A murky twist in the fight between the ruling party and the military old guard

DURING an interview with a Turkish minister recently, your correspondent was asked to remove the battery from her mobile telephone. “Otherwise our conversation will be tapped,” the minister explained. His paranoia may be understandable; over the past week Turkey’s elite has been rocked by tales of politicians, judges and journalists being wiretapped. Even the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, complained that “they eavesdropped on me for six years”.

Much about this story remains murky. It is not clear, for instance, who might have been listening in on Mr Erdogan. Indeed, the scandal mainly involves allegations that the justice ministry, led by Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party, has been monitoring members of the elite suspected of involvement with coup-plotters in the so-called Ergenekon case.

The uproar started when Istanbul’s top prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, discovered his calls were being recorded. Some 55 other judges and prosecutors were being similarly tapped under orders from the justice ministry. “This is worse than Watergate,” fumed Deniz Baykal, the leader of the pro-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

The justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, says the surveillance was legal and he may have been right. But as Husnu Ondul, a human-rights activist, puts it, “it’s the laws that are screwed up and most of them were passed by the AK party.” Under these broad legal powers, he says, “it is possible for a person to be tapped separately and concurrently by the police, the national intelligence services and the gendarmerie.”

Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, who spearheaded a court case last year to ban AK, has seized on the affair to threaten to investigate whether the wiretaps were in breach of the constitution. If so, this could provide him with another excuse to try to shut down AK.

The row has little to do with justice. Rather, it is another twist in the long-running power struggle between Mr Erdogan and his mildly Islamist party, and an old guard led by the generals that has steadily lost ground. The army’s standing has been damaged by a slew of leaked documents detailing plans to foment chaos and topple the government. AK is hitting back with new laws pruning the army’s powers. The secret wiretaps may be just another weapon in this political fight.

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Gold Lock is proud to announce that Douglas Haskins, Channel Manager-North America, is scheduled to be interviewed by Federal News Radio AM1500 in Washington, DC, Monday 12/14/09 at 8:30am (eastern time).  Federal News Radio contacted Gold Lock to schedule the radio interview to discuss the Gold Lock Hacker Challenge: a $250,00o prize to anyone who can hack a 10 minute encrypted conversation.

Would be hackers are free to use any tools or technology at their disposal. This contest is open to anyone, anywhere, unless your participation is specifically prohibited by law.

Hackers have until 12:00 AM (GMT/UTC + 02:00 hours) on February 1st 2010 to provide us with the transcript. Read the contest rules for complete details and restrictions. Be sure to complete the entry form on that page before you start trying to grab the gold.

Single Channel Beeper Buster^TM System

If the bad guys in your jurisdiction use pagers to conduct their business, you need The Beeper Buster^TM. With The Beeper Buster^TM, you can sit in the privacy of your own office and monitor every message sent to any pager. You do not need the cooperation of the paging system operator, nor will the user of the pager know you are monitoring all his messages. The Beeper Buster^TM can capture all messages sent to a target pager, capture all messages containing a particular “search string” (such as the phone number of a suspect location, pay phone), or any combination of the above. Special techniques are used to determine the unique address (the “capcode”) of the pager, meaning you do not need access to the target pager to capture its messages. It’s very simple. And, the The Beeper Buster^TM is affordable. Unlike rival units, The Beeper Buster^TMactually operates faster than the paging system. This means no missed pages, for any format at any speed. Persons using other less capable pager intercept systems are well aware of the problems of missed pages. The high speed and perfect accuracy of The Beeper Buster^TM is due to our extensive use of custom designed high speed hardware. If you need to use captured messages as evidence in court, the specially designed features of The Beeper Buster^TMguarantee the integrity of the data.

Interceptor is a system used to log pager message traffic over Pocsag or Flexpaging networks directly to a PC or computer network. The software is available in single PC or networked client/server versions.

Interceptor consists a 4 channel receiver unit and a Windows based application which together are able to monitor up to 4 paging frequencies within up to 4 pre-selected frequency bands. Pocsag and Flex pagers may be monitored on separate channels.
(For single channel logging see LogPage)

Interceptor is equipped with powerful filtering and reporting tools that enable the user to automatically search through received pager messages using different criteria and output the filtered results to the screen, resend it to apager or other messaging device such as a cellphone or forward it via email.

Skype uses SSL which uses electronic certificates and 128 bit encryption (standard for credit card transactions online also) This level of encryption is NOT appropriate for even top secret level communications. How many times have credit card numbers been stolen online?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

128-bit 2^128 2 multiplied by 2 128 times over. = 339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a couple trillion…).

Gold Lock Enterprise uses 4 different encryption methods. One of which is 16,384 Bit Authentication. That is 2 multiplied by 2, 16,384 times over (not just 128 times). This method IS appropriate for top secret level communications. Enterprise uses 16,384 Bit Authentication Elliptic Curve 384 Bits (RSA 7680 Bits Equivalent) AES 256 Bits Diffie Hellman 4096 Bits

AES – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard Top Secret appropriate

RSA – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA Top Secret appropriate

Diffie Hellman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange Top Secret appropriate

In addition to this technical “stuff” the facts remain that Skype provides a key to governments for lawful interception (which means all the security in the world in now a mute point) and  Skypes 128 bit encryption has been broken, and hackers now easily intercept their calls.

http://sigillu.wordpress.com/category/technologies/skype/

As you can see Enterprise has significantly higher encryption capabilities than Skype. Skype encrypts just enough to satisfy their customers. Gold Lock takes pride in having the best and highest encryption software on the market. Gold Lock Enterprise is a military grade encryption software. No military uses Skype to relay orders or pass top secret information.

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But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown — a rival political party? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

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The recordings revealed by the media were taped by Business Track (BTR) — a 5-year-old company controlled by former Peruvian navy officials — which formally provided services to protect companies’ information and informally intervened private conversations related to “illegal businesses”. 

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, writing in El Pais, this practice seems to be “dictatorship’s sequels” , a leftover from Fujimori’s regime. The head of the Peru’s intelligence service, Vladimiro Montensinos, generalized the use of chuponeo to track and intimidate opponents, and to extort politicians, military officers, officials and others engaged in illegal activities or even bribed by Fugimori’s government. Apparently, Business Track was created by former officers who were used to do this job during Fugimori’s rule and that found profitable to offer their services to the private sector. As a result of these disclosures, the Peruvian Prosecution has imprisoned six members of Business Track for illegally intervening private phone conversations. 

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Lee Gomes, 02.12.09, 05:00 PM EST 
Forbes Magazine dated March 02, 2009

Once a message is properly scrambled, our sun would burn out before you could unscramble it.

Some perquisites of the American presidency–Air Force One, say–are available only to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many others, though, can be had by anyone, including a mobile phone that’s immune to snooping and spying.

President Obama is, like many of us, an e-mail addict, and press coverage of his new BlackBerry has tended to describe it as some sort of top-secret, supersecure device. In fact, owing to advances in both mathematics and computers, presidential-level security is now available on every desktop computer and can easily be added, for a price, to any mobile device as well.

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Colombia is investigating its secret police over allegations of illegal wiretapping.

Five unnamed officials from the DAS domestic intelligence agency have told a magazine that agents have unlawfully recorded judges, politicians and journalists.

The head of DAS Felipe Munoz says an investigation is being set up to determine whether rogue agents illegally intercepted information and passed it on to criminals.

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