ECHELON FOR REAL!//YOU UPGRADEmag// may 29.  2001
The UPGRADEmag is a global edutainment round-up ‘broadcast’ weekly to =[9835]= Trance// New Age// Alternative// Activist folks who have been recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity/ Megatripolis Dance Dept as "showing signs of life".  Since many choose to forward it to their own lists, we estimate 20,000+ recipients. And, because of its less 'specialist' content, it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide, making a total weeky ‘readership’ of, conservatively, 220,000+

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ECHELON, THE LONG DENIED WORLDWIDE SPYING NETWORK, IS FOR REAL!   YOU 2394
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SAT JUNE 2              DEN OF ENLIGHTENMENT THREE!

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High action week coming up! We're trying to build something new  - or fix something old - most likely in the idea / communications department. We work hard and productively.
The week ends with Mercury turning retrograde, opening a three-week Review Period. The grand finale is a full moon - one meant for travel. 
Put on your dancing shoes! 
And maybe check Maya del Mar's site as she's the one who sends us da news. www.daykeeperjournal.com.
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All right then, lissen up all you Upgraders, and admit, honestly, that sometimes you wonder whether we here at the Parallel YOUniversity might occasionally get just an eeny weeny bit conspiratorial and even downright paranoid about what's going on in the world, right?  Right.  We sometimes wonder ourselves. 
However, this week has brought TWO pretty definite revelations that just might make us all reconsider.
Perhaps you caught them in the media?  Well, facts can be described from different viewpoints.  Most of the media have described the latest from the viewpoint of 'HARD TO BELIEVE BUT UNDENIABLY TRUE'.  If you look at the same facts from the viewpoint that 'WORSE THAN THIS  IS ALMOST CERTAINLY GOING ON' they can look quite quite different.

ECHELON, THE LONG DENIED WORLDWIDE SPYING NETWORK, IS FOR REAL!
MEPs confirm global electronic eavesdropping network
Those damn conspiracy theorists have been proved right once again!  Not only do world leaders actually 'worship' an Owl God and perform mock human sacrifice rituals while ritually pissing against trees (as secretly filmed at Bohemian Grove for Channel 4 recently) but the same ruling elite, as will be revealed this week in a European parliament report, has been electronically spying on all of our communications.
Over the last decade everyone's heard some rumour of mass electronic eavesdropping, by 'word recognition' and such stuff, but now there's proof that the US-led worldwide electronic spying network known as Echelon, whose very existence has been repeatedly denied or ignored, is a huge fookin reality!!
Echelon, we are now privileged to know, was set up by a secret treaty as far back as 1947 when unnamed 'leaders' of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand actually divided up the world between them, and agreed to share the product of global eavesdropping.  Intercepts are picked up by ground stations, including the US base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, and GCHQ's listening post at Morwenstow in Cornwall, and are exchanged between Agencies from the five countries via supercomputers "which identify key words".
In the cold war such signals intelligence ("Sigint" in the trade - was directed at military and diplomatic communications but, with the increasing sophistication of computers, it has gradually switched to industrial and commercial targets, and, you guessed it! private individuals.  According to the official report, the Echelon system can store millions of records on individuals, intercepting faxes, phone calls, and emails.

HERE HANG ME WITH MY COMPANY'S ROPE!
Now, as you can well believe, the MEP's investigation faced stiff and sneaky opposition from British and American 'leaders' and 'security personnel'.  Indeed it only finally became unstoppable after French claims that, in 1994, Echelon had cost Airbus Industrie an £8bn contract with Saudi Arabia because the US had intercepted communications between Riyadh and Airbus's Toulouse headquarters - in which British firms hold a 20% stake. 
"The capitalists will finally compete with each other to sell us the rope with which to hang them"  Karl Marx - there's one for Echelon gratis! 
MEPs, however, admit in their report that they have been "unable to find conclusive proof" (read that again) of industrial espionage.  More disturbing, as they point out, is the threat Echelon poses to personal privacy.  Mostly they interviewed and read statements from former intelligence operatives who provided compelling evidence of Echelon's existence, and the potential scope of its activities.

SEVERAL MILLION EMAIL INTERCEPTS PER DAY!
One Canadian ex-operative, for example, claimed that several million emails, faxes and phonically are intercepted daily.  Whose?  Well, the name and phone number of one woman, he remembered, was added to the Canadian 'Terrorist List' when she used an ambiguous word in an innocent call to a friend.  NSA's near-bottomless computer storage system is said to be capable of storing 5 trillion pages of text, "a stack of paper 150 miles high".  This is probably a vast understatement, it is probably theoretically limitless.
The recent British Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows authorities to monitor email and internet traffic through obligatory "black boxes" placed inside service providers' systems. It also gives police authority to order companies or individuals using protective encryption techniques to hand over the encryption keys.  Failure to obey carries a maximum 2-year jail sentence.  (Are all you activists getting ready!?).
Now, most of the news reports that have just started coming through this evening kept stressing the report's recommendations "to employ encryption techniques to protect personal privacy".  Nowhere was that law above mentioned!
Or add to that the leaked documents published last week by London-based group, Statewatch, saying the EU's 15 member states are lobbying the European commission to require that all service providers keep all phone, fax, email and internet data for possible future criminal investigations.

BUT DON'T PANIC.  OR NO MORE THAN YOU ALREADY WERE
Note those "trillions" of intercepted fragments of conversations?  How many people do you reckon the security services have on their books?  Recording a trillion conversations is one thing, reading a billion conversations would take millions of man-hours.
These security operations were and are mostly intimidatory, and only work in this respect as long as the 'dissenters' are limited in number and each is personally afraid.  Look around you, we are long past that situation, there are millions of people worldwide now who are struggling against the global hegemony. HALF the populations of any 'civilised' country refuse to vote, the one share in Democracy they have! 
Our leaders simply have neither the time nor the money nor the personnel to physically read even a tiny fraction of what their technology can record.  So, if you ARE a violent revolutionary then you should be very afraid (and rightly so!) but for all you dancing green evolutionaries out there. DON'T WORRY, 'We' outnumber 'Them' by a hundred thousand to one, and that's a conservative and falling estimate! 
Fraser.

YOU 2394        "The fact of the matter is" - Most Popular Politician's cliché.

UK
FRI JUNE 1-2    OFF THE TRACKS SPRING FESTIVAL
Including informal acoustic sessions and sets by Here be Dragons and the Andy Gutteridge Trio. Weekend tickets £22, including camping.  01332 384518 / 833673
http://www.offthetracks.co.uk/

YOU 2395        "And again, if I can just make this point" 2^nd Most Popular Politician's cliché.

California
WED MAY 30      A TALE OF 2CITIES: AN AMERICAN JOYRIDE ON MULTIPLE TRACKS: Track 4: Hallucination Map Cont'd:
"grifters, drifters, dodgers."  by HEATHER WOODBURY: [brilliant performance stuff - don't miss it!!]
828 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica    (310)-398-9065, $5

YOU 2396        "There is no instant solution"  3^rd Most Popular Politician's cliché.

SAT JUNE 16     LEGALISE CANNABIS FESTY
Brockwell Park.  Postponed from last month.  30,000 pot puffin' people?  And there's a bit of a rumour that the Den of E is doing a stage!  They're certainly doing the club afterwards!  020 7637 7467
http://www.cannabiscoalition.org

YOU 2397        "It's going to take time"  4^th Most Popular Politician's cliché.

SAT JUNE 2 & SUN 3      12^TH ANNUAL ZIPPY PICNIC ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
Autonomous space for random creativity, originally the anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Psychedelica but now a Free People's Event.  Because it's clashing with the Den this year, any organised activity will only start at 3pm on the Sunday when the Dionysian Underground will be doing some opening Ritez.  Rumours of a black 2001 obelisk appearing are probably not true.
Viaduct Pond, Hampstead Heath.

YOU 2398        "A whole range of proposals"  5^th Most Popular Politician's cliché.

YOU FEEDBACK (2393)
Hi Fraser,
another fine installment ; 0 )
Just wanted to add my viewpoint to a discussion you and Lee Midwinter were having in this week's UP.
I would have to agree with him on the point about drug use ultimately causing more paranoia than spiritual fulfillment in the long-term, while I agree with you on your point that a certain degree of paranoia is caused because of the infringements, rules & regulations of a society that makes it so difficult to feel love for one another, London and New York in particular are so governed by materialism, commercialism and consumerism; 'Who earns what, who's wearing what clothes, who knows who, who lives where etc etc' , I cant help thinking that without having done my fair share of E and amphetamines over the years, I wouldn't be so sensitive to the way SOME people are on a weekly basis, it gets me down how moody and impolite to each we can be, constantly playing mind games of 'one-upmanship' on the tube or in the high street. in fact I probably exaggerate it a little in my own mind!!
Yes drugs expand ones thinking and empathy with the world but without doubt there are downsides, I gave up class A's two years ago yet still get searing pangs of low self-esteem and unconfidence (is that a word) in public and I used to be the most confident of individuals!  We can all have our cake and eat it, progress just requires us to know when to say I've had enough!!
Keep up the wonderful work.
P.S  Hope everyone's registering their vote against ESSO!!
Peace.
JAFAR, the green machine / roadrunnerrecords

- personally (i mean you) the psychedelics give the vision of consciousness that is POSSIBLE - then u need to forge or find some kinda spiritual path to get there (ABSOLUTE SELF HONESTY AND OBSERVATION will do :)  
if you don't, you can be left in a sorta nomansland which i think u r describing - half way up neither up nor down.  truth is, i think, that YOU CAN'T GO BACK but you also can't satisfactorily stay where you are either. 
it IS possible to change one's level of consciousness (YOU KNOW THAT, unlike non-shamanic people) but now YOU gotta find YOUR way to do that.
honest searching is all that's required.  (all!)
fraser.

YOU 2399        "We want to see a wide range of options right across the board"  6^th Most Popular Politician's cliché.

SUN MAY 27 - JUNE 3     MIND-BODY SPIRIT EXHIBITION
Pretty commercial these days or, at best, low level, but still worth a visit if u've never been or on the off chance of meeting a long lost spirit sister or 2.
Royal Horticultural Hall No 2, Greycoat Street, Victoria, London SW1: http://www.mbsfestival.com/

YOU 2400        "That is why we are putting in more money in real terms than any previous administration"  7^th Most Popular Politician's cliché.