Re: <nettime> Jamming Echelon

[Grant Bayley <gbayley@ausmac.net>]

Responses below...

(PS: I'm the guy that does the echelon.wiretapped.net site)

_______________________________________________________
Grant Bayley                         gbayley@ausmac.net
- IT Manager, Batey Kazoo (www.kazoo.com.au)
- Administrator, The AusMac Archive (www.ausmac.net)
- Webmaster/Organiser, 2600 Australia (www.2600.org.au)
_______________________________________________________

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Rop Gonggrijp wrote:

> The people you're protesting against are professionals. They've been
> systematically monitoring citizens like us since the early sixties. In
> their history, they've spied on much larger and much more powerful popular
> movements with more determination to have an impact on government
> interests. They have yet to show any sign of being impressed by anything
> less than a direct hit from a nuclear warhead on their Fort Meade
> facilities. I say that these people are not going to lose any sleep over
> these protests. 
> 

Did anybody think they really would?

I sure didn't.  My personal hope is that people stop taking their privacy
for granted unless they like having it intruded upon.  The fact that
people are hitting the site like crazy and clicking through to the PGP
mirror on the Wiretapped.net site is more than enough justification for my
having made the site. 

> Let's instead focus on getting the mass of people to understand that their
> only way out of this is to use encryption. It's much more difficult, less
> glamorous, and the satisfaction is less instant. But it needs to be done,
> and all this half-assed crap diverts from that mission. 
> 

I'd be more than happy to listen to suggestions on how you'd bring the
general populace of any particular country from a state of inherent, blind
trust of communication systems to a state where privacy isn't something
able to be easily breached. 

If people (or worse yet, the media) aren't capable of reading to the
second paragraph of the site that's receiving most of the hits on this
issue (the wiretapped.net one), might these hapless individuals be classed
as being unlikely to be able to be educated on any level on increasing
their privacy? 

> SEX GROUPSEX TRIO BESTIALITY FISTING PREGNANT CUNT DICK GAY
> ASS HORNY TEENAGE NAKED YOUNG WET PUSSY DILDO VIBRATOR 69
> 
> ^
> |
> +--- I hereby claim that including these words and then posting to
>      Usenet will waste infinitely more government time. Lots of
>      government officials have Internet to their desk PCs these days.
> 

You've no idea how true this is for Australian Government departments. 
Without making this into a new topic, an Australian porn site threatened
by the new Internet censorship legislation posted a listing of all the
.gov.au addresses that had hit it.  Most entertaining.. 

Grant
(aka Dogcow)

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