Apr 09
30
ECHELON P2P and YOU
The Berne Convention (of September 9, 1886) was formed for the purpose of
protecting intellectual property.
It has been quoted by most American Politicians for the last
10 years as the reason why America
needs to get tough with the P2P community.
Its interesting, that the United
States only became a signatory to the
convention (see USA details for accession date) on November 16, 1988, a mere 90 days
after the first news story surfaced about Echelon. (18
August, 1988 – scroll down to the August 18 entry)
In other words prior to that date, the United
States did not recognise the validity of
Intellectual Property outside it’s borders.
With its penetrative Deep Packet Inspection policies,
implemented initially through Echelon, then via triplet encryption keys in windows, and now Ak….. and some hardware vendors, it
could be argued that the United States still doesn’t recognize the value of
Intellectual Property except where it pertains to the wealth and well being of
its natives, office holders or corporate
entities.
Many wonder why the European Parliament is concerned about
Intellectual Property protection. (ACTA)
An article
from ZDNet explains part of the nature of the problem.
Duncan Campbell's Scientific and Technical Options
Assessment (STOA) April 2000 report to the European Union entitled Interception
Capabilities 2000 states that those governments implicated in Echelon routinely
monitor commercial communications. This report also states that in the US
a process was developed “whereby NSA data could be used to support
commercial and economic interests.”
The United States
didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of young hackers finding extraordinary methods
of obfuscating, encrypting and misleading DPI into not being able to read the
commercial data therein.
Therefore it had no choice. It had to drag in the RIAA.
Our guess is that the conversation went something like this…..
Now look here RIAA….
Our economy is going to go belly up unless you can
convince the world to stop using P2P.
How can we compete against the whole world unless we can
read their confidential business plans.
We’ve fixed Microsoft windows – but we just cant get into
that open source Linux stuff.
You guys created this mess by suing Napster – now fix it.
And you cant tell them that its because we cant read
their emails to each other – you have to come up with another reason.
For countries to continue to kowtow to the United
States demands of criminalising intellectual
property sharing, they must demand that echelon data be freely shared with all signatories to the Berne convention.
And if the US really is more concerned with illegal file sharing than it is in snooping on the worlds population – then it will off course immediately comply.
In other words – the USA should have to first clean up in its own backyard before it can justify
its pontifically “superior than thou” attitude, to foreign Governments.
The first thing to remember is that friends don’t spy on
friends.
Wake up world – smell the coffee – The USA stance on
Intellectual Property protection is “Do as I say – not as I do”.
Does anyone else see a problem with this? Or am I all alone
on this little island.