Nexus - 0704 - New Times Magazine-pages

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deBriefings PROMIS came up again on the periphery after the Heaven's The standard consumer computer and its Internet connection Gate cult incident, when it became apparent that the last signifi- | may contain the means by which Echelon spies on the world. Last cant news from the area where the cult lived, in Rancho Santa Fe —‘ January, a "glitch" in the protocol for removing phone listings near San Diego, involved the murders of Ian Spiro and his fami- from the Yahoo! site gave private address listings when phone ly. Spiro was a British intelligence spook who had been helping numbers were punched in. Glitches found in the Netscape Danny Casolaro's main informant, Michael Riconosciuto—the browser in 1995—one that allowed Netscape to extract the history creator of the PROMIS back door. of a user's session, and another that subverted encryption/ Even the death of Diana, Princess of Wales has atentacle decryption operations—won $1,000 from a bug bounty hunter reaching back to PROMIS in the person of Adnan Khashoggi, — group for two young hackers in Australia and San Francisco, Dodi Fayed's uncle. Khashoggi's signature appeared on a docu- USA. Perhaps it is not surprising that two years later, presumably ment that had Casolaro excited on the day that he died. That very _long after it fixed these other bugs, Netscape awarded another night, he was due to meet with someone named "Ibrahim" who $1,000 plus a T-shirt to Danish software company Cabocomm would have shed more light on Khashoggi's role in the Iran- __ when it discovered another glitch. This one allowed a website Contra scandal. Khashoggi is a notorious arms merchant respon- _ operator to read anything stored on the hard drive of a computer sible for developing supra-legal contracts that sustain Middle —_ logged on to the site. Implications of a more advanced technology East defence and oil industry corruption. no doubt employed by Echelon are onerous. Those politics certainly played a role in whatever happened to Encryption security and the "Clipper chip"—a "front door" Diana and Dodi in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. They came into __ strategy for keeping tabs on the Internet—served as issues with play again with the tragic death of my the general public in preparation for the Octopus co-author, Jim Keith, in September coming Echelon debate. Philip Zimmerman 1999. Keith died of a blood clot after reluc- used a public domain algorithm to create the tantly going into a Reno, Nevada, hospital Pretty Good Privacy encryption software, for minor knee surgery. Rumours were rife and he publicised it freely, bringing that that the odd death had to do with Keith's protection to the masses. However, even reporting on the possibility that Diana was The standard cybernerds have trouble dealing with pregnant at the time of her death. In a col- PROMIS/Echelon possibilities that may not umn for the website Nitro News (now consumer computer even exist, as some have argued. defunct), Keith said he would name the . Daniel Brandt, producer of CIABase/ physician who told Diana she was pregnant. and its Internet NameBase, a renowned data engine on Word had it that Keith was killed before he . intelligence literature and personalities, could name that name. A thorough investi- connection argues: "...a 'back door' to get around pass- gation of Keith's death—a tremendous i word protection is easy for any pro- loss to the conspiracy information may contain the grammer... [but] you still need physi- means by which underground—has yet to be made. cal access to the computer, either Of paramount interest to the desk- . through a direct-connect terminal or a Echelon spies on the world. top conspiracy student, however, is remote terminal through the phone the ongoing development of lines, in order to utilise a back door. PROMIS-like back doors that have [It is difficult] to believe that foreign- been popping up to spy on average ers allow technicians from another personal-computer users. These are country to install new computer sys- the most likely suspects as somehow tems in the heart of their intelligence being linked to the Echelon system. establishments, and don't even think to Rumour had it that when the origi- secure physical access to the system nal versions of Windows 95 appeared, before they start entering their pre- they contained a back door that sur- cious data...claims that PROMIS...can reptitiously read the user's hard drive suck in every other database on Earth, and reported it back to someone—Bill Gates? Echelon? In the — such as those used by utility companies, and correlate everything trans-global corporate state, the distinction hardly needs to be —_automatically...needlessly discredit [whistleblowers] by their own made. This rumour came with the story that pressing some key _ high-tech gullibility." combination during the opening "clouds" sequence of Windows Bill Hamilton, the owner of Inslaw—the company which origi- 95 brought to the screen a photograph of a prized Palamino _ nally developed PROMIS—maintains that the software could run owned by Gates. The first draft of Casolaro's book on the — on "any UNIX machine, Hewlett Packard UNIX, RISC 6000, Octopus was entitled "Behold, A Pale Horse". The "back door" AT&T, AS400, under its own operating system, and on main- feature ostensibly was removed from later versions of Windows, frames under MVS"; that it was comprised of 88 program mod- and today the software has a voluntary registration that does the —_ ules; and that the source code, replete with the Inslaw name same thing, only with the consent of the spied-upon. Presently, throughout the code commentary, was kept by any government there is no indication of how it works with the pre-installed soft- which had it. When asked how a foreign country could modify ware often bought by many non-computer-savvy people. the source code without discovering the back door, Hamilton was consumer computer and its Internet connection Echelon spies on the world. JUNE — JULY 2000 NEXUS - 13 The standard may contain the means by which