Re: US' NSA monitors all e-mail, telephone and FAXes in Europe

Christopher Whipple (byteboy@simons-rock.edu)
Sat, 31 Jan 1998 18:56:07 -0500 (EST)

Have you ever seen the NSA building? Or how much fiber they have running
into it? I've heard that an excessive amount - which I thought would be
used to spy on Americans - not until now did I ever think that perhaps the
economic situation in Europe would warrant such attention by the NSA.
Maybe it should be called the ISA...

-byteboy

On Sat, 31 Jan 1998, Dan Clemmensen wrote:

>
>
> Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> [SNIP]
>
> > [quoting someone]
> > A draft ("consultation version") of a report by the European Parliament's
> > Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (STOA) entitled
> > "AN APPRAISAL OF TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL" has been submitted to
> > the EuroParl's Civil Liberties and Interior Committee. Several IT-relevant
> > excerpts are now available at John Young's widely respected crypto-politics
> > website: <<http://www.jya.com/atpc.htm>
> >
> > "[...] Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are
> > routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency,
> > transferring all target information from the European mainland via the
> > strategic hub of London then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the
> > crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK."
> >
>
> This causes my bullshit alarm to ring loudly.
> 1)The bandwidth of "all e-mail, telephone and fax communications" in Europe
> would be quite high--higher than any feasible satellite channel.
> 2) Where are the signals intercepted by NSA? nearly all are land-line
> only, with no radio component, so physical taps would be necessary. This would
> certainly require colusion of the European PTTs, which are mostly run by
> European governments. Why would they permit NSA to do this?
> 3) With serious compression, a phone call can be squeezed to an average of
> perhaps 500bytes/sec. There are probably an average of at least one million
> simulatneous phone calls in europe at any time. This is 500 megabytes (4 gigabits)
> per second, requiring 43.2 terabytes of storage per day. the compression would
> require roughly one million very competent DSPs. automatic keyword recognition
> equipment would require at least an additional 2 miooion DSPs.
>
> I might believe that NSA attempts to intercept as much military microwave voice
> as they possibly can in Russia, and that they used to do a lot more of that in
> eastern Europe, but modern commercial landlines are a different story entirely.
>
>