On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Dave Emery wrote:
> Just to amplify this a bit, does anyone seriously think the >NSA's satellite and embassy based cellphone interception capability is >primarily targeted against - US - GSM calls ? Or that they can >routinely get warrants to listen in using the wired tapping >infrastructure in say Russia or France or Iran ? Of course the NSA's satellite and embassy based cellphone interception capability isn't primarily targeted against - US - calls; that would be illegal. The snooping in the US is done by others and then handed over to the NSA instead. And of course the NSA does the same for them. This is what the UKUSA agreement is all about. Bluntly, no matter who does the actual interception work, in the modern world every intel agency's analytic and correlative resources are targeted against everybody in the world. To say that some particular agency doesn't do intercepts in some particular country is irrelevant; It's all just data. Remember lawmakers learning that the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it? Well, we're looking at the same phenomenon here: the worldwide intel community treats privacy laws and operational restrictions as damage and routes around them. It's exactly the same thing. I'd be willing to bet most nations even get intel on their own citizens that's gathered by actively hostile countries: An actively hostile nation, let's say, snoops on american citizens. Then they share the intel product with someone they've got a treaty with, and then that country shares it with somebody they've got a treaty with, and they share it with the US. It's all just routing. Someone has information somebody else wants, somebody else has money or intel to swap for it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out, it's just going to happen. Anything an intel service shares with anybody, it's putting into the network, and it's going to get around to everybody. Bear --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]