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Editor's Note: further data about project ECHELON are available in a separate document
Article
on Law Enabling National Id Card
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on the US Govt. HAARP
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VisualPassive MicroWave Imaging
Date: Sat, 09 May 1998 13:48:56 -0500
From: Jeff
McSpadden
This webpage of mathematical error has an excellent simple description of how modern encryption works and why they are so htrd to break.
http://www.psn.net/~xocxoc/math/glmaterr.htm
The only glitch in the document is that it points out that PGP is available only to US and Canadian citizens, which fortunately is not true. Anyone can get the latest PGP version at
The International PGP Home Page http://www.pgpi.com/
The PGP home page won't let you get the American version of PGP 5 if you live outside the USA / Canada. You can get the full version from several sites which I can't remember at present. These should be listed somewhere in alt.security.pgp or you could just ask for them. Hypothetically if you have real trouble finding it then just hypothetically you could e-mail me and I could Hypothetically sort something out ;)
So does it sniff your IP address to determine you location? If so maybe a IP Spoofer would work.....
Nezach wrote:
>I was in the Air
> Force for a term of service working with
satellites, so if anyone
needs
> info on that I can help a bit (mainly worked with infrared
imaging
> sats).
Ok, I'll bite on this one. Is there anything that you can do to enhance a target on the ground for detection by satellites? Anything that would make it easier to track by satellite. Radioactive powder, an isotope in a pin, ir generator, a specially designed 1"x1" block that looks like a zeppelin when hit by radar, are some of my fictional ideas. Do you know of any more?
Any Recon satellite is a very bad sensor for tracking a person or even a group of people.
If you have a satellite that uses an infrared detector making something radar reflective isn't going to make it easier for that sat to pick the object up. Making something hot won't help a radar sat, etc. You get the Idea.
Bad Hollywood movies aside IR sats are only good at picking up very, very hot signatures. A rocket exhaust plume (rocket as in space launch vehicle or ballistic missile, not anti-tank rockets) or something re-entering the atmosphere. You can't track a person with IR from orbit like they did in Patriot Games. For that you have to have the IR sensor in the atmosphere.
Photo Imaging sats have the resolution to pick people out but you are still looking at the top of their head which isn't that great for Iding people. And their lower orbits mean that there will be large amounts of time where they can't cover the area you want to look at.
Radar Sats are used to track surface fleets. Trying to pick out people even with a millimetre band radar out of the background noise would be nigh impossible with current generation tech.
Of course this can all get hand waived if you assume that satellites are using borrowed grey technology. Just assume that all the abductee's have been implanted with a chip or a crystal that resonates at a certain frequency. A satellite broadcasts a broadband signal and all implants send a pulse back out to get received by the sat which then tells whomever is operating it where those people are.
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 22:13:06 -0500
From: Jeff
McSpadden
Shamelessly stolen from http://censored.sonoma.edu/ProjectCensored/top_stories.html
Exposing the Global Surveillance System
Source:
CAQ
Title: "Secret Power: Exposing the Global Surveillance
System"
Date: Winter 1996/1997
Author: Nicky Hager
For over 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), has been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region.
Neither the public nor the majority of New Zealand's top elected officials had knowledge of these activities, activities which have operated since 1948 under a secret, Cold War-era intelligence alliance between the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (the UKUSA agreement). But in the late 1980s, in a decision it probably regrets, the U.S. prompted New Zealand to join a new and highly secret global intelligence system. Author Hager's investigation into this system and his discovery of the ECHELON Dictionary has revealed one of the world's biggest, most closely held intelligence projects, one which allows spy agencies to monitor most of the telephone, e-mail, and telex communications carried over the world's telecommunication networks. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.
The ECHELON system, designed and co-ordinated by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the world's biggest, most closely held intelligence projects. Unlike many of the Cold War electronic spy systems, ECHELON is designed primarily to gather electronic transmissions from non-military targets: governments, organisations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Computers at each secret station in the ECHELON network automatically search millions of messages for pre-programmed keywords. For each message containing one of those keywords, the computer automatically notes time and place of origin and interception, and gives the message a four-digit code for future reference. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970Os, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Using the ECHELON system, an agency in one country may automatically pick up information gathered elsewhere in the system. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.
The exposure of ECHELON occurred after more than fifty people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields, concerned that the UKUSA activities had been secret too long and were going too far, agreed to be interviewed by Hager, a long-time researcher of spying and intelligence. Materials leaked to Hager included precise information on where the spying is conducted, how the system works, the system's capabilities and shortcomings, and other details such as code names.
The potential abuses of and few restraints around the use of ECHELON have motivated other intelligence workers to come forward. In one example, a group of "highly placed intelligence operatives" from the British Government Communications Headquarters came forward protesting what they regarded as "gross malpractice and negligence" within the establishments in which they operate, citing cases of GCHQ interception of charitable organisations such as Amnesty International and Christian Aid.
Nicky Hager states: "The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book [Secret Power] arrived in the bookshops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister's department trying to decide if they could prevent it from being distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political costs were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated."
Little Known Federal Law Paves The Way for National Identification Card
Source:
WITWIGO
Date: May-June 1997
Title: "National ID Card
is Now Federal Law and Georgia Wants to Help
Lead the Way"
Author: Cyndee Parker
Mainstream Coverage:
The New York Times, September 8, 1996, Section 6; Page 58, Column
1
Related article in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1996,
Page
A1
In September 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996. Buried at approximately page 650 was a section that creates a framework for establishing a national ID card for the American public. This legislation was slipped through without fanfare or publicity.
This law has various aspects: It establishes a "Machine Readable Document Pilot Program" requiring employers to swipe a prospective employee's driver's license through a special reader linked to the federal government's Social Security Administration. The federal government would have the discretion to approve or disapprove the applicant for employment. In this case, the driver's license becomes a "national ID card."
According to the author, "For the first time in American history, and reminiscent of Communist countries, our government would have the ability to grant approval before a private company enters into private employment contracts with private citizens. Because of the nature of the employment system alone, personal information would be accessible to local agencies and anyone who even claims to be an employer. The government would have comprehensive files on all American citizens' names, dates and places of birth, mothers' maiden names, Social Security numbers, gender, race, driving records, child support payments, divorce status, hair and eye color, height, weight, and anything else they may dream up in the future."
Another part of the law provides $5 million-per-year grants to any state that wants to participate in any one of three pilot ID programs. One of these programs is the "Criminal Alien Identification Program," which is to be used by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to record fingerprints of aliens previously arrested.
A third part of this law provides that federal agencies may only accept driver's licenses that conform to new requirements, meaning only licenses which contain digital fingerprints.
The author of the national ID law, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), stated in a Capitol Hill magazine that it was her intention to see Congress immediately implement a national ID system whereby every American would be required to carry a card with a "magnetic strip on it on which the bearer's unique voice, retina pattern, or fingerprint is digitally encoded." Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), among others, has strongly denounced the new law, calling it "an abomination, and wholly at odds with the American tradition of individual freedom."
Shortly before the bill was signed into law, Georgia passed its own legislation, creating something similar to the federal ID program. The Georgia law requires residents to give digital fingerprints before obtaining a driver's license or state ID. This law was approved by the state legislature in April 1996 and received virtually no public or media attention at that time. Since passage, many Georgia lawmakers have tried repealing the law. Eight repeal bills were drafted in the Georgia Assembly and one in the Senate. However, all of the bills were blocked in the Senate and never voted on.
Student Researcher: Bryan Way, Erika Nell, Matt Monpas
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.
BIG BROTHER GOES HIGH-TECH
Sources:
COVERT ACTION QUARTERLY
Date: Spring 1996
Title: "Big Brother Goes
High-Tech"
Author: David Banisar
INSIGHT
Date: 8/19/96
Title: "Access, Privacy and Power"
Authors: Michael
Rust and Susan Crabtree
Date: 9/9/96
Title: "New Surveillance Camera Cheers Police, Worries
ACLU"*
Author: Joyce Price
(*Reprint from Washington Times)
George Orwell's prediction concerning government surveillance in his science fiction novel 1984 is rapidly becoming reality in the "free world." Information on individuals in the developed world can now be obtained by governments and corporations using new surveillance, identification, and networking technologies. These new technologies are rapidly facilitating the mass and routine surveillance of large segments of the population--without the need for warrants and formal investigations.
In Britain, nearly all public areas are monitored by over 150,000 closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV). Equipped with a powerful zoom lens, each camera can read the wording on a cigarette packet at 100 yards. These cameras can track individuals wherever they go--even into buildings. In the U.S., Baltimore announced plans to put 200 cameras in the city center. The FBI has also developed miniaturised CCTV units it can put in a "lamp, clock, radio, duffel bag, purse, picture frame, utility pole, coin telephone, and other [objects]" and then control remotely to "pan, tilt, zoom, and focus."
Another type of surveillance camera currently in development boasts the equivalent of X-ray vision, and can penetrate clothing to "see" concealed weapons, plastic explosives or drugs. Known as the passive millimetre wave imager, it can also see through walls and detect activity. And while neither is expected to be available until 1997, the manufacturer has been flooded with calls from law enforcement agencies around the globe. The camera has also prompted suggestions that it is in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.
Additionally, new biometric technologies which use sophisticated computer-scanning to measure personal characteristics--including fingerprints, retinal patterns, and the geometry of the hand--are already being tested by U.S. immigration authorities at JFK, Newark, and Vancouver airports in place of passports.
Other emerging fields of surveillance include Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) which track the movements of all people using public or private transportation. Such systems are linked to ordinary bank accounts and can generate records that show a driver's name and address, and the exact time and place where tolls have been charged. Nine states in the U.S. already use similar systems to track over 250,000 vehicles every day, and 12 more states will soon put their own systems on-line.
While technologically dazzling, such advances threaten to render privacy vulnerable on a scale never seen before--without providing accountability for those who may misuse it.
The Pentagon's Mysterious HAARP Project
SOURCE:
EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL
Date: Fall 1994
Title: "Project
HAARP: The Military's Plan to Alter the Ionosphere"
Authors: Clare Zickuhr
and Gar Smith
The Pentagon's mysterious HAARP project, now under construction at an isolated Air Force facility near Gakona, Alaska, marks the first step toward creating the world's most powerful "ionospheric heater." The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP), a joint effort of the Air Force and the Navy, is the latest in a series of little-known Department of Defence (DOD) "active ionospheric experiments."
Internal HAARP documents state: "From a DOD point of view, the most exciting and challenging" part of the experiment is "its potential to control ionospheric processes" for military objectives. Scientists envision using the system's powerful 2.8-10 megahertz (MHz) beam to burn "holes" in the ionosphere and "create an artificial lens" in the sky that could focus large bursts of electromagnetic energy "to higher altitudes ... than is presently possible." The minimum area to be heated would be 31 miles in diameter.
The initial $26 million, 320 kw HAARP project will employ 360 72-foot-tall antennas spread over four acres to direct an intense beam of focused electromagnetic energy upwards to strike the ionosphere. The next stage of the project would expand HAARP's power to 1.7 gigawatts (1.7 billion watts), making it the most powerful such transmitter on Earth.
For a project whose backers hail it as a major scientific feat, HAARP has remained extremely low-profile - -- almost unknown to most Alaskans, and the rest of the country. HAARP surfaced publicly in Alaska in the spring of 1993, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began advising commercial pilots on how to avoid the large amount of intentional (and some unintentional) electromagnetic radiation that HAARP would generate. Despite protests of FAA engineers and Alaska bush pilots, the final
Environmental Impact Statement gave HAARP the green light.
While a November 1993 "HAARP Fact Sheet" released to the public by the Office of Naval Research stressed only the civilian and scientific aspects of the project, an earlier, 1990, Air Force-Navy document, acquired by Earth Island Review, listed only military experiments for the HAARP project.
Scientists, environmentalists, and native people are concerned that HAARP's electronic transmitters could harm people, endanger wildlife, and trigger unforeseen environmental impacts.
Inupiat tribal advisor Charles Etok Edwardsen, Jr., wrote President Clinton on behalf of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and the Kasigluk Elders Conference expressing their concern with the prospect of altering the earth's neutral atmospheric properties.
HAARP also may violate the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention (ratified by the U.S. in 1979), which bans "military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects."
HAARP project manager John Heckscher, a scientist at the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, has called concerns about the transmitter's impact unfounded. "It's not unreasonable to expect that something three times more powerful than anything that's previously been built might have unforeseen effects," Heckscher told Microwave News. "But that's why we do environmental impact statements."
SSU Censored Researcher:
Scott Oehlerking
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 23:45:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: The Man in Black
no discussion of the HAARP can be complete without mentioning the Philadelphia experiment and the work of Nikola Tesla.
I guess this is quite different from the other HAARP program (which IIRC stood for High Altitude Artillery Research Project - doubtless I will be corrected by Agents who are more aware of this operation) which was headed by the Canadian Gerald Bull.
The story goes that Dr. Bull later went on to work for the Iraqis on their "Supergun" project before being assassinated (allegedly) by Mossad - who were understandably peeved that Saddam was hiring people to produce a weapon capable of lobbing artillery shells from western Iraq to Tel Aviv!
As I understand it, the Iraqi Supergun was never completed (due to the interception of the British manufactured barrel parts which were ostensibly part of an oil pipeline... as if you needed rifling to shift oil along a tube! Of course that is quite a different story), but a smaller prototype was successfully tested.
Off the point I guess, but with military acronyms you can never be sure!
In Las Vegas, maybe 4 years ago, the city attempted to put up cameras on the freeways to monitor traffic. As Vegas was growing so quickly, the local govt. was in a rush to get all the info it could on traffic patterns so it could move its beltway plans forward. After a day or so, someone tipped a local ultra-conservative cable access show host/ATF target to the presence of the cameras. He urged "right-minded citizens" to remove the cameras. Within a week they were all shot out. At the time the city wasn't about to pay to replace them, so there was no beltway in the near future, at least by the time I left 2 years later.
The truth is, big brother is actually a bunch of balding bureaucrats in $200 suits trying to keep their cubicle-filled worlds from erupting into chaos. Kinda sad really.
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 10:47:42 EDT
From: Totoro25
In regards to your Vegas story. I live in Houston and they have put cameras up on every freeway. They added them during their other construction. All you have to to is look to the left or right while driving and you can see them up on top of their poles watching everyone. Big Brother is alive and doing well in our town.
in the UK we have speed cameras all over the place; interestingly, although the maximum speed limit in the country is 70mph on motorways, with most roads conforming to the national limit of 60mph, All speed cameras are set to go off only if the speed of a passing car exceeds 90mph. This is because the paperwork involved in prosecuting everyone who goes above the speed limit would be phenomenal. as it happens, you will have to wait on average six months to receive notice of the fact you've been caught out in particularly busy areas like Central London, even with these time-saving measures in operation. In addition, you always know when you've been caught, as you can see the flash. Given that they're ridiculously easy to damage, I have serious doubts about their relative use with regards to big brother...
Actually, this is not the case at all. For example, most cameras in 30mph zone go off at 40+mph. In general, they are set (roughly) for the limit plus 5mph plus 10% of the limit.
> the paperwork involved in prosecuting everyone would be phenomenal.
This is very much the case. When they set the first camera up, they set it for the limit and gave it a roll of film that would last (by their estimates) 2 weeks. It lasted 2 hours!
> As it happens, you will have to wait on average six months to receive notice
I wish this were the case (blush)... Basically, if you don't receive a notice within two weeks of being 'flashed' you're safe. There is a legal limit on how long they can hang on to a film.
> In addition, you always know when you've been caught, as you
can
> see the flash.
Unless you find one of the IR cameras! They are gradually replacing the strobe lights with IR. Apparently, on narrow roads, when they flash a car it can blind anyone coming the other way. There have been a number of (thankfully) non-fatal accidents caused by this effect.
> Given that they're ridiculously easy to damage, i
> have serious
doubts about their relative use with regards to big
> brother...
It's rare to find one that has been successfully damaged. The only things I have seen is someone spraying the lens with paint... which strikes me as being quite effective...
Taz said:
<<<It's rare to find one that has been successfully damaged. The only things I have seen is someone spraying the lens with paint... which strikes me as being quite effective...>>>
In Reno, NV, the PD had these small trailers they'd wheel out that informed you in foot high LCD how fast you were going. They didn't precipitate tickets, but people hated having the police tell them anything. Supposedly if you went past one fast enough it alerted the police, but I've personally never found that to be the case. Nevada is home to the "Sagebrush Rebellion" and anti-govt. types are the norm. The first few trailers were shot up pretty badly. Then the police added bullet-proof glass to the face. So locals started shooting at other parts, destroying the body and wheels of the trailers. Then policed put a squad car behind them to catch people shooting. That pretty much stopped the gun fire, but the PD didn't have the money to keep the police out there, so they went back to just leaving the trailers out there, just not as often.
I live in Galveston (the Isle of the Damned). I had heard that the cameras on the Houston Freeways were part of an experimental program to monitor traffic patterns.
Volunteers who wanted to be part of the program would get stickers with microchips in them to put on their cars. The cameras could pick out the micro-chips and see where cars were going at any given time where traffic might be stuck and which freeways needed to be bigger 'cause everyone was driving on them.
Of course, Texans (being the paranoid lurve gods we are) refused to volunteer for such an insane program and the cameras were useless. (go figure). anyway....your tax dollars at work.
Gentlemen, apparently the Government's cover story for the equipment mounted on the area roadways was almost completely successful. It can be no coincidence however, that 96% of the working population in the Galveston area passes within visual range of these devices (or similar ones) over the course of a typical week.
On the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle there were four speed cameras in operation. they sat there quite happily taking photos of everyone that sped by for the first five or four months they were up. then, one October evening, someone saw the flash, and decided to stop, wrap a chain around the base of the pole it was standing on, and then drove off with it. It was never seen again. About a week later another got wiped out in a head on collision with somebody's car, and then local youths decided to finish off the remaining two with molotov cocktails. This tends to happen a lot on certain housing estates as well, thus reducing considerably their effectiveness in combating the local joyriding problem. So although I bow to the other corrections to my hastily made statement, I don't see how they're especially difficult to damage...
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 14:30:56 +0000
From: Matthew Pook
How about just painting the lens with something? UV paint perhaps?
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 23:49:17 -0400
From: "Jon Capps"
> Is there any special gear, military or otherwise, that can
allow someone
> to tell where a person is on the other side of a wall?
I had a player try to
> use something infrared or the like in a game
some time ago. In retrospect,
> it sounds fishy.
A long while back I read an article or saw a show on TV (don't remember which, it's been a long time) in which some guy had invented a device that relied on radar, or maybe sonar (really loong time...) that had the ability to find people on the other side of a wall, or even buried within rubble, so long as the one being sought was still alive. Apparently, it could register the signals being bounced off a person's breathing chest. The unit was rather large at the time, but research was being done to bring it down to flashlight size. It would not do anything when aimed at a wall with nothing behind it, but when aimed at a person, the slight doppler shift caused by the signal being reflected off their expanding and contracting chest would cause a light to go on or something. It also had a readout that would give range. I don't know what kind of signal it used that would let it see through walls though...
That's all the info I can remember about it. Hope it helps..
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 09:05:42 -0400
From: Graeme
Price
Well, there are devices that can do exactly this sort of thing used by the fire brigade back home (and elsewhere) to find people under rubble (useful for earthquakes) and also to find people in smoke filled rooms. They do use infrared for this.
Unfortunately, such equipment is open to abuse by players. I had problems with the equivalent (thermographic cyberoptics) in Cyberpunk a couple of years back. One PC kept using thermographic (passive IR) to shoot through walls with a BFG. Eventually I had to make a Ref call and alter the item description so that it required careful calibration to have the desired "see through walls" effect and took time to get a usable image (I gather this is one of the problems with the IR gear used by firemen) meaning it was no use for shooting with except against stationary targets.
Note that anything using passive IR will only detect temperature gradients (hot person in cold room etc.) and may not be that accurate (couldn't tell between two people - except by their rough size). Detection of objects at ambient temperature (furniture etc.) will be very difficult or impossible, except by inference (ie. you can see someone sitting down, so it's reasonable to assume that there is a chair there). What it is useful for is telling where in a building someone is, or how many people there are in a room etc. Practical use (as a real-time sensor vs. moving targets) will be limited, so no using it to spot the on-rushing Cthonian! Apart from that it's all Ref. calls I'm afraid.
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 15:27:30 -0400 (EDT)
From:
The Man in Black
Seafood content of this tactic depends on the wall and the suspected target. I recommend using Grenades or heavy weapons to make a big hole if you want to know what's going down on the other side of a wall.
Yes, this question often came up in both my cyberpunk and DG games. The technology I used was PMWI - Passive MicroWave Imaging, based solely on a New Scientist article on the subject last year (from their surveillance-tech special issue).
This technology is based on a small array of microwave receivers being used to detect the millimetre-wave radiation given off by warm sacks of H2O, i.e. people. Each receiving element acts like 1 pixel in an CCD camera, building up an image. Because of the longer wavelength of the radiation and the 'pixel-size' of the receivers, these images are of low resolution. So you probably can't use it to recognise individuals, but it is adequate for surveillance & targeting.
<good enough for government work :>
This MW radiation penetrates clothing and walls well, and is only blocked by metals. Hence to a PMWI camera a building looks like a hazy area with black metal pipes and fittings, and luminous people floating unsupported. It also has a lot of potential in airport security, since a concealed gun appears as a distinctive black shadow against the glowing body.
I forget the name of the US company making them, who is trying to sell them to police. They were offering a video camera sized unit for mounting on the dash of police cruisers.
<the privacy implications are profound - remote search without a warrant>
I'll look up the article when I get home.
