Can we escape ECHELON?

Can we escape ECHELON?

By Dark Politricks

How funny is it that Edward Snowden has released information that shows the outcries of European nations to be false, hypocritical and superficial at the very least.

It has been known for over a decade that the main western nations including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and to a lesser extent Germany and other Euro nations were engaged in massive data collection through the ECHELON system.

I remember reading about it back when I had just left school. Trying all the online tests to "prove" that emails were being re-routed by keyword analysis.

I remember one such test involved sending two emails. The first with known flagged keywords such as bomb or AK47 and then another without. The first email was supposed to arrive in your other inbox after the second one due to it having been re-routed and checked by the ECHELON system. Checking timestamps on spoofed emails mentioning bombs and guns was a fun way to spend an afternoon at school.

Anyone who knows about ECHELON knows that the idea was that countries would spy on each other and then share the data to bypass laws preventing the countries snooping on their own citizens. 

However that all seems to have changed since 9.11. Now they just hoover up the data and our politicians claim it's for our own safety and that "sufficient oversight" exists to prevent mis-use of the technology.

Yes and I believe everything our Home or Foreign Secretary says....

Apparently in this free for all, data grabbing world, real sim cities are being built by the NSA/GCHQ nexus.

 It seems they are trying to replicate a whole world on their super computers so that they can monitor our behaviour and spot when someone acts outside their "natural boundaries". This could be shopping at a different store than usual, driving a new route to work or speaking to different people on or offline.

All our data is combined, merged and analysed. The lines between private and state data monitoring no longer exist.

Those Tesco points you have been earning are most likely filling up just one section of your own virtual profile at GCHQ - don't dare to go on a diet suddenly, they might think you are acting "strangely" and upgrade your monitoring status a few grades!

As attested to by cryptome.org in a recent article they are literally creating computer models where each human being is a "node" to be measured and monitored.

By combining all the various pieces of private, public and stolen data from the cables that take all the telecom communications under the Atlantic from the UK to the USA, the NSA & GCHQ can literally virtualise our lives and then run models to predict what would happen in certain scenarios.

What would be the normal behaviour of society if the water or electricity was cut off for 3 days?

Who would be likely to riot or take to the Internet and demand changes?

What groups of people are more likely to complain about their situation when taxes are increased than others?

What quantity of benefits and state handouts does it take to produce a dumbed down nation of uninquisitive fools?

What about a terrorist attack or police shooting?

Will the neighbourhood you live in be compliant and lock the doors as they did in Boston or would a single shooting of a known drug dealer in LONDON cause massive riots around the country?

It is getting to the stage that your actions can be accurately predicted and any variation from the norm is automatically noticed, flagged and probably checked for signs of malcontent.

Just as they know I have time to write a couple of articles for this blog a week, drive a certain way to work, shop at local stores and like the odd flutter on the horses they would know the same about you without having to do too much data analysis.

Give me enough data points and a big enough database and I could probably write a half decent programme to do the same.

I can only imagine the tools available to the GCHQ coders.

Plus it doesn't really help our cause when we are so keen to hand over our data to known intelligence agency linked companies such as Microsoft or Google. Got a Facebook page? Comments and quotes all logged and flagged. Mentioned anything about the government lately? Maybe you are already halfway towards getting your name onto a watch-list. Visited anyone in Pakistan lately? Your probably on at least a few already!

When Google analyses your email contents and search terms to show "appropriate" advertising just think what the NSA and GCHQ are analysing with their super computers. They don't want to show you adverts, that's for sure.

So whilst some of us have known about ECHELON for decades, to some the revelations coming from Snowden are a shock. However what we actually know is guaranteed to be only the tip of a humongous iceberg, the tip of which is scary enough, but we probably can't even comprehend what is below the water line!

I am just waiting for the first properly real virtual world computer games.

Ones which people will flock to, thinking they can escape the drudgery of work and the meaningless lives they have.

Terrorists will probably meet up in virtual worlds just to chat, thinking they will escape real world monitoring.

It is only a matter of time until a true "Second Life" is produced.

One in which people can touch, taste and pretend they are something when their real life is nothing.

It might sound like fun, even idealistic.

The problem is, that when that day comes, you can safely assume that the NSA/GCHQ nexus will already have virtual informants to monitor your virtual life.

Escape? I don't think we ever will.

View the original article Escape from ECHELON at darkpolitricks.com.

The UK finally stands up to the US and prevents the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the USA

Gary McKinnon not being sent to the USA for trial over alien hacking scandal

By Dark Politricks

We heard great news yesterday as the UK suddenly grew a pair of balls and stood up to America for once.

What was it that caused the government to grow a pair?

Well the Home Secretary Theresa May decided to keep Daily Mail readers and the majority of the UK public happy by not sending Gary McKinnon to the USA.

They had always promised pre-election to do this and re-balance the unfair extradition treaty between our two countries but no-one really believed them until yesterday.

This was an extradition order in which he was facing up to 60 years in prison for hacking insecure US military computer systems on his hunt for an alien cover up. He was a loner with a UFO fix that needed scratching and he did all of his hacking with easily obtainable tools and open to attack US military computers.

However compared to the Goldman Sachs banksters who have hooked their  super computers into the Wall Street stock exchange so that they can manipulate the DOW Jones, front run trades and actually steal billions from pension funds and personal investors he was incomparable.

If anyone needs locking up for 60 years it is these "hackers" who have been given a free run by both the Bush and Obama governments to steal from the public without risk of fine or punishment.

As the BBC News site said:

British computer hacker Gary McKinnon will not be extradited to the US, Home Secretary Theresa May has announced.

Mr McKinnon, 46, who admits accessing US government computers but claims he was looking for evidence of UFOs, has been fighting extradition since 2002.

The home secretary said there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was "seriously ill" and the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn.

Mrs May said the sole issue she had to consider was his human rights.

She said it was now for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, to decide whether he should face trial in the UK.

Mr McKinnon, who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, faced 60 years in jail if convicted in the US.

This is great new for Gary McKinnon who has always admitted the charge and wanted to face justice where the crime took place. Here in the UK  not in some US court where he would have surely ended up in an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison somewhere.

A person like Gary would not have lasted long in a hardcore US Federal prison where he would have faced beatings, rape and even death due to his gentle nature. All for his crime of "hunting for aliens" on insecure US military computers.

Therefore the Human Rights Act, which the Daily Mail and Tories attack so often, was used legitimately to protect a UK citizen who was vulnerable to suicide from a horrible fate in a US prison. I just hope these right wingers will now see how the Human Rights Act can benefit us all - not just the terrorists and scroungers that are constantly used as straw men to attack it for protecting their human rights.

We have just extradited a number of terrorist suspects to America including hook handed Abu Hamza who is charged with setting up a terrorist training base in America and attacks in Yemen.

These people are real terrorists not people suffering from autism like Gary McKinnon who just wanted to look for signs of an alien cover-up.

In reality Gary McKinnon did the US a favour as despite what the US claim, that he committed the most serious hacking attack ever faced by the USA. In reality all he did was reveal that multiple US computers were open to the easiest of hack attempts.

He wasn't some brilliant computer genius who hacked his way pass numerous hyper secure firewalls using viruses and trojans but instead he used a basic port scanning tool to find open computers within various US military installations that "forgot" to use secure administrator passwords.

If he anybody such as Gary could do this with easily downloadable tools from the web then China and Russia surely would have already got much further than him and probably already had.

These computers should have had been super secure but as Gary has said in his interviews they were totally vulnerable to even the most untrained hacker and he was able to access numerous computers in his hunt for signs of an alien cover up and claims to have succeeded in his task.

If you watch the interview below you will actually see that Gary McKinnon claims to have found proof of alien spaceships just as he was being caught.

He also claims that there is a whole department in NASA that "cleans" photos that contain any signs of alien spacecraft or other objects before sending them off to universities and other scientists for use in the public domain.

It is clear from other hacking cases that the country who has been hacked is willing to take on the expertise of the hacker in lieu of punishment and then use their skills for their own nefarious activities e.g Stuxnet or the new Flame virus - both viruses that use multiple zero day exploits to work their way round the middle east destabilising Iranian nuclear plants.

However because Gary McKinnon took advantage of such an easy method to gain access to these US computer systems there was little benefit in offering him such a choice as he wasn't a "super hacker". Instead they have been chasing him for a decade for the misdeed of revealing how vulnerable their computer systems were to attack and his life has been made a misery because of the threat of spending the rest of his days in a US prison.

In reality the US government should be thanking Gary for helping to shore up their security but instead they have chased and harassed a man with Aspergers syndrome for the best years of his life.

I only hope this is the end of the matter and Gary can get on with his life in peace without ending up in some sort of "accident" such as a double shot to the head suicide.

Here is Gary McKinnon's interview about what he saw and how he accessed the US computers with a basic port scanner tool. Within the interview Gary talks about:

• Why the American government want him so much and how the Labour government seemed to capitulated without a fight.
• How he was a clueless hacker who didn't cover his tracks whilst investigating US computer systems.
• How he gained access to high grade military and NASA computer system through unsecured administrator accounts without passwords.
• How the US government claims that he caused $5,000 of damage to every computer he accessed which coincidentally is the minimum amount required by US law to be charged with the crimes he has been.
• Why he believes that the US government has access to alien technology such as free energy which should be distributed to the people of the world.