[107500] in Cypherpunks
RE: Suggestion for Public Echelon counter-measures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brown, R Ken)
Fri Jan 15 06:40:42 1999
From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, "'Tim May'" <tcmay@got.net>
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 05:29:52 -0600
Reply-To: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
> Tim May[SMTP:tcmay@got.net] wrote:
>
> (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.)
In UK I guess because the combination of a new-ish government (who made the
right noises when in opposition) and the new importance of the Euro
parliament might have been thought to provide a possibilty of change. So
the folk who knew about this stuff & didn't like it have been trying to stir
up public opinion against Echelon et.c. Also the new Wassenaar agreement
shows pretty clearly what's going on.
Also, presumably for the same reasons, mainstream press have started talking
about it.
Of course if you were the sort of anarchist who believes that electoral
politics is a game not worth playing, or the sort of capitalist who believes
that the markets will decide in the end anyway so politics in general is not
really relevant to the issue, then you won't wouldn't want to be involved.
I agree that this stuff has been known about for a long while - although I
only remember the word "Echelon" from comparitively recently, the idea that
"they" were spying on us and the general outlines of how it was being done
were certainly current in, for example, New Statesman magazine in the 1970s.
And the British government sort of gave the game away when they banned trade
unions at GCHQ in the early 1980s - an event I remember well because I was
a very minor elected officer of the relevant union (although I worked for
the Inland Revenue, not GCHQ - how unsound can you get on this list?)
Ken Brown
