ZGram - 9/22/2001 - "Who's monitoring our e-mail?"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

September 22, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Yesterday I alerted my ZGram readers that I was experiencing extraordinary
interference in my computer work - of a nature I had never experienced
before.  For one, I could not get my ZGrams out.  Secondly, and much more
suspiciously, my usual avalanche of e-mail was reduced to a trickle.  Since
I am unsophisticated computer-wise, Copyright (c) 2001 - I had no
explanation, but my inner radar started beeping when I realized that other
people, and not just in the Revisionist field, were experiencing similar
problems.

Here is one typical letter - NOT from a Revisionist:

[START]

Like many of you ...I get between 20-50 messages a day. Beginning on
Tuesday, I was getting just one or two messages only each day. I thought
maybe I've been unsubscribed from the lists, but then a friend who called
said my posts to one list were indeed showing up. (...)

Then a friend sent me the following item today, after I wrote to her
yesterday about an academic conference panel we are organizing. She
indicated she'd sent me four messages between Tues. and Thursday, none of
which have shown up in my inbox yet. The conference is about reconciliation
and truth and justice committees in the Middle East, and why have they not
been attempted there yet.

The following item from AlterNet news should give all of us pause. All that
we are writing here is being monitored. This morning, my inbox was suddenly
full of over 70 new messages; most of them were dated Tues. and Wed. So
somehow and somewhere, someone seems to have been holding up my mail.

[END}

Here is this article from Alternet.org - apparently an anti-war website:

[START]

TECHSPLOITATION: How 9-11 Will Change Cyberspace

     Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

     September 17, 2001

     After last week's terrorist attacks, government and FBI officials
immediately began chipping away at our digital privacy in the name     of
national security. "Encryption" was blamed for our lack of     intelligence
about the attack, and Sen. Judd Gregg subsequently     called for a
prohibition on encryption products that don't provide     back doors for
government surveillance. As if terrorists are going     to use
government-compliant forms of encryption software anyway.

     Meanwhile, Wired News reports that anonymous techs at major ISPs
like AOL and Earthlink describe how the FBI came calling last week     with
Carnivore devices (also called DCS1000), surveillance hardware     that
sits on an ISP's backbone and monitors every data packet that     comes and
goes. And the ISPs let them install the devices without     protest.
Carnivore monitors network traffic, which means that even     if you use
PGP or some other encryption on your e-mail, the system     will still be
able to figure out where you're sending data. If, for     instance, you're
e-mailing your friends in the Middle East,     Carnivore will take note.
And this kind of information could be     enough to make you a target for
greater surveillance.

     A lot of this hysteria grows out of long-standing fears of
"cyberterrorism," which a series of 1990 Pentagon studies claimed     could
bring the country to a standstill. Major utilities like water,     power,
and gas are run by centralized computing facilities that     could be
hacked and controlled remotely. No one seems to have     noticed that this
problem could be solved by implementing     heterogeneous, decentralized
computing systems, which handle many     forms of information on different
kinds of computers. It might be     difficult, but no more so than putting
spook-ridden back doors into     all of your encrypted crap and regulating
the traffic at all major     ISPs.

     People are also freaking out because rumor has it that bad guys like
terrorist poster boy Osama bin Laden have been hiding their battle
plans using steganography. With steganography, cryptographers hide     data
in the pixels of a photograph or image. Allegedly, bin Laden     was using
steganography to hide his nefarious plans in innocuous     photos posted on
sports and porn Web sites. All of this is     technically possible.
Terrorists could be communicating covertly     online every day.

     But why are security experts lobbying for brute-force surveillance
methods that have little chance of working effectively anyway? It     will
be impossible to crack every code, to keep track of every     message
online, no matter how much surveillance we implement.

     As social critic Slovaj Zizek pointed out in a brilliant editorial
posted on a socialist listserv last week, the nation is caught in     that
surreal, amorphous moment between our recent trauma and its     symbolic
impact. Zizek compared this period to "the brief moment     after we are
deeply cut, and before the full extent of the pain     strikes us." In the
absence of control, in the throes of fear and     pain, we experience a
vacuum in meaning itself. Nothing makes sense.     As if we were drowning,
we reach for any meanings we can to buoy us,     to keep us afloat. And
inevitably, deprived of rationality and     meaning, we return to the safe
confines of infantile paranoia. Kill     them all! Trust no one! Monitor
their every move!

     But the creepy thing is that this breakdown in reason is swaddled in
the warm, communitarian rhetoric of protection and strength. Again     and
again we are exposed to images of destruction and loss; we are     sent
into a morass of meaninglessness; and then we are "rescued" by
authority figures who promise better security and swift retribution.

     The process works something like steganography. We're presented with
a picture of security and strength, but it hides very dark data     indeed.
To restore our freedom, we will be deprived of it. To     recover from
senseless murder, we will need to perpetrate more of     it. (...)

     Personally, I'm most disgusted by what can only be called the
aggressive sentimentalism in so many government and media responses     to
the terrorist attack. Commentators are using the sad stories of     victims
to whip the public up into a blood lust. We're being pushed     to assign
an ugly and violent meaning to our recent national trauma:     that cruelty
should beget cruelty; that an incredibly tragic loss of     control should
be met with an even greater loss of our personal     liberties. (...)

     [END]

=====

Thought for the Day:

"I find it laughable that the agency notorious for its inability to
find a bleeding elephant in a snowbank suddenly (within hours of the
attack) has the culprit pinpointed!"

(Sent to the Zundelsite)