The theme for this month is paranoia.
Although it’s been evident all around us for the past 14 months, it’s really shifted into high gear during the past six weeks culminating in claims that phone calls are being tapped, emails are being read, faxes are being scanned and neighborhood animals are being interrogated. Actually, no one is claiming that last one as far as I know but one of the cats from next door definitely gave me a funny look this week then ran off in the direction of the local police post.
Paranoia is too often thought of as a condition stemming from an unrealistic delusion. It might be more appropriate to just consider it a suspicion of people and their actions without any concrete evidence. Knowing a little bit about technology, however, changes the landscape of paranoia to something else because so much actually IS possible. Because of what technology offers, we actually should be quivering in the corner like paranoid gangs of pot-smoking monkeys, unable to eat a banana without fearing its been poisoned or worse yet, filled with tracking-enabled nanoprobes intent on increasing our permanent findability via global positioning satellites upon ingestion. The paranoia is starting to get thick now.
A few years back, I was walking with a friend near Government House in Suva and we happened to get talking about George Bush and general disaster his errant presidency has been to both the United States as well as the world. The venom started spewing too before my friend put up his hand and motioned towards the American embassy we were walking by. He said we should stop discussing the topic in the vicinity of that building. His notion struck me as a bit odd but since he effectively shut up until we were well clear of the embassy, I had little choice but to comply. Paranoia?
According to my friend (who's a proven network engineer himself), merely mentioning certain words near the embassy is enough to call attention to yourself via American technology. Now I enjoy Tom Clancy novels as much as the next person but this seemed pretty far fetched to me at the time. Then again, I don’t follow this kind of thing and I’m certainly not up-to-date on the latest military surveillance technology. So I looked into it a bit more closely.
For those that have heard of ECHELON, you’d know that it is the name given to an intelligence network with the sole purpose of gathering and interpreting data collected from communications systems around the entire world. It’s commonly thought to be operated by the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. This is no ham radio we’re talking about here. This is a world of futuristic network surveillance and if it’s to be believed, it’s a pretty wild world indeed.
Some European countries conducted their own study on the existence of ECHELON and based on the information collected, they determined that the system was capable of intercepting and inspecting content from telephone calls, FAXes, emails and other data traffic routed through satellites, public telephone networks and microwave links. Effectively, ECHELON can hear pretty much everything that’s going on.
If a person is on their mobile discussing a plan about how they’re going to assassinate the President of the United States, ECHELON will know. If a person is sending an email outlining how they’ll be co-ordinating a terrorist attack in Sydney, ECHELON will know. Even if a person is FAXing the secret, stolen recipe to those creme scones they make at Hot Bread Kitchen, ECHOLON could know. In other words, nothing is out of reach.
Does this really sound so far fetched? When I first read about ECHELON, it did. Since then, however, I’ve seen how easy it actually is to eavesdrop on email as it passes through unprotected networks like the free WiFi at coffee shops. For the record, I don’t sit around seeing what people are doing on those networks but after about an hour of Googling how to do it and then trying it for myself, I’m convinced of its simplicity. Of course, ECHELON is a bit more complicated a system than Jonathan with his laptop at a Esquire coffee shop in Suva. Or is it? It’s all data at the end of the day.
Most of us might want our governments to provide us some protection from certain elements out there intending to do us harm. Which elements, however, and where to draw that line becomes the issue and that’s clearly what is making people uncomfortable around us nowadays. When we’re talking on our mobile phones, do we even want people to have the capability of listening in? I suppose for the time being, all we can do is be aware that it can happen and be cautious with what we say on the phone and write in an email.
If that has the negative impact of turning us into those quivering monkeys sitting in the corner, so be it. As long as we’ve got enough of those bananas.
Mailife, April 2008
