[107488] in Cypherpunks
Re: Suggestion for Public Echelon counter-measures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim May)
Fri Jan 15 00:58:34 1999
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990114205645.00c5ecf0@deepwell.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 21:43:58 -0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Reply-To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
At 1:19 PM -0800 1/14/99, Ian Briggs wrote:
>The government could get most corporate secrets simply by looking them up
>in the patent application database.
>That would be much easier that actually piecing together a couple dozen
>conversations and reassembling them into
>a linear piece of useful information, assuming that any one conversation
>would flow linearly, that the person has 100% of
>the information, that at least a useable amount of information is
>communicated outside the company or in a manner that
>Echelon can intercept, assuming that the technology or information is in
>ANY way valuable to the US government's, assuming...
>
>Get what im saying?
No, because I think you are wrong.
From my years as a researcher at Intel, I can assure you that the vast
majority of important "corporate secrets" had nothing to do with the patent
process. Whether called "trade secrets" or "designs," these secrets were
never inputted into the U.S. or other nation's patent process.
Whether "Echelon" is implicated in vacuuming up corporate secrets I'll
leave to others to speculate about.
(By the way, the huge number of posts in recent months about "Echelon" is
surprising to me. Didn't we already know this was happening? Didn't Bamford
do a pretty fair job of spelling out the general features back in 1982? The
recent Echelon revelations just seem like a minor updating.)
--Tim May
Y2K -- Where were you when the lights went out?
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments.
