
Welcome to Echelon 2.0 - bluetooth
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/06/welcome-to-echelon-20.html
======
adventured
This is a pretty bad article. The NSA wouldn't violate the constitution? Give
me a break. They violate it every minute of every day. They're using it as
toilet paper, as they attempt to store every piece of digital information on
every American they can, in their mega data center in Utah.

You'd be better off starting from a list of big Federal agencies that aren't
violating the Constitution every day of the week.

It's not speculation that Echelon existed, it's an openly admitted fact that
the program was not only developed but live. It was used to help catch, as two
examples: Pablo Escobar and Carlos the Jackal.

~~~
gohrt
Do you know someone who works at NSA? I knew someone (a rank-and-file SIGINT
engineer), and he swore that people in his office are trained to discard any
domestic data they encounter. Was he lying? Maybe. Did the policies change?
Maybe.

~~~
ianhawes
The likely scenario is that information distributed throughout the agency
suggests that they do not spy on US citizens. Basic training is done for all
employees where they are taught not to spy on US citizens.

However, NSA also conducts clandestine operations. Employees selected for
those operations are probably recommended based on their willingness and
trustworthiness when it comes to spying on US citizens and effectively
breaking the law.

Alternatively, as has been suggested recently in numerous articles, FBI
probably works hand-in-hand with NSA to "legally" allocate information
required for datamining. To the employees of the clandestine operations, the
information obtained is technically "legal", so perhaps that serves to settle
the nerves of the employees involved.

------
PavlovsCat
_the NSA cannot intercept signals within the United States_

Oh, really?

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A>

In the first few minutes of that Bill Binney says this:

"I was focused at foreign threats. The problems I solved, and the way I solved
them, were directed at foreign threats, and foreign potential threats.
Unfortunately, after 9/11 they took my solutions and directed them at this
country, and _everybody_ in it."

~~~
bascule
Thanks for posting this! That part of the article bothered me as well. See
also:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)>

------
rdtsc
Just because what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it isn't shady. You can
tell they've gone far and wide to push the boundaries slowly as far as they
could. It is like they can't slice your throat but they can surely wave the
knife a inch away from your head while claiming they are still following the
rules.

Then perhaps some will wonder, how come people mistrust the government?

The Constitution was written centuries ago. Before internet, before phones.
And I guess for a long time people trusted the government to keep up with the
spirit of the Constitution. It seems the opposite is happening. Those who one
expects to know, respect and defend it are the ones chipping away at its
edges, bit by bit.

This leads to trust issues. It is like entrusting someone with a job, and then
they find a way to screw it up then come back and say technically I didn't do
anything wrong because "I followed all the rules". Yes they followed all the
rules, but they also managed to lose the trust. Now the relationship is
adversarial as opposed to one of mutual support.

Now I always wondered about the peons. They ones working in the trenches who
have implemented all these technical "features" . One or two have come out and
revealed it. What about others? Will there be death bed confessions, 20 years
from now? Don't anyone of them care or see what they are doing or what they
are enabling? Just wondering what goes on in their heads.

~~~
kijin
The U.S. Constitution was written, not because people trusted their government
to do the right thing back then, but because they _did not_ trust the
government. The current political atmosphere, where the government is
considered trustworthy until proven otherwise, is a result of Reconstruction
and the two world wars that followed. Before that, it was a very real
possibility that the newly founded United States might soon devolve into the
kind of tyranny that the Founding Fathers perceived British rule to be. The
Constitution was an attempt to prevent this from happening. By default, the
government could not be trusted; and trust was only granted reluctantly when
the government could demonstrate that it was doing the right thing. That's why
so many clauses of the Constitution are concerned with what the government
_can't_ do. The government was never supposed to enjoy as much blind trust as
it does today.

~~~
rayiner
None of this is actually true. The state governments didn't trust the national
governments, but the Constitution does nothing to limit the power of
government in general (the nearly unlimited power of the state governments,
inherited from their status as successors to the British Parliament). The
structure of the Constitution is much more about the politics between the
states than it is about a blanket mistrust of government.

~~~
agwa
Look at the state constitutions enacted during the 1776-1787 period, how they
were created, and what the public discussion of them was. They show a definite
distrust of government. (States may have had regulatory powers, but that did
not give them license to be tyrannical by e.g. locking people up without trial
or conducting unreasonable searches.) Many of the new ideas that were formed
during this period about how to structure state government to hedge against
tyranny were also used when drafting the federal constitution.

kijin's point stands: back then people did not trust the government (and a key
related point: they knew that even a republican (i.e. democratic) government
could be untrustworthy). Much of that healthy distrust is gone today.

------
k3n
> Echelon (probably) existed

Probably?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON>

------
cdooh
Ah, when you look at it critically the death of 3000 people, 9/11, has lead to
2 never ending wars, the curtailling of people rights all over the world as
states rushed to implement broad anti-terror laws to please the US and funnily
enough, from where I seat in Kenya, the complete dismissal of the very thing
that makes America America; it's constitution

~~~
adventured
* made America America

The Constitution is arguably no longer the governing law for the US Federal
Government. Their behavior indicates it's optional as to whether they follow
it (and there haven't exactly been big consequences to not following it, we
keep giving them more money to spend to expand the abuse).

~~~
rayiner
> The Constitution is arguably no longer the governing law for the US Federal
> Government.

I can't think of a federal action, even this one, that is blatantly
unconstitutional. The problem is that you don't like what the Constitution
says. You want things like the 4th amendment, which protects you against
invasive searches of your home and person, to apply to information like that
the NSA is collecting that is not private at all (and indeed is not even in
your possession, being collected and stored by an independent third party).

You want to act like the government has turned away from the Constitution, but
the case is rather that you want to re-litigate the boundaries of
Constitutional protections. There has never been the kind of blanket
protection of "privacy" that technologists like to claim applies to the
internet. "Privacy" in that sense is a concept that largely post-dates the
founding (the 4th amendment is better understood not as a privacy protection,
but as a protection against the indignity and invasiveness of illegal
searches). If the founders had meant to create a blanket protection of
"privacy" they would have done so.

~~~
betterunix
"I can't think of a federal action, even this one, that is blatantly
unconstitutional"

That is because you have a conservative view of the role of government and of
the constitution. From where I sit, these things are all unconstitutional:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone> (should be obvious)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Walsh_Child_Protection_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Walsh_Child_Protection_and_Safety_Act)
(ex post facto law)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs> (lack of authority; alcohol
prohibition required a constitutional amendment, and this should too)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War> (no formal declaration of war by
Congress, not that this is news)

Now, I am sure there are various backflips and acrobatics that can be done to
interpret the constitution to allow all of the above. Really though, we can
save ourselves the effort; the constitution is just not as important as it
used to be. Executive branch power has expanded far beyond the scope of the
constitution. Congress keeps passing laws without regard to the constitution.
The courts have generally failed to strike down unconstitutional laws. Why
waste our mental energy trying to figure out how today's government is still
in line with the constitution, when we could instead just admit that the
constitution is just a guideline that is freely ignored?

~~~
rayiner
It's not a matter of engaging in backflips or acrobatics. It's a matter of
reading provisions of the Constitution in historical context, not interpreting
every provision in the broadest possible way in which it could be interpreted,
and handling tensions between Constitutional provisions through balancing
instead of just picking our favorite provision and giving it maximal effect.

1) Free speech zones: At the time of the founding, state police power was
considered nearly unlimited, and the First Amendment didn't apply to the
states at all. So how do you reconcile the state's police power with the right
of people to peacefully assemble? The answer does not have to be "you have to
read the right to assemble in the broadest way possible to the exclusion of
any legitimate state interest in policing." That's one mode of interpretation,
but that's not the only justifiable one.

2) The Adam Walsh Act. Not an ex post facto law because it doesn't directly
change the criminal status of any person, but rather directs, optionally,
states to conform their registration laws to certain standards. Many states do
not have ex post facto clauses in their state Constitutions. See:
[http://congress-courts-
legislation.blogspot.com/2011/01/stat...](http://congress-courts-
legislation.blogspot.com/2011/01/state-ex-post-facto-clauses-and-adam.html).

3) Iraq War: The Constitution does not say that Congress must declare war
before any hostilities are initiated. It just says that "The Congress shall
have Power... To declare War..." Absent much guidance as to what this
provision means, we can look to historical practice. And almost immediately we
see that no formal declaration of war (whatever that is--the Constitution
never uses the term) was considered necessary when presidents of the founding
fathers' generation engaged in hostilities with Tripoli and Algiers, within
just a few decades of the founding.

This is not to try and convince you of these points. Rather, it's an attempt
to show that reasonable minds may differ. Conservative views of Constitutional
interpretation are not illegitimate ones, and indeed are informed by the basic
mode of common law legal interpretation that the founders themselves were
familiar with.

------
samstave
Also, dont forget the HW backdoors provided to the NSA by Cisco for over a
decade...

And the NSA chip fab...

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/29/1456242/hiding-b...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/29/1456242/hiding-
backdoors-in-hardware)

------
nnq
Q for those of you with a legal mind: how could one "extend"/reinterpret the
US Forth Amendment to make it apply to things like internet logs or credit
card receipts? Why should doing something via a 3rd party business make the
information concerning what you do less "intimate"?

...and pondering more on it: why should businesses not benefit from the same
rights to privacy as individuals do?

~~~
gohrt
Orin Kerr explains: <http://www.volokh.com/posts/1211991760.shtml>

His argument is that: it would be inconvenient to follow the 4th amendment in
the 21st century, because computers give people the technical power to have
conversations in private that would be otherwise need to be public, so
government should ignore the 4th amendment.

In short, there is no such interpretation, but government lackeys and show-off
contrarians make up sophistic excuses for the governments illegal actions.

~~~
rayiner
"Sophistry" does not mean "I don't like the result of this educated and
rational analysis."

~~~
gohrt
No, it means "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument"

~~~
rayiner
What's fallacious about it?

------
jaryd
It's crazy... I remember in high school (I think 2001) I gave a speech to my
Social Studies class about Carnivore (previously DCS1000). I was incensed by
it, and by what it represented. I now read this stuff, and just kinda quietly
think "what next?"

~~~
kijin
What next? This [1], of course.

Of all the electronic device you own that are capable of being exploited for
automated surveillance, your PC or Mac is probably the only thing that is
_not_ actually being used for automated surveillance (not counting your web
browsing habits, and provided you don't have any spyware on your computer).
How dare you use a computing device that (hopefully) does not have any
backdoors built into it, is not locked into any vendor's monthly payment plan,
is not locked into any vendor's proprietary OS, and even supports "terrorist"
techniques such as full-disk encryption?

Fortunately for Big Brother, key hardware components of general-purpose
computers are only produced by a handful of corporations such as Intel and
AMD. Don't be surprised if they agree to build all sorts of defects-by-design
into their processors, graphics cards, HDDs/SSDs, etc. There are already
plenty of excuses: I have popcorn ready for the day when graphics cards
finally implement security systems to prevent them from being used for bitcoin
mining or password brute-forcing.

The FSF should change their name to FCF, Free Computing Foundation. We need
them badly, more than ever before.

[1] Cory Doctorow, "The Coming War on General Computation",
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg>

~~~
endgame
> not counting your web browsing habits, and provided you don't have any
> spyware on your computer

You don't need spyware to do that: <http://www.experian.com/hitwise/hitwise-
methodology.html>

~~~
kijin
Intercepting your network traffic doesn't count as backdooring your computer.

~~~
crististm
yes, it counts as censorship

------
Kekeli
Doesnt end-to-end encryption for your calls as offered through open sourced
apps like Redphone secure your conversations so that nobody can listen in.

<https://whispersystems.org/>

------
gavinlynch
There already was an Echelon 2.0 back in the 90's. I suspect we're on Echelon
4 or 5 or 6 or 6, etc. by now.

~~~
gavinlynch
lol @ the downvotes. Sure, please downvote factual history. Hilarious.

------
ethanazir
I guess people who use encryption stand out. But how can we avoid Watergate
type abuse of this information. Say if I'm a Tea Party candidate, I must
compete with a one way mirror?

