Still jamming the echelon... but what for, really?

 

The bidirectional way Internet works opens up way for novel ways of protest  institutions or organizations, but how effective are they? In this post I'd like to take a closer look at particular practice of netizens, to which we can refer to as "jamming the echelon". What kind of collective action is it? And what goals can it help to achieve?
Those interested in conspiracy theories will instantly recall late nineties, with stories circulating about grand network of wiretaps run by the powers of Anglosphere to collect every bit and word transferred by the telephones, faxes and modems. Code-named ECHELON by an investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in 1988, it fed imagination of these who feared excessive government control and wanted to act against it. What did they do? They called for collective irritation of the system, called "Jam Echelon Day".
What did it consist in? The original post to Hacktivism mailing list proclaimed that:

On October 21, 1999, netizens around the globe are implored to send out at least one email with at least 50 keyword words. You need not be privy to knowing exactly what words Echelon uses. It is safe to assume that words such as "revolution" and "manifesto" and "revolt" [etc.] will work. Just be sure to sound as subversive as possible.

Hacktivists, or hacker-activists, believed that ECHELON contains at its core a classification mechanism, which uses set of "trigger words" to differentiate between friends and enemies, or putting it into more contemporary vocabulary, a good citizen from a terrorist. The word list was a vulnerability this "hack" would abuse - if lots of internet users started to place trigger words in their communication, they would create enough signal noise to collectively jam the whole machine. The post was followed by a link to simple word generator, which would generate phrases ready to use in the emails:

George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence (CIA), told Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) about Mayotte (Indian Ocean) frenchelon station : a cryptoanarchist sent ISI (pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence)'s highly classified steganographic codes to Abu Nidal Organization (ANO a.k.a. Fatah Revolutionary Council) !

(example generated at http://www.bugbrother.com/echelon/spookwordsgenerator.html)

A protest strategy?

This collective action reminds of some protest strategies we know from offline world. Boycotts, sit-ins or more general occupation of buildings, spaces, symbolic sites. In each case there is a set of rules an individual can follow to participate. When (and only then, actually) big enough crowd amasses, the protest can reach its end. The same holds for jamming the Echelon, yet it seems that it is an operation of a different kind. Here, the internet services are not avoided (as would be with the boycott), nor telecom's buildings are blocked up by unwanted guests. The protesters do something different, something deeply connected to the medium they use and their role as prosumers: by participating in communicative pracitce (talking on the phone, sending emails, commenting on forums), they produce information consumed by avaricious entrails of Echelon. The trick or "hack" is to produce information in such a way, that it's algorithm will produce unexpected results.
There are two ways that a classification algorithm such as Echelon can fail: it can produce a false negative, or a false positive. The former means that an entity the algorithm seeks after managed to slip under the radar. The later means that algorithm yields many findings, which aren't supposed to be found in the first place. When faced with an predatory computer system such as Echelon, an obvious path is the false-negative one, namely to stay away and not be detected by it. However, in this case it wasn't probably an option: how to evade a system so vast and all-knowing? Inventors of Jam Echelon day chose the other path: persuade people to generate enough false positives, to make giant useless.

15 years later, still generating false positives...

Government surveillance and profiling is not the only threat to privacy. Surprisingly (or not) it's the corporate algorithms that are even more interested to collect every piece of "digital dandruff" we leave. The authors of AdNauseam browser add-on propose exactly same strategy to fight agains this problem.


AdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To from mushon on Vimeo.

AdNausem is taglined by phrase "Clicking ads so you don't have to", which summs up the functionality of the extension. When enabled, it will simulate clicks on each and every advertisement encountered by the user. This process is invisible to the user, as websites that ads link to are never opened, but not to servers that hold them or their operators. For them, the user will, to a disgusting degree, seem to love everything they advertise, clicking through it with fervor. In this case, similarly, the to-be customer classification algorithms are jammed with excess of false positives. The protest is based on very same principle: if you cannot hide from your perpetrator, blind his eyes by overproduction of information.

But how successful?

One needs to ask, how successful these strategies are? I wasn't able to reach data about people participating in Echelon Jamming or number of downloads of AdNauseam, but it is not a risky bet to say that they weren't that successful at all. For one, as with every collective action, it needs enough participants, and as with many offline initiatives, these too fail because almost no-one shows up. There is also a deeper problem: we already know that post-snowden and facebook colonized Internet is surveilled and monitored in much more complex and intrusive ways, immune to simple "hacks" performed by netizens. Perhaps we should point at some other end of this digital practice deemed to fail?
The direction I would propose is suggested by a thesis, that political problems can seldom be solved by technical means. Privacy abuse, by both government agencies or business, is a social problem that needs political debate and legal regulation. Seen in this perspective, "jamming the system" is another form of demonstration - building a community of discontent and showing its unity. In this way, it's the message that matters: one doesn't have to actually use AdNauseam while browsing; it suffices that he shares a link to its (funny) website. Equally, it doesn't matter if state surveillance systems got choked by a few paranoid cyberactivists: it matters that their strange signatures raised eyebrows of other, unaware users.