
My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers - aarkay
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-eavesdroppers/
======
guimarin
Back when I was a kid, Enemy of the State was not a documentary.

But really, if you cared about Privacy/Security at all since the 80's you'd've
known about Echelon, Echelon II, etc. You've also read up on ThinThread and
Trailblazer.

My favorite is the No Such Agency adjunct that pulled like $200m a year in
funding with 3 people in the division. Well and this patch:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Logo_of_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Logo_of_Infrared_Space_Systems_Directorate.png)
quite literally the greatest US Gov't Patch of all time.

~~~
codezero
I've always been partial to this one:
[https://i.imgur.com/XaIWseY.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/XaIWseY.jpg)

~~~
WiseWeasel
Sure, that's a great example of classic Bond-villain-like appeal, but I still
have to recognize the design team who pushed this work of an entirely
different level of greatness through committee approval:

[http://www.nro.gov/images/launches/nrol-66/NROL-66-patch.jpg](http://www.nro.gov/images/launches/nrol-66/NROL-66-patch.jpg)

------
teh_klev
I remember the Zircon affair quite vividly. At the time I was a 20 year old
student union activist, CND member (still a member) and involved in the
Scottish independence movement (SNP member when it was unfashionable).

A couple of days after BBC Scotland was raided by Special Branch a bunch of us
attended a viewing of the "banned" Secret Society "Zircon" programme in
Edinburgh in the City Chambers (I think). Duncan Campbell was present and gave
a short introduction. It was a positively electrifying event. I managed to get
hold of a copy of the episode for distribution and viewing at my college. It
was handed to me in a jiffy bag, the VHS video cassette was labelled "Mickey
Mouse", I think I have it in a box somewhere.

~~~
wrboyce
Is this[1] the programme you refer to?

[1]: [https://vimeo.com/44948377](https://vimeo.com/44948377)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
At 19:19 it's hilarious - British Aerospace gave the game away about the 3rd
"Skynet" satellite being at 53deg East instead of where it should be, then
that info was rescinded in later releases (showing it was important), then the
centre for tracking the Skynet satellites (in this segment) only has 2
tracking dishes.

British SigInt were really, really bad at lying it seems.

Or, was this just the diversion ...

------
sandworm101
The problem with Echalon-type programs today is cultural. They were/are
intelligence operations. But today "intelligence" has grown to encompass
criminal investigations and targeted, violent, operations such as drone
strikes.

An intelligence operation does not need to be 100% accurate. Huge volumes of
less-than-perfect data are examined by experts who then issue reports,
opinions, on what is actually happening. The top report would be the sort of
things included in a president's daily briefing. That was basic cold-war
intelligence.

Today's leaders expect surveillance to be absolute. They don't want "and
increased likelihood of attack", they want "Mr. Smith will be onboard flight
123 at 2pm". That's the level you need to send a bunch of cops to lawfully and
publicly arrest a specific person and take them to a court for prosecution.
Such things require very different methods, methods for which ECHALON was
never designed.

~~~
toyg
_> today "intelligence" has grown to encompass criminal investigations_

That's a function of changed political objectives. "The enemy" became a liquid
definition, purely for political reasons: "Arab terrorism" can easily be
redefined as OLP or Taliban or Iran or AQ or IS or or or, keeping the public
"at war" indefinitely and impeding scrutiny of reigning confusion in foreign
policy. Until that stops, it's politically very difficult to fight calls for
"more intelligence to stop our planes blowing up".

Unfortunately, the US (and EU allies, especially France and Britain) have now
managed to screw up _an entire continent_ so much, that a clear statement of
interest to "reset" this state of things is almost impossible. In comparison,
Vietnam and Cambodia were a walk in the park.

------
mirimir
The Intercept: [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-
unmasking...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-
british-eavesdroppers/)

There's lots of 1998-2001 stuff on cryptome.org :)

Total TFH then. Now, not so much :(

~~~
api
Time seems to have had a way of vindicating at least some tin foil hatters,
yet people today are just as ready to dismiss as 'crazy conspiracy theory' any
similar extrapolations or speculations.

If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I
remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in
the 1990s is now reality. Some of what's now reality would have made them
blush. The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that
everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at
all times to central servers owned by closely state-connected corporations --
and that people would accept this willingly and even pay out of pocket for
these devices themselves.

~~~
tedunangst
> If you strip off the really genuinely nutty stuff, quite a bit of what I
> remember reading nutters talk about on places like Usenet alt.conspiracy in
> the 1990s is now reality.

well, yeah. if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy. why is that
surprising?

> The conspiranoids would have called you crazy if you'd suggested that
> everyone would be carrying devices that constantly report their location at
> all times

would they? that seems like a pretty obvious consequence of carrying a cell
phone.

maybe my recollection is different, but i don't think people were saying "the
government reads your email" was a crazy idea. they were saying "the
government reads your email on their secret moon base staffed by hitler
clones" was a crazy idea.

if you want to make the argument that the hatters were right all along but
were wrongly dismissed, find a specific claim that was made, and a specific
counterclaim. these "right all along" discussions always slide into
unfalsifiable generalities and strawmen.

~~~
api
"if you ignore all the crazy, what's left isn't crazy."

That's exactly what I'm saying.

If you ignore all the crazy, the stuff that's left was stuff that _almost
nobody else was saying_ : that there was some kind of "conspiracy" to
implement a total surveillance state (PRISM and friends, and location-aware
phones), that in the future the middle class was going to be destroyed and the
world enslaved to the service of a tiny elite (the "sharing economy" of non-
employees with no benefits), fascism is coming back (too many examples to
list), corporations with shadowy "deep state" links will rule the Earth (TPP),
etc.

Remember that this was in the post-cold-war 1990s when everything was getting
better, a rising tide would lift all boats, and freedom was going to ring.
This was before 9/11, the great housing hyperinflation, the 2008 crash and the
great stagnation, or our experiment at bringing democracy to Iraq ended with
ISIS.

Polite establishment intellectuals weren't saying those things. Only crazies
were, and the crazies were largely right. Maybe they were bat shit crazy about
the underlying mechanisms, but they were right about where things were going.

IMHO a lot of conspiracy nuts are actually very perceptive and intelligent.
They've got good pattern recognition circuits going. The problem is that
they've got poor epistemology. They're not very careful thinkers, and they're
often a bit uneducated and inexperienced about how the world really works. As
a result they tend to force-fit their observations and extrapolations onto
silly cartoonish models of how the world works. The observations are correct,
but the models are not.

This is coupled with the fact that being loony outsiders, they have no
reputation or political street cred to protect. They don't have to care about
offending their superiors because they have none, and they aren't afraid of
damaging their reputation because there's nowhere to go but up from 'fringe
lunatic.' As a result, they can tell the truth insofar as they can point out
trends nobody else wants to look at. According to Pravda grain production is
only going up!

Just replace the word "conspiracy" with "emergent behavior in a complex
system" and re-read all that stuff.

There is no Illuminati, but there is an "old boy network" where favors are
traded for favors and corruption breeds. There is no New World Order per se,
but there is a complex global economic system full of paradoxes and feedback
loops and perverse incentives that behaves very much like one, and we do have
corporations so big and complex and entrenched they're almost like a model of
what a hostile AI would be like. Put these things together and you get
everything the nutters write about minus the funny hats and secret societies.

Then again...

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-
wal...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-
secret-society.html)

~~~
tedunangst
> the middle class was going to be destroyed and the world enslaved to the
> service of a tiny elite

wait. is this an example of a good theory or a crazy one?

~~~
mirimir
> The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion
> of wealth among the middle class and the poor. There is a widespread public
> view across American society that a key structural change in the U.S.
> economy since the 1920s is the rise of middle-class wealth, in particular
> because of the development of pensions and the rise in home ownership rates.
> But our results show that while the share of wealth of the bottom 90 percent
> of families did gradually increase from 15 percent in the 1920s to a peak of
> 36 percent in the mid-1980, it then dramatically declined. By 2012, the
> bottom 90 percent collectively owns only 23 percent of total U.S. wealth,
> about as much as in 1940 (see Figure 2.)[0]

> The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects
> global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small
> national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to
> assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the
> architecture of the international ownership network, along with the
> computation of the control held by each global player. We find that
> transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large
> portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial
> institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that
> raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.[1]

[0] [http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-
inequal...](http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequality-
united-states/)

[1]
[http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf)

~~~
tedunangst
Probably a case where choosing ones words carefully helps. If you told me in
the 90s "wealth inequality will increase" I probably would believe you. If you
had told me "the world will be enslaved" I would have been skeptical. Saying
that you were right all along because, while you said the latter, you really
meant the former, sounds like retconning.

~~~
mirimir
True. But I do fear that wealth inequality will go exponential with
automation. At least slaves are needed.

~~~
belenos46
If we get real, robust automation, we're not going to see wealth inequality
head that way. Or, at least, it's not going to matter as much. When anyone can
get automation to do all the things they care about, what's the incentive to
work like a dog for your whole life?

~~~
pygy_
Automation is gradually stripping our economic power.

When everything is automated and nobody knows how to build anything anymore,
what's the incentive to keep the idle masses fed?

------
evilhaskeller
I remember an IRC channel about security in the early 2000s. Somehow we
started discussing government surveillance, and someone mentioned ECHELON.
People's reactions were interesting: most people immediately dismissed it as
being "impossible", or "another conspiracy theory".

It makes me sad.

~~~
yborg
How quickly we forget. Long before that, back in the USENET days, it was a
common joke to include a .sig line "for the ECHELON line reader" with a list
of words that the presumed NSA computer would match against, like "KGB nuclear
anthrax bioweapon" etc. The joke being that if everyone would include these,
they would end up having to analyze the entire newsgroup feed.

~~~
SapphireSun
Heh, there's an emacs command for that too. M-x spook

------
throwaway81922
A somewhat philosophical question: what is the endgame here?

Cracking codes was no doubt fundamental to winning the Second World War (and I
would imagine all wars since the invention of the Caesar cipher) - but since
then the motivation for surveillance appears to have from safeguarding the
freedoms and rights of the people to an full-scale assault.

We now have nation-wide surveillance of the British public (and no doubt the
people of most other countries), who for the most part couldn't be of less
interest if they tried. So what is the motivation for this? What is it about
you or I that is so interesting to GCHQ/NSA?

~~~
Mikushi
It's not a popular opinion, but what they are interested in is silencing and
curbing any attempt to attack the current system, regardless of the merit and
legitimacy of the "attackers" ( by that I mean activists, journalists, ...),
they want to defend their position of power using all means necessary while
pretending it's for "freedom & democracy"™.

Their repeated attacks on the press, the persecution (at time violent, if not
deadly) of activists/journalists, the illegal wars, the financing of
terrorism, protection of known paedophiles,... The list of fucked up shit they
pull is so long I personally have lost faith of anyone -in significant
numbers- caring, because if you don't care right now, you'll never do.

~~~
pdkl95
It's called COINTELPRO. Just like "total information awareness", the program
didn't really end; it was simply broken up and renamed.

------
sr_banksy
Great insight into how free-speech, freedom of press and privacy laws work and
have evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Having lived on either end of the
pond as an average citizen, I know the American Press enjoys greater and truer
freedom. They hold the legislators accountable. The British press, on the
other hand, felt malleable, made to bend any which way the government choose.
The BBC creates invaluable programming, but also is bound to the government by
the purse. It always felt like the government meddled with its affairs. And
now some great to get some historical context into it as well!

------
shahryc
"Since then, the program has largely been presented to the public only through
posts on government surveillance/conspiracy forum..." \------ I guess the
conspiracy theorists weren't that crazy after all.

------
signaler
First learned about ECHELON in Robert Ludlum's Bourne series:
[http://bourne.wikia.com/wiki/ECHELON](http://bourne.wikia.com/wiki/ECHELON)
The key difference being that this is trunk VOIP ingestion, not the more
sinister PRISM and TURMOIL stuff which is much more invasive

------
superkuh
This page will reliably kill X.Org X Server 1.7.6 regardless of the browser
used to render it.

~~~
keithpeter
OK on xorg-server-1.9.5 which is pretty old. What GNU/Linux are you using?
Debian Squeeze?

------
twic
> The next morning, as the New Statesman hit newsstands, I went early to
> Parliament to meet a friend and supporter, an MP named Robin Cook. He led me
> to a sanctuary in Parliament, where I could stay long enough to avoid being
> served by the authorities and get our story out safely.

Robin Cook was one of the good guys.

Interesting to know about a remaining enclave of asylum after our discussion
recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951283)

------
keithpeter
Historically GCHQ has had a strong relationship and support from British
government and politicians at government level probably reinforced by the
'troubles'. Mrs Thatcher altered the culture of the rank and file GCHQ staff
by removing union representation and replacing it with a 'staff association'.

------
acqq
The original source link with the new content:

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-
unmasking...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-
british-eavesdroppers/)

~~~
dang
Yes. Url changed from [http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/uncovering-echelon-
the-top-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/uncovering-echelon-the-top-
secret-nsa-program-that-has-been-watching-you-your-entire-
life/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook),
which points to this.

------
1arity
A Moral Thesis in Defense of Surveillance

People talk about civil freedoms, and they incorrectly attribute lack of
surveillance the status of a civil freedom. Freedom from observation is not
freedom, freedom from incorrect enforcement is freedom.

Observation does not alter the moral scope of the individual, or the moral
scope of the society. The individual's choice to limit their own moral scope
under observation is what limits their scope. Surveillance does not affect the
effective moral scope. Enforcement defines the ( effective ) moral scope ( the
scope of actions that individuals can do without expecting hindrance from
society ).

More comprehensive surveillance, leads to more clear enforcement, and more
clear enforcement preserves in clearer definition those freedoms which are
expressly not prohibited under the moral scope of a society. Surveillance is a
tool of freedom. Specifically, a tool that contributes to preserving the
freedom of action of individuals by contributing to more effective
enforcement.

Without surveillance the machinery of enforcement can be more messily and
liberally applied.

The fake left doctrines complain about surveillance as a tool of oppression.

Surveillance is seen in fact a tool of freedom, it is the light shone upon.
The fake left doctrine has framed the entire debate incorrectly. Absence of
surveillance is not a civil freedom, it is in fact an assurance of imprecisely
applied enforcement.

Surveillance is a civil freedom.

Lawful enforcement is a civil freedom.

The remaining civil freedoms, known as "civil liberties" are those things
permitted by an individual's effective moral scope.

Civil liberties, like morals in general, are not absolute, they are the
choices made by societies to define themselves at a particular time and place.
( The color of absolutism is invoked because that promotes harmony -- if
something is absolute it is beyond question. This is not a real admission of
absolute, simply a shorthand for a society saying the debate about this way we
define ourselves is complete, for now. )

Civil freedoms are distinguished from civil liberties in that civil freedoms
include those acts, two of which are defined above, which effect whatever
civil liberties are chosen. Civil freedoms include the machinery of creation
of civil liberties.

The relationship between the state and the individual is somewhat akin to that
between a parent and a baby. A baby is many things, and it is also helpless
and chaotic without the governance of the parent. The parent's attentive
observation ( surveillance ) of the baby presents the baby from harming
itself. The state's attentive surveillance of the individuals presents them
from harming themselves and others.

If large groups of individuals were capable of governing themselves in an ad-
hoc fashion then...the internet, reddit, all of these places would be domains
of inclusion, tolerance, peace, and respect. In fact, moderators, and
moderators of moderators, and policies, and a central authority are required
to prevent chaos and harm.

These things ( observations and controls -- surveillance and enforcement ) are
the very enablers of the same liberties that the fake left doctrine purports
they destroy.

The fake left doctrines complain about surveillance as a tool of oppression.
They use "freedom" in an intangible, absolute sense. A mythological "Perfect
Freedom of the Individual", a delusion that fails to acknowledge the social
context in which any freedom of action exists.

These fake left doctrines are founded on a delusion of a freedom unhindered by
a social context. They are the fake left's dream of the mythical Powerful
Individual, a delusion to compensate for the collective belief of the fake
left of the powerlessness of the individual against some mythical oppressive
force. In fact, for an individual exposed only to lawful restriction of their
action, their only powerlessness is their fabrication of their own
powerlessness.

The mythical oppressor of the fake left is in fact, not the lawful
surveillance state, it is the individual that chooses to believe itself
powerless. Surveillance is not oppression, incorrectly applied enforcement is
the very definition of oppression. And as the net of surveillance is narrowed,
a broader net of enforcement must be cast to protect individuals from
themselves. The fundamental that the fake left has not grasped is that the
trade off is not between "broader freedoms and broader surveillance" it is
between "broader surveillance or broader enforcement", and broader
enforcement, without the information, is going to be incorrectly applied.

~~~
colllectorof
1\. Global surveillance is not a left/right thing. No matter what you believe
in or where you stand on issues, global surveillance can be used to force you
to do things you do not want to do - without regard to _any_ moral, ethical or
legal considerations.

2\. The article pretty much proves you wrong on the moral scope thing.

 _> Surveillance is seen in fact a tool of freedom, it is the light shone
upon. _

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

 _> If large groups of individuals were capable of governing themselves in an
ad-hoc fashion then...the internet, reddit, all of these places would be
domains of inclusion, tolerance, peace, and respect._

Many parts of the Internet _are_ domains of inclusion, tolerance, peace, and
respect. Reddit, Twitter and 4CHAN are _designed_ to be what they are. They're
not the only models of how things work, they're just the largest centralized
platforms that draw the most attention.

