US government sites ranging from the FBI to the Department of the Interior have gotten walloped by hackers during the past few weeks, and the Feds are wringing their hands in the media about how these nasty hackers are simply common criminals and not making a political statement at all, whatever they claim. So what does it mean when the Feds enlist hackers to attack foreign governments and their sovereign rulers?
In May, Newsweek published reports stating that government hackers had been authorized to "diddle" with Serb president Slobodan Milosevic's international bank accounts. Whether or not you regard that kind of news as mere FUD, it hardly inspires confidence in your own account's security or sanctity. And what happens if you become an enemy of the state? (Can you imagine how much fun Dick Nixon could have had with a roomful of hackers and his Enemies List?)
You government allows—no, encourages—
others to spy on you.
BOB ECKSTEIN
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Can you imagine a system of spy posts and satellites that captures almost every e-mail, fax, phone call, or other transmission, scans it for certain key words and concepts, and files it (and you, the sender or recipient) for future reference? And what if the US, UK, Canadian, and other governments were working together to spy on each other's citizens with such a device? It sounds like X-Files conspiracy fodder. Problem is, last month the Australian government admitted to The (Melbourne) Age that science fiction became science fact years ago.
The system is called Echelon, and it's run by a five-country consortium called UKUSA, which for the past 50 years has been in the business of signals intelligence ("sigint"). In the US, Echelon's operation falls in the bailiwick of the National Security Agency. But that's not who's spying on you: in a legal sleight-of-hand, the five countries work together to circumvent respective prohibitions on domestic espionage. A US agency can't legally gather information on Americans—but under international law, a British (or Australian or Kiwi) agency can gather it and hand it off.
According to some published reports, Echelon automatically intercepts millions of messages per hour and feeds them into a system called the Dictionary, which parses them against "collection requirements" specified by the various spy agencies involved; messages with attention-getting content are routed to the requesting agencies. According to the Australian government, some of the current collection filters seek out Japanese trade-ministry plans, information on Pakistani nuclear capabilities, and various data on North Korea's slide into the economic abyss. Economic information is in fact highly pertinent data for the signatory countries, and there are few restrictions on collecting it.
The computing firepower involved is prodigious, but it's not unattainable. (Echelon also includes taps on the Net and, since 1971, on underwater cables.) It has been documented that Echelon monitors the communications infrastructures used by diplomats, criminals, and industrialists; what's unknown is how far that net is cast and how much data is actually parsed. Worse, the heavy veil of secrecy under which Echelon has operated makes its workings opaque even to US government officials. The NSA likes it like that; when Congress recently requested more disclosure on Echelon-related information, the NSA declined to cooperate, citing (to the bafflement of Congress) attorney-client privilege.
The good news is that the US may be about to get its Echelon flakes frosted by the international community. Since the US and UK have been denying the existence of UKUSA for nearly half a century, one can only imagine how overjoyed they were to see the Australians on the record about it. Various European parliamentary bodies have commissioned reports to discover exactly what info Echelon tracks and what's done with it; a number of companies (including Boeing nemesis Airbus) have already charged the US with redirecting sensitive information to "preferred" American competitors. And the backlash is widening: the UK, formerly in virtual lockstep with US calls for privacy "key escrow," has suddenly stepped off the bus. (Key escrow allows private citizens to use data-protecting encryption, as long as the government is free to decrypt it—sort of like putting a lock on your door but being required to leave a key hanging next to the doorbell.)
Now, before you flip the page and forget about this cant, because all this wild-eyed talk is annoying and because the government isn't really going to bother People Like Us because we're not (choose one: criminals, addicts, foreigners, left-wing, right-wing, poor, rich, online shoppers, hackers, terrorists, of color), get this straight: You may not think you're a dangerous commodity, and I sure may not think you're a dangerous commodity, but that doesn't matter. You're being tracked, hacked, and attacked anyway—just in case—just like the rest of us.*
*According to a recent article in The Progressive Review, over 100 of the 137 predictors or indicators of a grim, totalitarian future in Orwell's 1984 have already come to pass. As for the other side, one of the most promising e-commerce sites has named itself soma.com—a Brave New World homage that went almost entirely unnoticed.
