At Thursday 01:00 PM 2/24/00 , William Allen Simpson wrote:
The US government has had listening devices at the MAEs/NAPs for years.
Given that these are frequented places, I am gladly accepting anon-remailed material proving the existence of such listening equipment. JPEG's, GIFs, rack numbers and floor plans marking their locations, pictures of time-lapse security cameras showing the men in black installing the crap, pictures of their vehicles in the parking lot, license plate numbers, agent names. If there is really a number of such IMHO unlawful taps, it'll be hard to contain information about them, unless they've dug themselves close to the fiber and are bending & eavesdropping that fiber outside of the MAEs. Such taps are not trivial, and their physical dimensions make it hard to hide them to the trained fiber installer's eye. Again, this is a solicitation to provide material to me solely aimed at endangering national security, or whatever lie they want the public to believe today :) No more secrets.
They have also patented techniques for sorting and classifying conversations, which appear to be applicable to Internet traffic.
As for other governments, haven't you heard Moscowitz's Chrysler story?
And then there was the story of a german company producing devices to generate alternate sources of energy (was it windmills or solar cells?) that was very surprised to find that a US company had filed for a patent with the guts of all their technical stuff not too soon after they had faxed some essential parts of it from one place in Germany to another. The US patent was reportedly upheld, but I wonder if they ever dared to bring civil suit for theft of trade secrets. Needless to say this company is a very eager user of Swiss-made encryption products at this point. bye,Kai ps: reportedly, NDB.com got DDOS'd today. Overloading the NSA's illegal eavesdropping taps one at a time.