At 5:58 PM -0800 2/19/00, John Young wrote:
>Very well, your rebuttal would be an informative addition
>to the file, if you don't object.
>
>
>Wayne Madsen is quoted today in Canada's National Post that
>the EU hearings are a joke. That all nations spy on each other
>and only a fool thinks otherwise:
Obviously. Most of Echeleon is not even very new. I read Bamford's "The
Puzzle Palace" when it first came out, around 1983. Minaret, US-USA, Alice
Springs, etc. With later details filled in: Task Force 57, Nugan-Hand Bank,
Banco Ambrosiano, and on and on. Some of the details are newly updated, but
mostly this was all implicit in the Bamford book...the listening posts
around the world, the deals with Western Union, ITT, etc. The UK-USA mutual
espionage deals to skirt the letter of the law, the Canberra-Alice Springs
murders and shenanigans, the role of SAIC, Kissinger Associates, and other
Task Force 57 staffers, and so on. Old beer in new bottles.
(I was working on a novel about NSA machinations and high tech in the
period 1988-1991. Stuff about NSA commercial espionage to run investment
pools. I eventually ran out of gas on this techno-thriller, but the preps
and research fleshed out the bones of crypto anarchy and helped lead to our
first meetings in '92. So this is why Echelon just looks like old beer in
new bottles. But I understand the journalists are now in a tizzy, so I
guess some here are, too.)
>
>Would that San Diegian be the gent who bragged of snagging
>Mitnick?
Rots of ruck.
BTW, there was a poorly written (or perhaps poorly translated) French
techno-thriller back in the late 80s, early 90s. I forget the title. Maybe
something like "Cyberwar." Or perhaps "Infowar." About a supercomputer with
special instructions to leak data when a weather service report had some
city's temperature at a precise value, e.g., "23.8 C."
I mention this because there are a lot of flaky theories used as the basis
for some flaky thriller novels. (I like to think the thesis of my 1988-91
projected novel was a helluva lot more grounded in real technology than
most of these novels are.)
This latest French report about "Operation Wintel" is cheesier than most.
So "fromagey" that I'm inclined to think _IT_ is the NSA's plant.
(Were I the NSA and hoping to subvert systems to my own end, I'd have made
the guy I threatened to kill in his company's parking lot an even better
deal: make your systems subtly attackable by us, both your crypto and your
Verisign products, and we'll not only let you live, we'll also let you
become a billionaire. Not that I'm saying this might have happened, just
that this is a much more obvious point of attack. It's all Greek to me.)
Putting these backdoors/snoopers into either the DOS derivatives or the x86
derivatives is just plain inefficient and too exposed. The code for both is
just too visible. Any introduced flaws must be subtle.
My strong hunch is that they are not there.
Which is not to say Europeans, Asians, and Free Americans should not be
worried about Echelon. They obviously should be. And they should be using
absolutely first-rate crypto code.
Gee, whatever happened to all that crypto code supposedly coming out of
Europe? Big news about 3 years ago, that PGP had been gotten out in source
code...I don't see NAI emphasizing this anymore. Ditto for RSA's foreign
development labs. The lack of strong crypto coming out of Europe is
something the Europeans can and should be talking about, not weird shit
about Intel chips having special NSA access.
--Tim May
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
