>Can someone summarize what this is saying to us?
robert,
i'm no tech-head, but looks to me like there's some assessing going on in the EU around communications interceptions (spying on internet traffic, etc) - the reports are interlaced with stuff like this: "UKUSA nations place no restrictions on intelligence gathering affecting either citizens or companies of any non-UKUSA nation, including member states of the European Union (except the UK)." which makes me think that some EU bureaucrats and/or parliamentarians are setting the groundwork for deploying large amounts of funds into enhancing the capabilities of EU spying techologies, as a counter to their reliance on (dominance by) the US/UK 'partnership', 'of course'....
they also provide a history of technologies used for spying on communications, which might be of interest.
and, of general interest to us here in internet land, see the passages i've copied below from one of the reports.
oh, and the aust/ns on the list might like to read up on the special place of aust in all this spooking. the bit about not spying on australians made me laugh, almost out loud, but i was scared someone might be listening...
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au
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"Intercepting the Internet 53. The dramatic growth in the size and significance of the Internet and of related forms of digital communications has been argued by some to pose a challenge for Comint agencies. This does not appear correct. During the 1980s, NSA and its UKUSA partners operated a larger international communications network than the then Internet but based on the same technology.(33) According to its British partner "all GCHQ systems are linked together on the largest LAN [Local Area Network] in Europe, which is connected to other sites around the world via one of the largest WANs [Wide Area Networks] in the world ... its main networking protocol is Internet Protocol (IP).(34) This global network, developed as project EMBROIDERY, includes PATHWAY, the NSA's main computer communications network. It provides fast, secure global communications for ECHELON and other systems. 54. Since the early 1990s, fast and sophisticated Comint systems have been developed to collect, filter and analyse the forms of fast digital communications used by the Internet. Because most of the world's Internet capacity lies within the United States or connects to the United States, many communications in "cyberspace" will pass through intermediate sites within the United States. Communications from Europe to and from Asia, Oceania, Africa or South America normally travel via the United States. 55. Routes taken by Internet "packets" depend on the origin and destination of the data, the systems through which they enter and leaves the Internet, and a myriad of other factors including time of day. Thus, routers within the western United States are at their most idle at the time when central European traffic is reaching peak usage. It is thus possible (and reasonable) for messages travelling a short distance in a busy European network to travel instead, for example, via Internet exchanges in California. It follows that a large proportion of international communications on the Internet will by the nature of the system pass through the United States and thus be readily accessible to NSA. 56.Standard Internet messages are composed of packets called "datagrams" . Datagrams include numbers representing both their origin and their destination, called "IP addresses". The addresses are unique to each computer connected to the Internet. They are inherently easy to identify as to country and site of origin and destination. Handling, sorting and routing millions of such packets each second is fundamental to the operation of major Internet centres. The same process facilitates extraction of traffic for Comint purposes. 57. Internet traffic can be accessed either from international communications links entering the United States, or when it reaches major Internet exchanges. Both methods have advantages. Access to communications systems is likely to be remain clandestine - whereas access to Internet exchanges might be more detectable but provides easier access to more data and simpler sorting methods. Although the quantities of data involved are immense, NSA is normally legally restricted to looking only at communications that start or finish in a foreign country. Unless special warrants are issued, all other data should normally be thrown away by machine before it can be examined or recorded. 58. Much other Internet traffic (whether foreign to the US or not) is of trivial intelligence interest or can be handled in other ways. For example, messages sent to "Usenet" discussion groups amounts to about 15 Gigabytes (GB) of data per day; the rough equivalent of 10,000 books. All this data is broadcast to anyone wanting (or willing) to have it. Like other Internet users, intelligence agencies have open source access to this data and store and analyse it. In the UK, the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency maintains a 1 Terabyte database containing the previous 90 days of Usenet messages.(35) A similar service, called "Deja News", is available to users of the World Wide Web (WWW). Messages for Usenet are readily distinguishable. It is pointless to collect them clandestinely. 59. Similar considerations affect the World Wide Web, most of which is openly accessible. Web sites are examined continuously by "search engines" which generate catalogues of their contents. "Alta Vista" and "Hotbot" are prominent public sites of this kind. NSA similarly employs computer "bots" (robots) to collect data of interest. For example, a New York web site known as JYA.COM (http://www.jya.com/crypto.htm) offers extensive public information on Sigint, Comint and cryptography. The site is frequently updated. Records of access to the site show that every morning it is visited by a "bot" from NSA's National Computer Security Centre, which looks for new files and makes copies of any that it finds.(36) 60. It follows that foreign Internet traffic of communications intelligence interest - consisting of e-mail, file transfers, "virtual private networks" operated over the internet, and some other messages - will form at best a few per cent of the traffic on most US Internet exchanges or backbone links. According to a former employee, NSA had by 1995 installed "sniffer" software to collect such traffic at nine major Internet exchange points (IXPs).(37) The first two such sites identified, FIX East and FIX West, are operated by US government agencies. They are closely linked to nearby commercial locations, MAE East and MAE West (see table). Three other sites listed were Network Access Points originally developed by the US National Science Foundation to provide the US Internet with its initial "backbone".
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>On Sat, 15 May 1999, rc-am wrote:
>
>> posted to aut-op-sy at lists.village.virginia.edu frm chris.
>> _________________
>>
>> http://www.iptvreports.mcmail.com/stoa_cover.htm
>> (or, if you e-mail me individually, I can e-mail you the text)
>>
>> Title: DEVELOPMENT OF SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY AND RISK OF ABUSE OF
>> ECONOMIC INFORMATION (An appraisal of technologies for political
>> control), Part 4/4: The state of the art in Communications Intelligence
>> (COMINT) of automated processing for intelligence purposes of intercepted
>> broadband multi-language leased or common carrier systems, and its
>> applicability to COMINT targeting and selection, including speech
>> recognition
>>
>> Publisher: European Parliament, Directorate General for Research,
>> Directorate A, The STOA Programme http://www.europarl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/
>>
>> Author: Duncan Campbell - IPTV Ltd - Edinburgh iptv at cwcom.net
>> http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan
>> Editor: Mr. Dick Holdsworth, Head of STOA Unit
>> Date: April 1999
>> PE Number: PE 168.184 / Part 4/4
>>
>> (The above is related to last year's "Appraisal of Technologies for
>> Political Control", also published by the European Parliament and also
>> [still] on the world wide web at:
>> http://www.telepolis.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/1393/anchor1.html