We ARE being monitored ....

B

Bruce in West Oz

New member
It's not being paranoid when someone really is out to get you!

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Crisis: Massive Internet tapping revealed [5/27]

We apologize in advance for this rant, but we firmly believe it is necessary to expose this shocking (if not surprising) story to as many people as possible -- before the circles of power which have created it solidify their positions beyond any chance of being stopped. Have an opinion about this story? Let us know by emailing us at echelon@blm.net.

Today, MOSR will be focusing exclusively on a major story that broke over the weekend and has received remarkably little press considering its terrifying implications.
According to this article on Australian publication The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990523/news/news3.html an Aussie official has finally come forward to confirm one of the worst fears of Netizens -- that a large majority of Internet traffic, including personal/business communication such as email, is being passively tapped by the AU/UK/USA governments as a result of a secret treaty signed in the late 1940's, and that these communications are constantly screened for items that would be of interest to each country's respectiveintelligence organizations.

This system is called "Echelon," and although many Internet users suspected such a system existed, we had all secretly hoped that it would fall under the same "possible but not probable" banner of our other collective paranoia. Apparently, we were wrong in the worst possible way.

Even worse, with the cold war now (hopefully) over, these systems may be abused for nearly any purpose, provider the abuser has access to those in control of these tapping systems. The implications are terrifying, and could be catastrophic if not addressed -- not only by the governments in whose best self-interest it is to keep these systems in place -- but by every person who uses the Internet and expects to have their rights respected in even the vaguest fashion.

This "Echelon" project threatens what may be the greatest potential of the Internet. By bringing people together in an environment free of physical and even, in a fashion, temporal boundaries, this medium has allowed information to become an even more important part of our lives. Freedom of that information is one and the same with freedom of indviduals. This freedom has the potential to reshape the world we live in by breaking down national borders, bringing together people of entirely different walks of life, and fostering a worldwide effort to shed outdated modes of social, commercial, and governmental operation.

This project makes that freedom laughable and nearly impossible to attain.
Unfortunately, for such an organization to exist in the first place, it must be well-protected and have the support of whoever it is in these countries who is really pulling the strings. Hazarding a guess at who that is has become an increasingly difficult job in recent years. [/quote]

In a similar vein, considering that Internet censorship is now law in Australia, someone went to the trouble of punching an entire dictionary through the government's preferred filtering software.

You can see the results at:
http://www.cmetech.com.au/kiddie_search.html

It's interesting to see all the firearms and shooting references that have been "rejected" by the database.

Bruce
 
Bruce does this mean that it's possible that everything we say here at TFL can actually be reported back to the government? They might actually "hear" what we say?
Cool.
Hey Clinton.
BITE ME!!!!

I've been wanting to tell him that for some time but had no way of doing it. Damn I feel better already.

Gunslinger
 
Gunslinger-
You get the TFL Man of the Month Award!

ROFLM...OTGCIDIMS (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My.....Oops The G***amn Colt Is Digging Into My Side)
Rich
ps: Hey Bill...what Gunslinger said!
 
you do relize that as part of the anti-terrorism bill passed after okc. that a group of 3 or more people discussing something the gov't deem's to be subversive is subject to arrest and or internment. of course this administration also passed into law the relaxing of show cause for wire taps, which now do not require a judge to sign off on. mmmmm.........
 
Unless you're a hacker or utilize some specialized service.. heck if you're just surfing the web, you're about as safe as using a public urinal. I've been trying to preach about internet safety for years, but it always seems to fall on deaf ears.

All this tapping is absolutely no surprise to me at all. It is, after all, the very nature of internet itself, especially the web. Even a mildly competent computer user can gain quite a bit of information about someone else if they wanted to, AND YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW IT.

Feel free to reduce the chances of being "attacked" by doing the following:

1. Use an alias. But do everyone else a favor and be consistant with it. Having 20 aliases is overkill and a serious headache unless you're in the Witness Protection Program. :) 1 or 2 is fine.

2. Use a 3rd party e-mail service. E-mail is totally wide-open and prone to attack. If you ARE attacked, at least it won't be on your original account. Also, it makes it just a tad harder for malicious people to track you down, virtually and physically. And for sensitive data, use PGP. It's not a do-all-end-all, but for typical users, it's more than enough. Give out your original e-mail only to those who you trust. Personally, I don't even bother using my original e-mail account. Only my wife does and she uses it only for mindless chit-chats with her friends. ;)

3. Set cookies down low. Cookies are also prone to attack or being snooped. However, they are useful enough to keep. Just set the usage to a minimum. If you're really paranoid, you can turn it off completely.

4. Exercise good password habits. Keep them at least 8 characters long (makes it safer against brute attacks). Vary them from one account to another. Don't make it anything that can be found in a dictionary (makes it safer against dictionary attacks). Mix it with special characters or numbers. Variety is good.

All of my passwords have different levels of sensitivity. For example, there's the low-level ones that I have for public use such as my account on this forum. Then there are medium-level, private passwords, designated specifically for private usage such as for my e-mail accounts. This makes it so public accounts can't be hacked and used against you for your more private accounts. I also have high level ones that I use for internet banking for example. And finally, I have killer, super-duper passwords that even my own wife doesn't know about. These passwords only exists inside my head and nowhere else. They are used solely for local encryptions of data that, among other things, include a list of all the my other passwords. This is just in case I get hit in the head too hard or something and can't remember my own passwords.

All this might make me sound like some crazy paranoid, but in reality, I've only got about half a dozen actual passwords in use, and once it's set up, it's an effective, transparent system that's a no-brainer to maintain.

5. Exercise common sense. There's a saying, secrets are only as safe as the secrets themselves. Put another way, the level of sensitivity of your data should not exceed the level of protection you can reasonably expect from your security measures. If you've got drafts of thermonuclear devices, then no matter how good your security is, don't be surprised if you're hacked. On the other hand, if you have Fort Knox security just to protect, say, your e-mail account, you're doing good. Hehe.

There are other things that are helpful such as firewalls and proxy servers, but if you're just an average user like me, the security measures mentioned should be plenty to make a person "street smart" on the internet. Just remember, no matter how good you are, if somebody wants to get you badly enough, they will get you! So maintain that condition yellow.

As always, thank you for letting me rant.

[This message has been edited by SB (edited May 28, 1999).]
 
I don't know if the story is really true or not, but i always figured that they (the government) monitored whatever they felt like they needed to, and have always acted accordingly. The story doesn't surpise me at all, and me being on the paranoid side anyway, figure it's true. but i also figure that big brother already knows what they want to know about me anyway,(and no, it's not because i'm a criminal, i'm not) so screw'um.

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fiat justitia
 
Hmmm, Communism, Guns, Civil War, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Fertilizer, Assassination, Bombs, Home Made Explosives, Guerilla Warfare, The President, Y2K, Mahem, Civil unrest.... if this string of words doesn't set off alarm bells nuthin' will ;)....

What's that thwump, thwump noise?

Hey it's a helicopter over my house !...Hi guys... No wait, I was only kidding !

Guys....

GUYS :( !!!!

This message has been terminated in the interest of National Security

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"The Gun from Down Under !"
 
Bruce, thanks for the update. Stories about Echelon have been around for a while now, some more substantiated than others, however this is the first that I'd heard of any sort of official recognition. Previous stories I heard around the net involved using it to spy on the Eastern Bloc countries, and now everybody since the disinfrachisement(?) of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.

I checked the link for the dictionary search and I get a "Sorry, we're being updated, try again later" sort of message. Maybe they know we're onto them, maybe the site was shut down by the grubbymint and the message is a red herring. Maybe they don't want us to know what's being filtered and what isn't to throw us off guard, make us afraid to say anything, force us all underground, force us to...

Oh, hello, can I help you?
Yes, that's me. Why are you wearing trenchcoats when it's so nice out? And why dont' you take off your sunglasses indoors?
What's that microphone looking thingy sticking out of your ear?
No, sir, just surfing the web a bit...
Help!! I want my lawyer!! Let go of me!! Ow!! Guys, help!!aioejytha[en-0qa2

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Don LeHue

The pen is mightier than the sword...outside of arms reach. Modify radius accordingly for rifle.
 
This should not suprise anyone. We knew phones are monitored in automated fashion listening for certain trigger words, some of which HS mentioned. The US has been doing that since the 50's.

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RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
 
Why do you think the CIA hires folks with PhD's to come to work and read books, magazines and newspapers everyday. They're not supporting the Book of the Month Club............
 
SB:

Good advice! I do it daily :)

Echelon, oh yes have known about it for some time. Pick just about any search engine and do a search on it. Should get a lot of hits.

Remember the movie "Clear and present danger" when they were monitoring the cell phone call? In a round about way, that was part of Echelon.

If you really want to have some fun, PGP encrypt some email. Then insert a bunch of keywords by hand into the encrypted text at random locations before you email it :) Just don't do it to much or you might get a visit :) :)

Jon...

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Perfect Paranoia is Perfect awareness
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I've known about this for years, and have had an attitude similar to Gunslinger's.

Ever heard of something called "The Atlanta Hub"? It's the central Internet communication chokepoint in the US. How fast you can get to a given site has a lot to do with which side of the hub you're on versus which side the target site is.

I first heard about the sucker a couple of years ago, 'cuz I'm "in the biz" in a minor way.

So think, guys: WHY would there be one central Internet point?

Cool, no?

Jim March
http://www.ninehundred.com/~equalccw
 
DRJON, how do you do that PGP encryption thing. i've alway wondered how you encrypt e-mail and such. being a computer dummy, i don't know. i know, i'm showin' my ignorance!
:)

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fiat justitia
 
Here is something that's simple and a lot of fun, but I think strikes my point home about just how open-ended the net is.

http://www.metaspy.com

Pick the exposed one, leave it running in the background, and check it every 30 seconds. CRAAAZZY stuff. :D
 
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