Welcome to Echelon 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Echelon 2.0

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191 pointsbluetooth52 comments

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.

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.

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.

I think the most likely answer is that your friend was not lying, but that the NSA is a massive agency with numerous different divisions and operations that do not all follow the same set of rules or have the same objectives.

Yeah the discard it right into there domestic database...

Binney has stated that he witnessed a shift in culture at the NSA since 9/11. We either have to take him at his word or not though.

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The federal constitution naturally only concerns itself with defining the structure and powers of the federal government. The "blanket mistrust of government" that you describe was indeed quite present, and is very much evident in the way the powers of the federal government are constrained and circumscribed by its charter.

Of course the federal constitution doesn't limit the power of already extant state governments; it's not the constitution of any individual state. Each state has its own constitution which charters, and constrains, the powers of the relevant state government, mostly in accordance with the very same "blanket mistrust of government".

There was no "unlimited power of state governments" at all; every state in the union had its own written constitution well before the federal constitution came into existence. Most of them are even more restrictive of power, and more vigorous in asserting protections of individual rights, than even the federal constitution is.

Indeed, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to act as a straight-jacket on the government.

The commerce clause, and numerous laws leading up to it, were the major opening. It made the lobbying boom possible by giving the government direct control over the economy (and therefore lobbyists acquired reason to lobby, and reason to buy politicians).

All powers not expressly granted to the government were to be outside their province. They switched that, such that any powers not expressly denied the government were to be assumed to be in their province.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant to define the boundary of power between the state and federal governments. All powers not expressly granted to the federal government remained with the states, who had nearly unlimited police powers constrained only by their own constitutions.

What has happened in the meantime is that the civil war and the reconstruction amendments redefined the power boundary between the state and federal governments, but the federal government has not usurped any powers that were originally outside the province of "government" (because there was scarcely such a thing!)

The federal constitution isn't merely there to define the boundaries between state and federal jurisdiction; it's there to define the structure and powers of the federal government itself.

You're trying to argue that the federal government merely usurped powers that the state governments already had, and this is scarcely true. No state ever had unlimited regulatory authority, and no state ever had anything approaching "nearly unlimited police powers"; state constitutions are typically more explicit in restraining the exercise of power than even the federal constitution.

"Don't anyone of them care or see what they are doing or what they are enabling?"

Perhaps they're afraid of prosecution (or worse). After all, they would know more than anyone exactly what the government is capable of...

> Echelon (probably) existed

Probably?

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

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

* 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).

> 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.

"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... (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?

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....

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.

America is democracy, you can bring about change with your votes. Unless of course you also have the same problem we have in Africa;democracies paralysed by idiots with votes

> democracies paralysed by idiots with votes

Or, as we call them, "democracies"

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...

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?

Read the Alito and Sotomayor concurrences (well, to be specific Sotomayor concurred in full, while Alito concurred only in judgement) in Antoine Jones v. United States (GPS surveilance of a car requires a warrant) and Douglass's dissent in California Business Association v. Shultz (a case that decided there was no 4th Amendment protection for bank records). The encouraging thing is that you can't read both of these and not think that maybe the court is slowly coming around to our side (pesky issues like standing notwithstanding, heh).

I actually don't think the third party doctrine has that much to do with call detail records. The issue is not only that they are held by a third party but that, at least when this was originally litigated, they weren't really that expressive, and there is already a major question as to whether historic cell site location data (also covered by the order btw) is protected, with already circuit splits forming on the issue.

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.

The problem is that Kerr's assessment of the impact of technology on searches and seizure is exactly backwards. Modern technology makes it far easier to intercept people's private correspondence, track their movements, and perform undetectable surveillance against them.

It's utterly absurd to suggest that technology gives us more opportunities for private conversations now than it did when audio and video couldn't be recorded and when written correspondence existed in the form of single-instance physical documents that could be sealed and examined for tampering.

So if the fourth amendment is to remain "technology-neutral", we need to be far more aggressive in its application, not less so. Encryption is, at best, a tool that helps people restore the former level of privacy that they would have expected in their correspondence.

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

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

What's fallacious about it?

Do you think it should be illegal to use unbreakable encryption to secure documents or conversations?

> 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?

I don't think its worth a strained interpretation of the 4th amendment to achieve this purpose. If it is desired, it would be better to make it a statutory or common law privilege (e.g. like the kind that applies to confidential communications between clients and their lawyers).

> Why should doing something via a 3rd party business make the information concerning what you do less "intimate"?

Because information that is voluntarily exposed to third parties is almost by definition not "intimate"?

Technologists tend to be fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the information at issue in privacy debates like this. AT&T's logs of your calls are not your information. They're AT&T's information. Romantic notions of internet technology aside, this is the physical nature of things: it's AT&T's data collected by AT&T's routers and wireless base stations, sitting on AT&T's servers. It's not your private information, at least not in the technical sense.

To use an analogy: you can object to the government listening in on a private dinner party at your house. You can't object to the government asking one of your guests what was said at the dinner party. You can't assert your privacy right over information that isn't yours.

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

They do. They just don't care to assert that right to protect the data they have on individuals.

The content and addresses of the letters you send cease to be 'your information' the moment they enter the mail system.

Does this mean we expect, Constitutionally, for them to be penetrated by government overseers?

If the Constitutional protection were about one's diary, something one expects never to transmit to another, that would be another matter, but the clause is implicitly understood to apply to information transmission and storage between people.

The text of the 4th amendment says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."

Which of those are things you transmit between people? Note the use of the word "paper" (connotative of something you keep in a desk, like a diary) versus the word "letter" (connotative of something you send to someone else).

The addresses of Postal mail have never been considered "your information" protected by the 4th amendment. The contents of Postal mail are considered protected, but given that the protection does not extend to UPS/FedEx/etc, it seems to be based on the unique status of the Postal service as an organ of the government.

> given that the protection does not extend to UPS/FedEx/etc

You've claimed this before, and still haven't identified the precedent which holds the government can force UPS/FedEx/etc. to turn over packages.

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?"

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

> 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

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

yes, it counts as censorship

I recall that the only ISP that refused Carnivore being installed in their systems was EarthLink - then there wasa story that EarthLink was founded by Scientology and they already had deep packet inspection and full traffic filtering/monitoring.

When the AT&T closet fiasco was revealed, it was a short-lived outrage.

The fact that the library of congress has signed a deal archiving all tweets is extremely odd.

The amount of ex-intelligence employees at facebook is just astounding.

The fact that .ir and .us cointelpro agents have built duqu and stux is amazing - the capabilities of those sytems is crazy.

We live in a cyber WWIII - and its largely invisible to 99% of the world.

Earthlink wasn't founded by Scientology. The founder of Earthlink - Sky Dayton - who did not have a controlling interest in the company by the point of the IPO in 1997, was/is a Scientologist. Earthlink was backed by a myriad of capital sources, from traditional VC to people like George Soros; Apple even put $200 million into them.

As I recall reading, there was an article naming a lot of the direct investors of EarthLink; all Scientologists from hollywood: Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg and others...

I don't know where that article is now - but I am sure it may be available online...

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-20/business/fi-11766_1_e...

http://www.skeptictank.org/moxon1.htm

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/

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.

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

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?

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