Spy System Spammed

Echelon, the global electronic spy system, has been jammed with emails and should be circumvented with encryption.

Militia Cadres Worker's Cooperatives Cocaine Manufacturing

These are the words Echelon is looking for. These and many more.

Echelon is aimed at monitoring all email, fax, or phone communication worldwide. A child of the cold war, Echelon now looks for (country-specific) keywords believed to indicate terrorism. Apparently, it is also used for economic purposes. Echelon has been set up by UKUSA, an alliance of the United State's National Security Agency (NSA), United Kingdom's Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ), Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) Australia's Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

Jam Echelon Day

If Echelon triggers on every email containing one of its keywords... what if we send manymany emails containing a more or less random text composed of such keywords? Hmm?

This is also what members of the hactivism mailing list thought. Thus, October 21st became Jam Echelon Day. Not purely coincidently, this day coincides with Stop Police Brutality Day.

What to do?

It is not (so) important whether the Jam Echelon Day succeeded in jamming the global surveillance system. It is, however, a crucial step in the right direction to have alerted the public and given Echelon and the UKUSA some media coverage. The BBC reported that an Australian official confirmed the existance of Echelon. Politicians both in countries taking part in the program and in third-party countries begin to take notice.

Apart from sending strange email full of keywords (which has primarily the purpose of drawing attention to Echelon) what can we do? We can secure our email communication by using strong encryption. One of the tools that makes it easy to encrypt every email is PGP.