Networker: Smart and stupid
Smart and stupid
Hearings before the European Parliament in late February have focussed attention on Echelon, the communications spying network involving the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. A report, Interception Capabilities 2000 by Duncan Campbell, has revealed important details of this system.
The basis of Echelon is fairly simple: it is like George Orwell's 1984 with modern technology. The easiest part of the system has been for the US spy organisations to convince US corporations to lie to their customers and cheat them out of any security they thought they were getting.
Outside the US, things are more complex. For example, should a Swiss capitalist firm decide to corrupt the security of its products for the purpose of being in the US government's good books? Crypto AG did precisely that, according to the report, by allowing US and British agencies to read the coded diplomatic and military traffic from more than 130 governments.
More recently, US computer companies appear to have fallen over themselves to help US spies. The stalwart of the large computer (mainframe) industry, IBM, has a public record of close collaboration with the US National Security Agency.
One of the most fundamental and widely used security algorithms (mathematical procedures) today is the data encryption standard or DES. This works by taking the information to be secured, chopping it up into small pieces, and then mixing and shuffling it until the original message can not be easily found. Part of this shuffling includes using an "S-box".
After IBM designed DES, the NSA changed some of the numbers in the S-boxes. A US Senate Committee for Intelligence investigation in 1978 cleared the NSA of weakening DES, but its proceedings are secret.
Microsoft received its training in corporate culture from IBM during its early years. The Echelon report identifies Microsoft, Netscape and Lotus (owned by IBM) as three products whose security has been designed to allow US government access.
According to the report, "Lotus built an NSA 'help information' trap-door into its Notes system, as the Swedish government discovered to its embarrassment in 1997. By then, the system was in daily use for confidential mail by Swedish MPs, 15,000 tax agency staff and 400,000 to 500,000 citizens." While the system provided e-mail security, it then gave the secret away to the NSA.
Microsoft was embarrassed last year when its NSA collaboration became known.
With millions upon millions of pieces of information travelling around the world every second, the spies can watch, but they have trouble understanding.
The US 60 Minutes program reported one case on March 5. A woman was listed on the Echelon database "as a possible terrorist because she told a friend on the phone that her son had 'bombed' in a school play".
This is also a problem for commercial organisations. Using a technique called "data mining", many giant corporations now collect massive amounts of information on millions of people. But as one skeptic put it, with enough information you can come to any conclusion.
Echelon is another illustration of what capitalism is so good at: finding stupid uses for smart technology.
By Greg Harris