Echelon and free software

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Author: JT Smith

Mikael Pawlo writes “The existence of Echelon is often debated. Conspiracy theory, reality
or both? You tell me. The EU Commission thinks Echelon is real. Now
they want free software to protect Europe. As reported by Gnuheter the Commission has published a report on Echelon. The Commission concludes (p 19 English version):

29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;

30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;

31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the “least reliable” category;

Read entire report (PDF-format).”