Big brother is monitoring YOU (no not the tv show) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/03/text_punk/ A tech worker was arrested yesterday after a text message he sent was intercepted and traced back to his phone. In a scene reminiscent of Neo's first escape from Agent Smith, Special Branch officers slapped the cuffs on Mike Devine at his office in Bristol yesterday, and took him away for questioning. Devine, who plays in a Clash tribute band in his spare time, had sent a message containing lyrics from The Clash's Tommy Gun to his lead singer who had forgotten the words to the song. According to The Sun, the message read: "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - SO LET'S AGREE ABOUT THE PRICE AND MAKE IT ONE JET AIRLINER AND TEN PRISONERS" The arrest has prompted speculation about how the message was intercepted. Police maintain that Devine's message went astray. They say he actually sent it to a woman in Bristol by mistake and it was she who alerted police to the content. However, The Sun also quotes Chris Dobson, a terrorism expert, as saying that the interception clearly shows that GCHQ is monitoring all vocal and textual mobile phone traffic. Devine himself is slightly bemused by the incident. He said: "It hadn't even occurred to me that it might look a bit dodgy. It was quite nerve wracking for Special Branch to come looking for you at work. I was thinking, Oh God, what have I done?" The police questioned Devine about his phone, and asked if he had used it to send texts at the end of April. They showed him a print out of the text and asked him to confirm that he had sent it. "I said, 'That's the lyrics from Tommy Gun. I'm in a tribute band'," Devine said. Fortunately, once he explained that the message was not part of a terrorist plot, the police accepted his explanation and let him go, but not before suggesting to Devine that he be careful about where he sent such messages in future. ® Worrying :evil:
Re: Big brother is monitoring YOU (no not the tv show) So texts that every1 sends are getting monitered ?
hasnt this been happening for ages though with normal phone lines, just there obviously not going to tell people about it though... something to do with that echelon thing
Re: Re: Big brother is monitoring YOU (no not the tv show) think it just looks for cobinations of certian words together like in the one above: "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - SO LET'S AGREE ABOUT THE PRICE AND MAKE IT ONE JET AIRLINER AND TEN PRISONERS" Gun - Airliner - Prisoners
yip... echelon apparently is a spy system which monitors all forms of electronic communication... started by the US National Security Agency (NSA), it captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and electonic message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today. The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON “Dictionary”) that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective “listening stations” maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept. so it's nothing new....
spud...u bit of an expert on this or wot then...or have you jus copied that specialist ECHELON expert sounding comment from some website
i'd heard a while back that because monitoring these types of communications was illegal due to privacy laws etc, the US intelligence agencies would monitor UK comms and vice versa. they would then pass the info onto the other country's intel peeps. dunno how true this is but summink certainly seems to be goin on. hey, if it stops hundreds dyin at the hands of the terrorist wankers then i'm all for it.
Re: Big brother is monitoring YOU (no not the tv show) I swear that I would tell them to bollox if they said that to me.
