Forwarding message by gtoal@an-teallach.com -------------------- From: gtoal@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal) Subject: Re: Bidzos life threatened? Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 17:29:30 +0000 Please post who else NSA -- and its like -- has threatened besides Bidzos and PRZ. Several years ago lots of British scientists died under mysterious circumstances. They were generally described as 'defence scientists' but what a significant number of them had in common was work in the area of surveillance. Several of them were connected to UK's system X. I posted a long piece at the time (now lost, sorry) hypothesising that what was going on was internecine warfare betweem the UK and USA governments departments responsible for fitting surveillance assistance to their telephone exchanges for contracts with foreign countries. (One UK govt official was found dead in his hotel room in an arab country while there at a trade fair in an unofficial capacity helping to promotye system X). At that time the UK govt had a clear lead in selling bugged exchanges because complete surveillance capability was designed in to system X - the USA doesn't have it everywhere yet - just in exchanges from co-operative suppliers. (Hence the 'wiretap' FBI bill, to get everyone else to play ball too). The ability to remotely monitor all the phone system of a foreign country would be *extremely* valuable to an agency like the CIA or GCHQ. Personally I don't doubt it's worth killing for, in their view. It was also my view when I suggested this hypothesis some years ago that the phone systems were being sold to these countries by telling the respective governments that *they* could use them for surveillance purposes. My suspicion was that there would be extra code buried in the switches that the customers did not know about which would enable remote callers to use the surveillance options too, without the host country or telco being aware of them. This latter capability being top secret and the risk of it being made known by disaffected employees perhaps being the reason why some of them were killed by our own security agencies. Hence why the multiple suspicious deaths were never properly investigated (or at least the investigations made public - MI5 couldn't expose the USA dirty tricks without exposing their own.) This is all highly speculative and I don't stand by it, I just offer it as a hypothesis.