[19920] in North American Network Operators' Group
It's 1998; do you know where your packets are?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry L James)
Wed Sep 30 23:14:18 1998
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 19:39:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barry L James <bjames@terraware.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
This isn't entirely operational in nature, but if true does
somewhat have an impact on what we are operating. You can find the
entire text at www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15295.html
but here are a few snippets to give you an idea of what it's about.
"In October, Europe's governing body will commission a full report into
the workings of Echelon, a global network of highly sensitive listening
posts operated in part by America's most clandestine intelligence
organization, the National Security Agency. "
"Echelon is reportedly able to intercept, record, and translate any
electronic communication -- telephone, data, cellular, fax, email, telex
-- sent anywhere in the world. "
"Echelon intercepts Internet traffic at the transport layer, such as the
TCP/IP layer, so the system doesn't care too much what it is or where it
came from," said Pike. "For analog traffic, such as telephone
conversations, it uses automatic voice-recognition technology to scan the
conversations."
Seems far fetched (but not *that* far), but worth a read.
Barry
---
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