.moderated readers
Edw...@alt.2600.moderated
grow.
What do you think?
Whitfield Diffie, Distinguished Engineer---Security at Sun Microsystems:
"An essential element of freedom is the right to privacy, a right that
cannot be expected to stand against an unremitting technological attack."
One cannot come up with a more 'unremitting technological attack'
than what is happening now.
That's worth saying again:
A more 'unremitting technological attack' could not be described!
******************************************************************************
Cybernetic control of society
---------- ------- -- -------
You are about to encounter the true use of the 'cyber' prefix.
Cybernetics is a cross-disciplinary science. The name was coined by
Norbert Wiener [pron. whiner], who was a professor of mathematics at
MIT, and did radar and firing-feedback mechanisms for the U.S. in
World War II. Cybernetics describes the complex of sciences dealing
with communication and control in the living organism AND in the
machine. Its application is sometimes called operations research.
I personally rank Norbert Wiener above Albert Einstein.
Operations research is a difficult discipline --- I certainly don't understand
it --- but when it was desperately needed during World War II, the U.S. Dept.
of War went for it gung-ho, rightfully. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is the
first step...the NSA grew out of these wartime operations research efforts.
To seek out information from noise, then act on the information.
Target accuracy for precision high altitude bombing requires
a complex feedback mechanism to control deployment (pre-GPS WW II).
* My dad:
*
* Norden bombsights revolutionized aerial bombing.
*
* They were so accurate we stopped putting explosives
* in the bombs and just aimed for people.
Communications, Command and Control. The above wasn't really the best
example of OR, but I did get
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Wini...@alt.2600.moderated
operatives' from
the British GCHQ spoke to the paper Observer: 'We feel we can no longer remain
silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence
within the establishment in which we operate.'
They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations,
including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported:
"At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a
routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In this case of phone
taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With the telexes this is
called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the
source was able to demonstrate telex 'fixes' on the three organizations.
We can then sift through those communications further by selecting
keywords to search for.
Without actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how
the ECHELON Dictionary system works.
Note that it was being used for telephone calls.
Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide
system. The design of the ECHELON system means that the interception of
these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any
station where the GCHQ had requested that the four d
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Lawr...@alt.2600.moderated
not all free. It was hideously expensive. And the
* repercussions --- I don't know what they are yet. I haven't talked
* to all the families.
*
* In the end, everything I received back was essentially destroyed.
*
* My computer was broken.
*
* All my prints were badly damaged.
*
* Some of them had been wadded up and thrown away and then taken out
* of the waste basket and flattened out again.
It cost Sturges $100,000 in legal fees, loss of major clients, much income,
seizure of his life's work, the tools of his trade, and made him feel
depressed about his life's work.
Our government uses Orwellian terror tactics
to control the politically incorrect:
Jock Sturges:
At my lowest point in this affair, I almost decided to jump
from the San Francisco bridge. I had stopped my car.
----
# FBI
# 450 Golden Gate Avenue
# San Francisco, CA 94102
#
# Dear Sirs, 7/6/90
#
# I am responding to a report on CNN last night.
#
# They showed a photographer, Jock Sturges, and some of his unpublished
# photos, and said the FBI confiscated them. According to the rep
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Gre...@alt.2600.moderated
triggered the Chairman to start making strange noises about shutting
down the Internet connection for security reasons. Also said something about
having email printed out at the Internet system and hand-delivered.
Now THAT scared the hell out of the rest of us, from geeks to managers, so,
being the hired gun for doing Internet security, I created some capture code.
All email in and out of the firm was now being copied to a 'save' directory.
Each night I went over it - all email traffic - with the aid of my analytics:
keyword spotting and keyword excluding software.
I had never heard of ECHELON or DICTIONARY or anything like it.
It was just obvious what to do from trying to check all (each and every one)
email personally at first. There was way too much of it for me to do that.
All the analytics I set up, including what I call the daily 'radar' file,
depended entirely on keyword monitoring. Items selected for review met a
series of include/exclude keyword matches.
Everything.
********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' **********
Ope's movie "Apollo 13" starring Tom Hanks had just come out:
> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 96 13:03:43 EST
> From: guy
> To: <someone>
> Subject: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
> Cc: <someone> <someone>
>
>
> Out bound from Salomon: From "Howie Windows" <how@sbi89>
> In bound to Silicon Graphics: To: hoj...@sgi.com
> Subject: sar source code
>
> internet:root 543> wc -l *.[ch]
> 129 sa.h
> 626 sadc.c
> 532 saga.c
> 496 sagb.c
> 45 saghdr.h
> 1463 sar.c
> 220 timex.c
> 3511 total
>
> 3500 lines of source, across seven sources, each clearly labelled:
>
> /* Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T */
> /* All Rights Reserved */
>
> /* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T */
> /* The copyright notice above does not evidence any */
> /*
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Mic...@alt.2600.moderated
feedback of weapons systems
(picking out a submarine from the background noise of the ocean) as they
do for describing human life, as they do for the political organization
of a country.
Like I said, an awesome scope.
Norbert Wiener even came up with a physics-based
description of how life is formed by information.
Check it out. Hang in there too, it's worth it.
* "Platform for Change", by Stafford Beer, 1978, ISBN 0 471 06189 1
*
* The term 'entropy' began life as a subtle measure of energy flow.
*
* When something hotter is systemically bound to something cooler, the
* greater energy of the hotter stuff migrates---inexorably migrates---
* into the cooler stuff. This is one manifestation of the Second Law of
* Thermodynamics, which everyone of education has encountered.
*
* This is sometimes referred to as 'the universe is running down'.
Okay, 'entropy', yeah I remember that kinda. Keep going:
Our solar system is a lot of matter that is NOT sitting in a situation of
entropy: the sun is radiating heat at the planets. Instead of just matter
smoothing out to a common low-energy state, a burning fireball is at work.
Cybernetics states that under conditions
like this, matter does something special.
* "Platform for Change", by Stafford Beer, 1978, ISBN 0 471 06189 1
*
* If we have a universe, which is improbable though it exists, it is
* because the Second Law of Thermodynamics has two forms. One is concerned
* with the pressure to
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Ol...@alt.2600.moderated
the United States.
: *
: * Thus, in 1977, during an investigation by the House Government
: * Operations Committee, Admiral Inman could claim, with a straight face,
: * that "there are no U.S. Citizens now targeted by the NSA in the United
: * States or abroad, none."
: *
: * Since the targeting was done not by NSA but by employees of British
: * GCHQ, he was literally telling the truth.
[snip]
: *
: * According to a former special agent of the FBI, the you-spy-on-mine,
: * I'll-spy-on-yours deal has been extended to other Western partners,
: * particularly Canada and Australia. The British, with the help of
: * sophisticated NSA computers, can bug just about anyone anywhere. The
: * electronic search for subversives continues, particularly in the U.S.
: *
: * The NSA conceded precisely that point when the U.S. Justice Department
: * investigated its wiretapping of American protesters during the Vietnam
: * War.
: *
: * The NSA assured the Justice Department that the information was
: * acquired only *incidentally* as part
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