Create our own Echelon

This is most likely a stupid idea but I thought I would say it anyway.

If the government has Echelon, would it be possible for the citizens of the countries to make a similiar thing? I know it would probably cost a whole lot of money and take a long time to make but is it possible? If we are going to get spyed on then lets spy back on them. If the government does not like tuff #. We just use the same legal reason they use for Echelon.


Other people add ideas please.

Well, in my country at least, its illegal to listen in on other people's phone calls and read other people's emails, but that doesn't stop the government doing it! If anyone tried to do it here (unless it was secret) they would probably be arrested.

Government/it's agencies have special conditions given by constitution.

In fact, you can't apply the laws and constitution you apply to the citizens to the listening agencies.

Else I would be first for a spy-back

Then we have to get a law passed that allows us to spy on the government. I am sure if come up with a law that is good, we can just add the spy stuff at the end of the law. I am sure there is a way to spy on the government legaly.

Edited to comply with site terms.


[Edited on 2-3-2004 by ADVISOR]

Technically speaking you have the right to moniter all traffic on computers/networks you own. Going by this if someone were to develop a sort of senor system to place on various notes of different networks, you could begin to develop your own form of system like Echelon. A place to look for inspiration would be open source Intrusion Detecion Systems such as Snort or LIDS (both for linux, but Snort is also availbile for Windows) While it wouldnt be as powerful as having monotoring systems installed at the ISP level to check all the traffic passing through, it could be used to find trends in evil crackers, or government snooping efforts.

I'm not sure how far Echelon goes, but I would think they're just looking for key words in key places and or at key people. I don't like the idea of being spied on, but then I try not to give them reasons to spy on me.

I think Echelon just allows them to cover more ground with less man hours. I don't think it gives them the opportunity to look at everyone all the time.

Though I must admit there's a lot of room for abuse just like so called sobriety road blocks where it's used as a way to look for any violations of the law.

If your really worried about information you can encrypt it & send it out with a one time created account from a public computer system, snail mail it or hand deliver.

As far as spying on them, I think alternateheaven pretty much summed it up and unless you have the bucks to run one of the large ISP's it's not going to happen.

The only other alternative is become one of them if your really want to know what they are up to, but then you can't tell the rest us - so what's the point



[Edited on 2-3-2004 by outsider]