Reporter Snuck into Wiretapping-Vendors' Conference

Thursday, June 1, 2006
Reporter sneaks into wiretapping-vendor's conference

Wired News sent Thomas Greene to the ISS World Conference, a no-press-allowed conference for companies that sell wiretapping equipment to law enforcement, ISPs, telcos, and repressive governments. These super-s33kr1t spies blabbed everything in the bar, let Greene slip into the conference spaces and eavesdrop, and slipped him a copy of the conference CD to copy to his laptop.
Greene recounts some fascinating discussions he held with attendees about the ethics of selling snooping technologies to the kinds of governments that imprison and torture dissidents. In one case, he had a remarkable conversation with an attendee who assured him that the Bush administration was less conscientious of human rights than foreign dictators:

(snip)

"You really need to educate yourself," he insisted. "Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

I tried several different phrases and keywords. :(

Great find!

I can only wait to see what the techno-libertarians there do to this one

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/06/01/156213.shtml

:popcorn:

All of my years of pessimism were proven to be justified.

One particular snip of hipocracy-

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability.

"The windup is that garden-variety crooks will remain those most susceptible to remote, electronic surveillance, while sophisticated, tech-savvy bad guys will continue operating below the radar. CALEA and its most potent technological offspring are inadequate to catch the people who most need catching. The project of "lawful interception" is huge, grotesquely expensive, controversial, infused with unnecessary secrecy and often useless against the most important suspects it purports to target."

But we knew that. Osama isn't going to call you on your princess phone and say yo dude this the O.B.L. here would you mind making arrangements to fly another airplane into a skyscraper . . . . in English, instead of Esperanto or Urdu or some dialect of Farsi only known to only two living people.

They're going after tax evaders, people screwing around on their spouses, political opponents, titty bar patrons, et al, etc. users of free boxing tickets, and anyone on their shitlist for any reason whatsoever.

Can't find terrists abroad, so start inventing some here to justify your budgets.

"I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA.""

Big Brother officially has us by the balls now. :scared:

If violating the law could lead to someone cutting off your head with a sword, you'd be pretty damned cautious about checking the legality of what you're doing. It's not necessarily evidence that they're nicer people, or have a better government. They just have more fear of the consequences.

Just sent them the link.

well, not yet anyway

:kick:

What if the reporter was a stringer with the Taliban Weekly?

if a reporter can sneak in ANYONE can.