Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
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It is believed that there is already some sort of automatic voice recog-
nition. But according to vendors of biometric systems, they still have a
high error rate. In any event, intense research work is done in this field.
In my opinion, it is conceivable that small Webcams in telephone booths
for (still also unreliable) face recognition could identify a person more
or less reliably, combined with voice recognition, in the near future.
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Naturally, the NSA cannot read emails encrypted in PGP or GnuPG if
you've properly protected your private key, unless the NSA already has
quantum computers, which I don't believe. In a real-world case, it was
much easier to get hold of the content of PGP mail: a hardware keylogger
had been built into the keyboard of the person concerned; it revealed the
passphrase that protected the private key.
What's All This For?
Though this section almost goes beyond the scope and volume of this topic,
we should ask ourselves what the motives are behind these obviously highly
important activities.
The espionage targets that became known originally related to the Cold War,
as you might have expected. For example, the radio traffic of Soviet trawlers
and Soviet Antarctic stations were located and tapped out of New Zealand. All
information about the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific was tracked in
detail. This already touched strategic military information about allies. National
intelligence agencies also provide the business world with important informa-
tion from industrial espionage. For example, the New Zealand agency GCSB is
said to have spied on the Japanese negotiating meat prices in the early 1990s.
The financial gain from this information was said to have been so high it might
have paid for New Zealand's Tangimoana station. The STOA report mentions a
1.2-billion-dollar contract for the SIVAM surveillance system for the Brazilian
rainforest. In this case, the NSA wiretapped phone calls between Thomson-
CSF and Brazil in 1994, and the US corporation Raytheon was eventually
awarded the contract (since it knew its competitor's price offers). Incidentally,
Raytheon was the supplier of important equipment for Echelon ground stations.
The European Airbus Consortium lost a 6-billion-dollar contract for Saudi Ara-
bia to McDonnell Douglas since the NSA had stored all phone calls and faxes
between the negotiating parties via wiretapped telephone satellite.
As expected, there has also been abuse. For example, Margaret Thatcher had
two unpopular ministers tailed by the Canadian intelligence agency CSE (to
make sure the British GCHQ would officially remain clean in the event it was
