US spy device 'tested on NZ public'

[damnedifIknow]

A high-tech United States surveillance tool which sweeps up all communications without a warrant was sent to New Zealand for testing on the public, according to an espionage expert.

The tool was called ThinThread and it worked by automatically intercepting phone, email and internet information.

ThinThread was highly valued by those who created it because it could handle massive amounts of intercepted information. It then used snippets of data to automatically build a detailed picture of targets, their contacts and their habits for the spy organisation using it.

Those organisations were likely to include the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) after Washington, DC-based author Tim Shorrock revealed ThinThread was sent to New Zealand for testing in 2000-2001.

Mr Shorrock, who has written on intelligence issues for 35 years, said the revolutionary ThinThread surveillance tool was sent to New Zealand by the US National Security Agency. The GCSB is the US agency's intelligence partner - currently under pressure for potentially illegal wide-spread spying on the public."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10886031

[RobertEarl]

1. DU archives could be used

Never write here what you wouldn't say in the rest of the world. Because, indeed, you are writing to the world.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. "you are writing to the world."

Hello world!

[RobertEarl]

3. Well

It does help to write something interesting and different.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

5. Sitting in judgement?

[RobertEarl]

7. Judgement? Of what?

If you want your enemies to pay attention to you, you have to write something that gets their attention and interests them. Otherwise they never even hear you.

You do want your enemies to hear your voice, right? Not me, anymore. I'm done with the hassle. Leave me alone and get off my grass, ya damn kids, heh.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. So, I guess we're back to the garden gnome.

[RobertEarl]

10. Whatever n/t

[rhett o rick]

4. I think I recently read that the USofA was using ThinThread before 9/11 but was shut off because of

some political motivated replacement program was to replace it. What I read said that ThinThread, had it not been turned off, might have recognized the 9/11 threat. I dont remember where I read this. Could have been in "Beyond Outrage", by Robert Reich.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. Reading the PDB would have done that.

[Octafish]

8. NSA and New Zealand, Australia and UK were cut in on ECHELON.

Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network

by Michy Hager

Chapter Two

Hooked up to the spy network: The UKUSA system

EXCERPT...

The global system has a highly secret codename -- ECHELON. It is by far the most significant system of which the GCSB is a part, and many of the GCSB's daily operations are based around it. The intelligence agencies will be shocked to see it named and described for the first time in print. Each station in the ECHELON network has computers that automatically search through the millions of intercepted messages for ones containing pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. For the frequencies and channels selected at a station, every word of every message is automatically searched (they do not need your specific telephone number or Internet address on the list).

All the different computers in the network are known, within the UKUSA agencies, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can search for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has been designed to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Before this, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations. Mostly, finished reports rather than raw intercept were exchanged.

Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. For example, the Waihopai computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD and CSE in addition to its own. So each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, Internet messages and other electronic communications that its computers have been pre-programmed to select for all the allies and automatically sends this intelligence to them. This means that the New Zealand stations are used by the overseas agencies for their automatic collecting -- while New Zealand does not even know what is being intercepted from the New Zealand sites for the allies. In return, New Zealand gets tightly controlled access to a few parts of the system.

When analysts at the agency headquarters in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham and Canberra look through the mass of intercepted satellite communications produced by this system, it is only in the technical data recorded at the top of each intercept that they can see whether it was intercepted at Waihopai or at one of the other stations in the network. Likewise, GCSB staff talk of the other agencies' stations merely as the various "satellite links" into the integrated system. The GCSB computers, the stations, the headquarters operations and, indeed, the GCSB itself function almost entirely as components of this integrated system.

In addition to satellite communications, the ECHELON system covers a range of other interception activities, described later. All these operations involve collection of communications intelligence,< 1 > as opposed to other types of signals intelligence such as electronic intelligence, which is about the technical characteristics of other countries' radar and weapon systems.

CONTINUED...

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/sp_c2.htm

[woo me with science]

11. K&R

Had enough yet?