D-kriptik Blog

I attended the panel discussion on “The Secret World of Global Eavesdropping” yesterday, as mentioned in a previous post. It was composed of Patrick Radden Keefe, moderator, and John Young, primary speaker. (Robert Windrem did not attend.)

My notes on the event follow the question/response format used during the discussion, and this post contains the subset of my notes that deals with technology and its usage in some form. The webcast for this event can be found here.

(My favorite quote from the discussion: “Mathematicians are an unruly group and hard to contain.” – John Young)

For those that don’t know, Cryptome.org publishes information on national security, intelligence, cryptography, etc. with a technical focus.

Is the human spy outdated? John Young says yes. Electromagnetic spectrum-based surveillance (supposedly at least 16 types used by National Security Agency (NSA) at least) and computer analysis (algorithms) are what is important to intelligence agencies. John thinks the complaints by NSA, etc. about keeping up with technologies such as the Internet are false -> these allow detailed analysis (supposedly about 20 types of whole scale data analysis), such as traffic analysis and data mining. Algorithms are what matter now – search, patterns of use, quantity, etc. Also, later discussed, John thinks that the importance of communications intelligence is another myth like the importance of human agents, as data intelligence is much more powerful than simply listening in to a conversation.

(John Young slip – use of “cult” for “culture” in “culture of secrecy.”)

Is data mining better against USA citizens than 3rd world terrorists due to our technology usage and paper trail? John Young says there are a variety of ways for gathering data – many different algorithms – and these can be effective for tracking terrorists. (An audience question follows up on this.)

Up until this point, Patrick had been asking the questions. Next, the audience chimed in. (In order to ask questions, you had to be videotaped. Great.)

How can the technological surveillance actually work in Afghanistan mountains? John Young points out that terrorists hiding in the mountains still have to communicate to be effective, and they can be tracked by their infrastructure needs/usage (e.g., getting food).

Is PGP useful? John Young says he does not know how good PGP really is, but he uses it. (The OpenPGP specification can be found here, and GnuPG is an implementation of OpenPGP that I often use.)

What about Echelon? Patrick discusses Echelon. It is a global spying network (originally established by the “UK-USA agreement” in the 1940’s). An EU commission, investigating whether Echelon was used by the USA government to give USA companies a competitive advantage, essentially confirmed the existence of Echelon (but was not able to find any conclusive evidence in regards to the point of its investigation). Later (after Patrick’s book on the topic), the NSA confirmed the existence of Echelon to some degree.

John Young went on to discuss what inspired him to start Cryptome. Lo and behold, it was the cypherpunks. He began following the cypherpunks in 1994 and started Cryptome soon after. He praised the talented technical work of the cypherpunks, but he did throw in a jab at their political beliefs. (I discovered the cypherpunks when I started college in 1995. The cypherpunks played a pivotal role in the “crypto wars” of the 1990’s and are often credited with bringing crypto to the masses in the USA.)

How does John Young protect his privacy? He uses PGP. He is skeptical of the Internet and worries about his site being used as a form of honey pot to lure people in for monitoring by the government. He says become knowledgeable. He says be open. (There are lots of tools oriented towards privacy out there – for example, TOR, privoxy, mixmaster remailers, and mixminion remailers.)

Overall, the panel discussion gave an overview of John Young’s thoughts on the topic at hand and some cursory information on things like Echelon. It was not the debate that I was envisioning, but I am glad I attended. Thanks to John Young and Patrick Radden Keefe for participating.

(As far as the out and about goes… We ended up at Hiro Ballroom. Turns out, The Sounds were playing, and it was good.)

Update:

I was asked why this write-up only focused on the technological content of the panel discussion. That was because this blog is technology focused, and most of the discussion was not relevant here. This was countered with the fact that the whole discussion was the result of technology. That is true to some degree, but that degree was not enough to make the content fit here. Of course, the full panel discussion is available online for those that are interested, and there is also the web site of the panelist, John Young – Cryptome.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.