From: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 02:35:38 +0800
To: Declan McCullagh <cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Request for illegal electronic surveillance examples and cases
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At 7:40 PM -0700 10/1/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>So I'm putting together a special report featuring examples of illegal
>wiretapping by governments -- to show why we shouldn't trust them with
>mandatory domestic key escrow. Also illegal electronic surveillance,
>generally speaking. Especially more recent ones. Maybe non-U.S. examples
>too.
>
>Any suggestions? I'm thinking things like: MLKjr, Mrs. Roosevelt, _Irvine_,
>_Socialist Workers Party_, Dewey-FBI alliance, mail opening, Emma Goldman,
>Brownell's blanket microphone surveillance, _Katz_, _Alderman_, CISPES.

As others have noted, Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace" is chock-full of
examples of government surveillance of cable and telephone traffic,
including cozy deals with ITT to have them turn over all cable traffic.
Ditto for other telecom carriers.

And the UK-USA agreement enables "cross-surveillance," where GCHQ can do
COMINT in the U.S., and NSA can do COMINT in the U.K and its colonies,
without technically violating charters and laws. (Someone described a room
at Fort Meade where a full-time staff of British and American agents
cross-fertilize their products--if the NSA wants some traffic surveilled,
the GCHQ can punch in a few commands, get the traffic, and then "share" it
with their American counterpart).

Bamford's updated edition is not out yet, so far as I know. Maybe it'll
have more recent examples, especially involving computers and networks.

As I'm not a professional telecom exec, or spook, most of my examples
either comes from books (Bamford, Kahn, Burnham, etc.), or from anecdotal
examples given. Anecdotes are hard to verify. But here are a few:

- a Minneapolis friend of mine told me that the huge Cargill operation, the
world's largest grain-trading company, and privately held, was using crypto
in messages to Europe and Asia. They were asked by the NSA to stop, or to
provide NSA with a key. Obviously this could only have happened if NSA or
GCHQ were intercepting and attempting to decode. (My Minneapolis friend
told me this in 1988. I don't have any details beyond this.)

- someone told me that transcontinental telephone lines were routed in the
60s and 70s deliberately over Indian reservations in the Rocky Mountain
states, and that the NSA used their "sovereign nation" status to skirt U.S.
laws about domestic surveillance. (True or not, I can't say. Maybe a
telecom buff here can see if any unusual jogs in the routing of the
LongLines can be seen, jogs that take them into Indian Reservations in
Utah, Colorado, etc., which is where I heard the intercept sites are
located.)

- more locally, I have been struck by the confluence of certain
capabilities right in my own area. The Defense Language School is in
Monterey, California. AT&T also operated their "simultaneous translation"
service there (or did, last time I heard)...this service allows a speaker
of Arabic, say, to speak to a speaker of Bantu, by means of experts in
these areas. And not far away is a major signal processing Cray complex,
ostensibly related to undersea sonar analysis, but usable in other ways.
The Naval Postgraduate School and a couple of foreign relations think tanks
are also in the area. Finally, or maybe not finally, the major West Coast
satellite earth station is located in Jamesburg, California, in an RF quiet
valley at the end of Carmel Valley. (Bamford also discusses this. Some of
the other major earth stations have already been identified as NSA
intercept points, such as the one in the valley in West Virginia.)

(Were I writing a novel, I would use this confluence to suggest that this
site is used for translating a lot of foreign language conversations
crossing this major West Coast earth station. The huge pool of foreign
language experts in the Monterey Bay area, what with DLS and ancillary
facilities, including the Naval Postgraduate School, and the presence of a
good cover for a major computer installation....)

- look also into the Red Squads in major American cities, where cops
ignored surveillance warrants to compile dossiers. (I believe the State of
Israel, often involved in such things as a cutout for the U.S., was
involved in some of these. In L.A., at least.)

- Frederick Forsythe has a fine new novel out, "Icon," which details
exhaustively (and probably correctly, given his other research) how
Russia's version of the NSA, now called FAPSI (standing for something in
Russian about radio), is supplementing its meader state funding by
freelancing for corporations and mafia groups which want ELINT and COMINT
on their rivals.

Anyway, finding _concrete_ evidence for surveillance, at least in recent
years, is not a lightweight project. It took Bamford years of research,
FOIAs, and so on.

Good luck.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."