[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
How can I get this book: "Secret Power"
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.