From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 94 17:05:34 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: (Fwd) Bidzos life threatened?
Message-ID: <199406302237.SAA06113@p03.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Forwarding message by gtoal@an-teallach.com
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From: gtoal@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal)
Subject: Re: Bidzos life threatened?
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 17:29:30 +0000

	Please post who else NSA -- and its like -- has threatened 
	besides Bidzos
	and PRZ.

Several years ago lots of British scientists died under 
mysterious  circumstances.  They were generally described as 
'defence scientists'  but what a significant number of them had 
in common was work in  the area of surveillance.  Several of 
them were connected to UK's  system X.  I posted a long piece 
at the time (now lost, sorry)  hypothesising that what was 
going on was internecine warfare betweem  the UK and USA 
governments departments responsible for fitting  surveillance 
assistance to their telephone exchanges for contracts  with 
foreign countries.  (One UK govt official was found dead in  
his hotel room in an arab country while there at a trade fair 
in  an unofficial capacity helping to promotye system X).  At 
that time  the UK govt had a clear lead in selling bugged 
exchanges because complete surveillance capability was designed 
in to system X -  the USA doesn't have it everywhere yet - just 
in exchanges from  co-operative suppliers. (Hence the 'wiretap' 
FBI bill, to get  everyone else to play ball too).  The ability 
to remotely monitor  all the phone system of a foreign country 
would be *extremely*  valuable to an agency like the CIA or 
GCHQ.  Personally I don't  doubt it's worth killing for, in 
their view.

It was also my view when I suggested this hypothesis some years 
 ago that the phone systems were being sold to these countries 
by  telling the respective governments that *they* could use 
them for  surveillance purposes.  My suspicion was that there 
would be extra  code buried in the switches that the customers 
did not know about  which would enable remote callers to use 
the surveillance options  too, without the host country or 
telco being aware of them. This  latter capability being top 
secret and the risk of it being made  known by disaffected 
employees perhaps being the reason why some  of them were 
killed by our own security agencies.  Hence why the  multiple 
suspicious deaths were never properly investigated (or at  
least the investigations made public - MI5 couldn't expose the 
USA  dirty tricks without exposing their own.)

This is all highly speculative and I don't stand by it, I just  
offer it as a hypothesis.