Echelon revelation...

[Lord Evermore]

I was just thinking last night: Everybody's heard about Echelon, the whole spy network run by the US government monitoring pretty much every telephone call and computer activity across the world, yadda yadda.

Naturally, that would take a lot of computer power.

What if......all these distributed computing projects - Seti@Home, RC5, OGR, etc., aren't REALLY doing those projects and those are just a front for the government getting us to use our computer time to do their dirty work?

I hate conspiracy theories.

 

[Fardringle]

Either that or they are being used to run the automated systems at Bill Gates' mansion..

 

[Modeps]

Echa-who? Etchasketch?

 

[toph99]

/me looks at the dnet cow suspiciously

 

[BGod]

I think someone has been watching The Lonegunman on Fox way to religiously!!!

 

[Jmman]

Actually, I have seen pictures of Echelon. They use Cray supercomputers....

 

[Bleep]

What a waste of time. Have you ever listened to a couple of teenagers on the phone? "Eh yeah" 2 minutes later "So! what are you doing" and on and on for 2 hours.
Bleep

 

[JohnnyKnoxville]

I wonder if their computers are powerful enough to hear the voices in my head.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

is that the whole, say bomb and president and your call gets logged??


crap, they are on to me, time to hide the booty.

 

[stonerdave]

i thought you meant the Echelon who cracked dreamcast games.

 

[Jmman]

Bigbooty....yep, that's it. Supposedly it listens for certain key words and if you trigger it, expect a visit from the feds.......

 

[ViRGE]

Humm, he found out our secret. Now we must kill him. Russ, set us up the exploding monitor.

 

[Pretender]

Somebody set up us the exploding monitor!

 

[Emulex]

whoa i thought you guys were talking about the release group.

 

[Pretender]

On a serious note, I think the source code for some clients are available (don't quote me on that)...if so, you could just look at it's code and see what it's really doing. Besides, for what Echelon does (process large amounts of information and narrow it down to smaller, more suspect pieces) is somewhat the opposite of what RC5 does (examine small keys and crack them) AFAIK...SETI and OGR may be a different story, but considering if anyone finds out, the results of the projects (which all have extended outside the US borders) would become completely invalid. With all the finances available to the government, it would be more efficient for them to just use supercomputers. Lots of them.