Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter

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Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter

Postby MinM » Wed Jul 24, 2013 12:59 am

Image @ABC: Telecom CEO Found Dead in Apparent Suicide http://abcn.ws/11cvZyl

Telecom CEO Found Dead in Apparent Suicide
Image GENEVA July 23, 2013 (AP)

Switzerland's leading telecommunications company says its chief executive has been found dead in an apparent suicide.

Swisscom says the body of 49-year-old Carsten Schloter was found Tuesday morning at the CEO's home in the Swiss canton (state) of Fribourg.

A company statement Tuesday says "the police are assuming it was a case of suicide; an investigation into the exact circumstances is underway."

Swisscom, a publicly traded company in which the Swiss government has the majority stake, says no more details of his death were being disclosed in consideration for his family.

Schloter joined Swisscom in 2000 as head of Swisscom Mobile and was appointed CEO in 2006.

The company says deputy CEO Urs Schaeppi would temporarily lead it.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStor ... 9-19744994

American Dream » Wed Jun 04, 2008 10:09 pm wrote:http://www.indymedia.ie/article/70223

Orwellian Ireland

Saturday June 11, 2005 15:56author by Brian Nugent

"I believe that spies, the security services, in the world generally, are becoming increasingly powerful and that our civil liberties are being eroded." Justin Keating...

...Of course one reason to target the business community is that it could operate as a cut out mechanism in their attempts to influence Irish politics. What I mean is that they can use a business person to bribe a politician say and the hand of MI5 behind the bribe will not be readily visible. MI5 have clearly a big Irish presence and even on the appointment of Manningham Buller as the Director they recruited another 200 agents to work on Irish affairs.(11)

Then there are a number of references to the big American agencies in Ireland. The CIA is possibly the most famous of those groups and the one with the most power internationally. In the New York Times in 1977 it was reported by John Crewdson that they controlled:

"at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one C.I.A. man said, and those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.

In fact, the CIA’s influence in the international media was probably much greater than its influence in the U.S. This was because the CIA was prohibited by law from certain actions in the U.S., whereas it was relatively unrestrained outside the country." (12)

Victor Marchetti the CIA dissident showed their influence on the Italian Secret Services :

"They are trained, for example, to confront disorders and student demonstrations, to prepare dossiers, to make the best possible use of bank data and tax returns of individual citizens, etc. In other words, to watch over the population of their country with the means offered by technology. This is what I call techno-fascism."
(13)

It is rumoured that concern to cover up garda CIA links is behind the delay in investigating the issue of garda collusion in the death of the RUC officers Breen and Buchanan, from Phoenix again:

"It is from here [the Dundalk garda question] that the story of CIA-Garda cooperation is likely to emerge if the man against whom allegations in relation to Breen and Buchanan is asked under oath, and in public, to recall his life and times in the Special Branch."(14)

It is presumably this CIA-Garda Special Branch connection that the magazine is referring to when it hints at garda involvement in the Equatorial Guinea coup affair.(15) Its also rumoured that many intelligence forms have gone missing that detail this corrupt relationship between the CIA and garda Special Branch. The affair includes over 100 Irish passports given to the CIA.(16) ...

There are also two British intelligence agencies which operate exclusively in Ireland North and South. One of them is called the 14th Intelligence Company, closely associated with the SAS it has about 150 members :

" The 14th Intelligence and Security company, known to it's secretive members as 'The Det' (short for Detachment, another cover name) is still part of the group of ad hoc units involved in various dirty tricks on both sides of the border. The Det's speciality is covert methods of entry, bugging and unattributable killings. Like the now better known FRU it is an "all arms" group which is British military terminology for a unit which draws members from naval, air force or army personnel." (19)

It is considered: " The oldest Dirty Tricks British army unit in the North"...."The Det was the most political formation in the British forces because of its unique chain of command and control....rested ....with the Director of Special Forces who reported direct to Downing Street."(20) ...
...............
Later, when Mrs Thatcher personally organised British military as well as political strategy in Ireland after the IRA hunger strikes, Kerr, promoted to lieutenant colonel, took command of the counter terror group, subsequently renamed and reorganised as the Force Research Unit. Like another controversial colonel, Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, Kerr was moving in high political circles, outside the normal military chain of command. Mrs Thatcher visited his secret unit headquarters at Lisburn (time and date noted in the unpublished bit of the Stevens report) to speak to him about his work and shake the hands of his operatives ...

...British spies, with the approval, or possibly on the direction of at least some political leaders, were running a campaign of sectarian assassination since the days of Edward Heath, the Downing Street incumbent when the first dirty tricks unit, Kitson's MRF, was set up."
(23)

As regards domestic agencies it has been stated that Special Branch, 'controls' Garda HQ (24) and that the practises of the secret police dominate the actions of the gardai. This is seen in the use of slander for example. From the Phoenix at the time of the succession to Commissioner Byrne:

" In the conspiratorial world of political policing, anonymous tip-offs, mysterious alliances and byzantine plots are the stock-in-trade. The choice of recipients of leaks is interesting. In the normal course of events, a smear campaign against a politician or a subversive would be given verbally to a selected journalist who would run the story but this cannot be done when the smear stories are about litigatious senior garda officers. Instead, the anonymous scribes have targeted politicians and lawyers ...

Use of Modern Technology

Similarly as people do research on the internet as opposed to in libraries the capacity to monitor a persons research greatly increases. It is reported by Alain Lallemand in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir that as part of the Echelon network the western agencies monitor all internet traffic at the main internet exchanges.(79) Note that some people would say that monitoring all internet traffic in this way is impractical because of the huge computer power needed but I beg to differ when the way this is probably accomplished is considered. There is no requirement to store the actual data that would travel across the exchanges, as web page requests for example, all you need to do is store the IP numbers and details of who is requesting a given webpage on a given date. The data actually on the webpage can always be looked up again later by those agencies using a comprehensive web archive like http://www.archive.org which in all probability they use. So in other words they are only storing web addresses and corresponding IP numbers of people who read the pages not the raw data and this can be stored as something like a simple flat text file which of course requires very little computer space. In so far as the contents of emails are unique (meaning they are probably capable of screening out spam and forwarded emails very successfully) they would have to be stored but again until the recent advent of broadband they were usually not very large and I think it is within the scope of echelon to cache them in their entirety.

One problem would have been internet voice calls which would clearly be unique to each conversation and could potentially be large files possibly even scattered over a number of exchanges and it is interesting that the capability of using the internet this way has been around for ages but only in the last few years has it been given any publicity which may be a valuable time delay for the agencies to get in place monitoring facilities for this traffic.

One final serious problem would be the matching of IP addresses (which are kinda the phone numbers used for all internet transactions) to actual people which presents many problems bearing in mind that normal dial up users are often given a separate randomly chosen IP address for every online session. There are two points I would make here.

First of all clearly Echelon has access to phone data as well as internet data so this combined with information in the IP address could tell them a lot...

...As mentioned above the main programme which coordinates the monitoring of telecommunications traffic for the big western powers is known as Echelon. It is well known that all international phone calls are routinely intercepted by that network using facilities like the NSA plant at Menwith Hill in England and also GCHQ in Cheltenham near London. The main route by which a lot of this traffic is intercepted is via satellites that are run for NSA by the huge Maryland agency known as the National Reconnaissance Office. All this is very well known but I don't think the full implications of the kind of technology they are using are properly appreciated by most people. Take for example the question of satellite monitoring of phone calls. I suspect a lot of people think then that that refers to satellite calls either made from satellite phones or international calls routed over satellites. They monitor those calls as well but the fact is that they monitor via satellite the ordinary landline calls of many countries. This is done because a lot of those calls in all countries travel across microwave relay links which are line of sight towers that the phone companies use to bounce calls around the country because of their convenience not requiring as they do any landline cables. What happens is that the signal that is directed by microwave at a receiving tower continues on after that into space and there the NSA can position a satellite and pick up the telephone conversations.(82) Eircom do use microwave relays to route internal landline voice calls in Ireland.(83) Furthermore all the Irish and international mobile phone companies use microwaves to bounce mobile calls between their masts. So depending on the architecture of the eircom network it is at least possible that Echelon monitors all Irish internal and international landline and most definitely mobile phone calls. The western agencies have also developed since the 70s the capacity to tap into underwater telephone cables.(84) ...

So incredible as it seems it is technologically, and for them morally, feasible that they keep copies of every single telephone conversation held over the last few years on the island of Ireland. Anybody who would hold data on that scale would clearly have enormous power to use that information to blackmail people and to anticipate the actions of political opposition groups etc. And be under no illusions people that is certainly what those organisations use that information for.(91) As the New Statesman reported in 1988 with respect to a US Congressional investigation into Echelon :

""Since then, investigators have subpoenaed other witnesses and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start." (92)

The real power of it of course is that they can retrospectively trawl through a persons past life before he or she came to the attention of those agencies.

It is well known as well that the telephone conversations are put through automated speech to text recognition systems and this has been done at least since the early 80s. (93) Similarly voice recognition is used and it appears they had that technology since about 1979. This means they can track a particular person by flagging his unique voice pattern as he tries to speak on any phone on any platform that they are monitoring. This is from Margaret Newsham an NSA dissident living in Texas:

"As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating."(94)
So all those movies that have the principals using call boxes to avoid detection are a bit mute when it comes to the technology available to the NSA and GCHQ.

Phoenix magazine when it described Echelon not long ago referred to a system called Enternet meaning the deployment of new technology that allows the agencies to interfere with the computers of people using the internet.(95) Presumably in cooperation with some large software companies they provide a kind of global hacking capability to the NSA and GCHQ et al :

"But ECHELON now has an "active" component which allows NSA or GCHQ analysts to covertly "hack" into information on the hard disks of computers linked into any telecommunications system, including the Internet."

Microsoft for example were discovered some time ago to have a close working relationship with NSA.(96) This came about because Microsoft felt it was illegal for them to export out of the US technology that could potentially be used as encryption that the US couldn't break. The question is how far does this legal pressure and the secret relationship it fostered go in terms of their products. Note as well the way in which Microsoft go to considerable lengths to hide from the user the extent to which their software caches key personal data.(97) This presumably is done under pressure from law enforcement bodies that are then supplied with all the information necessary to get access to the data later. Some of the main suppliers of anti-virus and internet security software also have remarkable holes in their security scans ostensibly because the software that they deliberately fail to detect is made by the same company as the anti-virus software. An employee of one of those companies claimed once that it was done under pressure from the US government but he quickly felt the need to retract that claim.(98)

It is even possible that the story of modern snail mail mimics that of email with a huge state apparatus of secret police using automated systems to hoover up any compromising information that they can glean from the post. Both the UK and the US have a tremendous legacy of secretly spying on any dissident activity of their citizens by reading their mail. In the UK this was revealed in the Spycatcher book where for the first time a shocked UK public found out that MI5 had offices in all the regional sorting centres where they monitored all the mail in a very widescale fashion.(99) The CIA have had the capacity for some time to read mail without opening it and have deployed this technology in the past on a large scale in the US. :(100)

"In the 1960's and early 1970's, large numbers of American dissidents, including those who challenged the condition of racial minorities and those who opposed the war in Vietnam, were specifically targeted for mail opening by both agencies [FBI and CIA]. In one program, selection of mail on the basis of "personal taste" by agents untrained in foreign intelligence objectives resulted in the interception and opening of the mail of Senators, Congressmen, journalists, businessmen, and even a Presidential candidate."

The above is from the final report of the Church committee of the US Senate April 23 1976. It refers specifically to widespread 'warrantless' mail opening.

"Despite the stated purpose of the programs, numerous domestic dissidents, including peace and civil rights activists, were specifically targeted for mail opening."(101)

In any case the point is that now the Royal Mail in the UK is using handwriting recognition software supplied by Lockheed Martin(102) a company described as the leading supplier of "monitoring equipment to the espionage agencies" in the US...

...Then they can use the historic information from the phone signal to see where they came from to the protests, listen to the historic cache of phone calls from that phone as I speculate and definitely they could monitor a cache of text messages to build up a profile of that person. Furthermore by looking at the pattern of how the phone signals group together before and after the protest you can clearly see who is normally hangs out with who etc. So with only one specific piece of surveillance data you can tell quite a lot quite quickly. The degree that this data is routinely used by even the smaller western intelligence agencies can be seen from the Times of 1997 which quotes this from Sonntags Zeitung of Zurich in the context of stating that Swiss police have been secretly tracking mobile phone users through the telephone companies:

"Swisscom [the state-owned telephone company] has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users and can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred metres and going back at least half a year," the paper reports, adding:"When it has to, it can exactly reconstruct, down to the minute, who met whom, where and for how long for a confidential tte--tte."
(108) ...

From the BBC:

"But today's spies are also able to convert conventional phones into bugs without the owners' knowledge.
.....
Mobiles communicate with their base station on a frequency separate from the one used for talking. If you have details of the frequencies and encryption codes being used you can listen in to what is being said in the immediate vicinity of any phone in the network.
According to some reports, intelligence services do not even need to obtain permission from the networks to get their hands on the codes.
So provided it is switched on, a mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug."(110) ,,,

Niche Telecom Providers Assisting NSA Spy Operations
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