From: Ernest Hua <hua@chromatic.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 23:35:25 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: How can I get this book:  "Secret Power"
Message-ID: <199610300734.XAA29703@krypton.chromatic.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


 From EE Times

 October 21, 1996
 Issue: 924
 Section: Design -- Computers & Communications

 Required reading

 By Loring Wirbel

 What was I thinking? It's been more than six months since I wasted
 column space with a good intelligence community rant. It's not as
 though nothing much has been happening. The New York Times and other
 media outlets have laid out the Cellular Telephone Industry
 Association's significant complaints against the Digital Telephony
 Act, portions of which will allow the FBI and National Security Agency
 to determine location of roaming telephone or IP addresses in a
 network. And we here at EE Times have been filling you in on the NSA's
 questionable involvement in an Internet backbone program called
 Project Monet.

 Truth be told, it's hard to keep sending up warning flares about the
 vast expansion of intelligence agencies' reach in an election year as
 hopeless as this one. President Clinton, of course, called for
 "wiretaps, many more wiretaps" during his acceptance speech at the
 Democratic Convention, and tried to sneak in a quadrupling of the
 Digital Telephony Act tapping slush fund during the waning days of
 Congress's budget negotiations. Everyone from Wired to The Progressive
 is now suggesting that President Nixon actually was more liberal than
 Clinton along the civil-liberties axis.

 And Bob Dole? The Republican Party quashed the efforts by budget hawks
 like John Kasich to carefully analyze NSA and National Reconnaissance
 Office budgets. The Repub gospel now is to give the Defense Department
 everything it asks for, and then some.

 Cryptography buffs have been waiting for relief in the form of the
 third edition of James Bamford's classic The Puzzle Palace, on the
 workings of the NSA. The new edition is supposed to contain material
 from co-author Wayne Madsen detailing NSA presence at Internet
 switching centers, and cipherpunks have been disappointed that the
 book didn't meet its June release date. Rumor has it that squabbles
 between the two authors and the publisher may push the book out well
 into 1997.

 But fear not, if you're willing to go chasing afar for good fireside
 reading! Researcher Nicky Hager in New Zealand has just published an
 amazing tome, Secret Power, that might do more damage to the NSA than
 Bamford's work. Hager is a bold activist, working with producers of
 the New Zealand version of "20/20" to go inside the secret signals
 base at Waihopai and take unprecedented video footage of the inside of
 the radomes, which are alleged to spy on international civilian
 Intelsat traffic.

 Hager isn't just a crank, however. His work on New Zealand's
 Government Communications Security Bureau is incredibly
 well-researched. Respected defense analyst Jeff Richelson wrote the
 foreword and British journalist Duncan Campbell claims in the Observer
 that the book has created quite a stir inside NSA headquarters. The
 most damning information details a global computer network, run by NSA
 on behalf of all the U.K./U.S. Treaty allies, called the Echelon/
 Dictionary network. Echelon allows NSA to snare traffic intercepted by
 any ally into a unified database, without the ally having the
 slightest idea of what NSA is taking. And Hager is certain that
 civilian telex and Internet traffic is a prime target of the system.

 Don't look for a U.S. distributor for Secret Power-everyone here is
 afraid to touch it. His publisher doesn't even list a phone or
 e-mail. But if we all write to Craig Potton Publishers, Box 555,
 Nelson, New Zealand, perhaps we can free up enough copies of the book
 to scare the U.S.  signal-intelligence community into having a minimum
 modicum of respect for civil liberties. But then again, I doubt it.