Here is a new site sponsered by the ACLU about Echelon.  What you ask is
Echelon?  Well according to what can be found out it is a global
network to intercept e-mail, phone calls, faxes, etc world wide to be
put to use by the intelligence agencies of countries such as the U.S.,
the U.K. and perhaps other countries.  Sponsered in part by the NSA
big borther is listening... see
http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/index.html

19 responses total.

it's getting worse. these idiotic governmental criminals can't be stopped,
can they? let all the security experts and programming (or coding) geniuses
in the establishment should abandon their positions and join some good public
service work like open source.

a correction: "let all the security experts and programming (or coding)
geniuses in the establishment abandon...<snip>

Well the NSA employs more mathematcians than the whole university system
here in the US.  I think the best we can do at this point is out these
spooks the best we can.  Speak the truth to power ans eventually it
will shrink from the light.

i think we can retain a considerable extent of our privacy by sending
encrypted e-mail, using services like hushmail.com or PGP and browsing the
web anonymously with services such as anonymizer.com. but they say even
anonymizing services are not that effective...

Hey eronius join the PGP item in this conf, there is some controversy now
whether no such agency has broken PGP or not now that the export restrictions
are being lifted.

sure.  but i dont see any PGP-related item in this conf. the sad thing is,
PGP is not available for non-US users. and i dont know how many countries
approve the usage of PGP's international version. right now there are no
cyberlaws in india. they'll be here soon. where is the PGP item?

Try item 9, item 13, or item 62.  All of those have "PGP" in the title.
Or try    find "pgp"   to turn up other mentions in the conference.

I was thiking of item which is a pretty comprehensive intro to PGP. r 13
at the next Ok: prompt.
hit b at the next Ok: prompt to see a listing of items.

found it! thanks! i'm amazed at finding so many experts talking about PGP.
this is an awesome place indeed!

PGP? what is this PGP?

Read item # 13 for an extensive definition of PGP or pretty good privacy
an encryption program for e-mail among other things.

i think the amusing thing about all this is that it's been going on for years,
and the US and UK governmants flatly denied that they'd even think of doing
anything like this, yet when questioned, the Aust. government just said "shit
yeah, we've been doing this for years, what do you think we are, stupid?"

Screw Echelon! One of the most important points of our lives is privacy! We,
as humans demand privacy, and the government then sets up a listening system!!
What the hell is wrong with them!

Who knows.

This is sad indeed, friends.  To quote Deep Blue "One of the most important
points of our lives is privacy! We, as humans demand privacy..."  I disagree.
Computer privacy and passwords are... how should I say this?  They are wrong.
They are an invention of evil beureaucracy.  They are an impediment to the
most fundamental ideals of the Hacker Ethic: All information should be free.
I'm not saying your taxes or credit card information should be unprotected,
just not everything.  The sad thing is, even though passwords and encryption
are wrong, they have become a necessity.  Goverments and Selfish people have
made it impossible to operate without them.  It depresses me, every time I
type in a password.  Not only to Grex, but my E-mail, my MUDs, everything!
I long for the days of the TX-0, PDP-1, PDP-6, and all of those Beautiful
machines that got underused because of the "Hulking Giants", the
batch-processed demons of International Beureaucracy Machines (IBM), and the
Wizards of MIT that used the TX-0  and the PDPs and gave us the knowledge to
become the Fourth Generation (of Hackers).  But I know those days are gone,
and will never be back.  Maybe it is foolish to cling on to this BBS, one of
the last reminders of the Golden Age of computers.  But cling on I will, I
must.  Just remember, it is us with whom they have entrusted the future to,
so make all desicions wisely.  Maybe I sound crazy, but...

they will put you in a jail, if you 'steal' someones passwords, credit card
things, but are you a thief if you just get that information, and do nothing
bad with it? unfortunately, most people will really steal something if they
can. that is why we need passwords and computer privacy. to survive.. this
sucks, but its true... look at goverment. can you trust them? they fight with
each other, and try to make money... i know only few people i can trust. i
would give them my house keys, money and anything else to keep.
if you can trust everybody, you dont need passwords. SMTP defined in RFC 821
would be good, if people are good. in this world, its vulnerable (give someone
your credit card an have your financial life fucked...)
i will stay here for how long its possible... who knows, maybe modems were
better than internet in some ways?

I know, that's the problem.  Information should be free and free-flowing, but
people impede that.  For example, you give someone two 100GB hard drives on
a server somewhere, right?  You tell them that they can do whatever they want
with those hard drives, with one catch.  Hard drive #1 has no password, so
it can be accessed by anyone who feels like it.  Hard drive #2 has a password,
so the data on it is relatively safe.  Now, which hard drive do you think that
person is going to use more?  The truth is, that person is likely to put even
non-private material in hard drive #2, like Mp3's, Playstation game codes,
and greeting card patterns that they downloaded from the Martha Stewart
website.  People, by nature are inconsiderate and greedy, and because of that,
even our beautiful machines, our computers, have been corrupted.

in mp3's case, there is another problem: problem with law (its stupid, but
you can be charged for having that on your drive if you dont have eg the
orginal CDs), so you dont want it to be public visible. but you want to
download it... 
it would be a lot easier to find anything, if man who is searching for
something (lets say it a rare file), will make it available for anyone from
the net. I think i will do it if i can, but now its impossible (if you keep
some data on the floppies, it can not be free-flowing through the net :)),
apache needs some space and memory, and a public ip
so what to do? can we do anything?

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