http://fire.net.nz/echelon.htm
The new space invaders
Spies in the sky
Peter Goodspeed
National Post
Saturday, February 19, 2000
A former employee of Canada's security agency has charged that Canadian
spies once managed to overhear the American
ambassador to Canada discussing a pending trade deal with China on a mobile
telephone and used that information to
undercut the Americans in landing a $2.5-billion Chinese grain sale.
For decades they were guardians -- mysterious warriors who straddled the
globe searching for secrets that would prevent a
nuclear holocaust. But now, the new technology of the post-Cold War world
has suddenly transformed the West's leading
spymasters into sinister shadows manipulating a massive surveillance system
that can capture and study every telephone call,
fax and e-mail message sent anywhere in the world.
These high-tech espionage agents from Canada, the United States, Britain,
Australia and New Zealand -- backed up by a
web of ships, planes and radar and communication interception sites that
ring the earth -- have established the greatest spy
network in history.
Its name is Echelon.
Originally devoted solely to monitoring the military and diplomatic
communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies,
today Echelon searches for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealer's plans and
political and diplomatic intelligence. But critics
claim the system is also being used for crass commercial theft and a brutal
invasion of privacy on a staggering scale.
On Tuesday, the European Union's parliament will open a major international
debate on the spy practices of the world's five
leading English-speaking nations, claiming that this electronic espionage
ring, led by the United States and Britain, is
methodically going where it has no right to go. The EU's civil liberties
committee is expected to accuse Britain of aiding the
United States in conducting economic and commercial espionage on a grand
scale at the expense of its European partners. A
special 112-page expose of the spy network prepared for the EU last spring
declares that the rapid proliferation of
surveillance technologies presents "a serious threat to the civil liberties
in Europe" with "awesome implications."
"There is wide-ranging evidence indicating that major governments are
routinely utilizing communications intelligence to
provide commercial advantage to companies and trade," declared Duncan
Campbell, the report's author, a Scottish physicist
and researcher who has devoted 20 years to studying electronic espionage.
Moreover, research about to be released by the EU's Scientific and Technical
Options Assessment office is expected to
document how deeply Echelon has penetrated Europe. It will outline ways to
combat the espionage assault.
At the same time:
- Jean-Pierre Millet, a Parisian lawyer, has launched a class-action lawsuit
against the governments of the United States and
Britain, claiming the Echelon spy network has robbed European industries of
some of their most cherished trade secrets and
undercut their bargaining positions in trade deals.
- Parliamentarians in Italy, Germany and Denmark are demanding public
investigations of the spy network.
- Privacy advocates in the U.S. have launched a court case demanding access
to government documents on Echelon under
the Freedom of Information Act.
- Several leading politicians are calling for the first Congressional
hearings to review U.S. intelligence-gathering practices since
the Watergate era.
- On the Internet, privacy advocates, computer hackers and journalists are
engaged in near-hysterical searches for signs of
Echelon's presence. Several new Internet Web sites have sprung up devoted
solely to documenting information on Echelon
and pressing for public investigations into the surveillance system.
"Echelon is a black box, and we really don't know what is inside it," says
Barry Steinhardt, of the American Civil Liberties
Union. "We don't know who is being targeted, what they are being targeted
for or what is being done with the information."
The Echelon system is simple in design. All members of the English-speaking
alliance are part of the UKUSA intelligence
alliance that has maintained ties since the Second World War.
These states have positioned electronic-intercept stations and deep-space
satellites to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular
and fibre-optic communications traffic. The captured signals are then
processed through a series of supercomputers, known
as dictionaries, that are programmed to search each communication for
targeted addresses, words, phrases or even individual
voices.
Individual states in the UKUSA alliance are assigned responsibilities for
monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main
task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and
conducting sweeps of all communications traffic
that could be picked up from our embassies around the world. In the
post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed
on monitoring satellite and radio and cellphone traffic originating from
Central and South America, primarily in an effort to
track drugs and thugs in the region.
The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening
posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia
and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the
Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for
communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New
Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.
"Most people just don't understand how pervasive government surveillance
is," warns John Pike, a leading military analyst
with the Washington-based American Federation of Scientists.
"If you place an international phone call, the odds that the [U.S.] National
Security Agency are looking is very good. If it goes
by oceanic fibre-optic cable, they are listening to it. If it goes by
satellite, they are listening to it. If it is a radio broadcast or a
cellphone conversation, in principle, they could listen to it. Frankly, they
can get what they want."
Experts stress that Echelon is simply a method of sorting captured signals
and is just one of the many new arrows in the
intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated
bugging and interception techniques, satellite tracking,
through-clothing scanning, automatic fingerprinting and recognition systems
that can recognize genes, odours or retina
patterns.
The Americans dominate the UKUSA alliance, providing most of the computer
expertise and frequently much of the
personnel for global interception bases. The U.S. National Security Agency,
headquartered in Fort Meade, Md., just outside
Washington, has a global staff of 38,000 and a budget estimated at more than
$3.6-billion (all dollar figures US unless
otherwise specified). That's more than the FBI and the CIA combined.
By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence operations are conducted
by the Communications Security
Establishment (CSE), a branch of the National Defence Department. It has a
staff of 890 people and an annual budget of
$110-million (Cdn). The CSE's headquarters, nicknamed "The Farm," is the Sir
Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in
Ottawa, and its main communications intercept site is located on an old
armed-forces radio base in Leitrim, just south of
Ottawa.
Though shrouded in secrecy to the extent that American officials used to
joke NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never
Say Anything," few foreign-affairs analysts are surprised by the sweep or
appetite of electronic spies and they caution against
taking Europe's angry protestations of dismay at face value.
"The EU hearings are a bit of a joke," says Wayne Madsen, a former NSA
employee and senior fellow at the
Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC). "It's going
to be a bit like that scene in the movie
Casablanca, where Inspector Renault declares: 'I'm shocked to find gambling
in this establishment.' "
"The fact is the German Greens and the French Socialists and Gaullists can
pull their hair out and say, 'This is terrible,' but
their countries are involved in this stuff. The French have an extensive
signals intelligence network of their own. I think what is
going to happen is there will be a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of
teeth, but then business is going to go on as usual."
But the real issue is whether UKUSA's spies are using electronic espionage
to get commercial information.
"Since the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the intelligence agencies
have searched for a new justification for their
surveillance capability in order to protect their prominence and their
bloated budgets," says Patrick Poole, deputy director of
the Centre of Technology at Washington's Free Congress Federation. "Their
solution was to redefine the notion of national
security to include economic, commercial and corporate concerns.
"By redefining the term 'national security' to include spying on foreign
competitors of prominent U.S. corporations, the
signals-intelligence game has gotten ugly."
Lately there has been a frenzy of concern over possible American economic
espionage in Europe.
- Yesterday, a French intelligence report accused U.S. secret agents of
working with computer giant Microsoft to develop
software allowing Washington to spy on computer users around the world. It
claims that the National Security Agency helped
install secret programs on Microsoft software, currently in use of 90% of
computers.
- In 1990 the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel claimed NSA intercepted
messages about a pending $200-million
telecommunications deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite
manufacturer NEC Corp. George Bush, then the U.S.
president, is said to have intervened on the basis of the intelligence
intercept and to have convinced the Indonesians to split the
contract between NEC and U.S.-owned AT&T.
- Last spring's EU report on electronic spying says that U.S. intelligence
agencies intercepted phone calls between Brazilian
officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF in 1994 and used the information
to swing a $1.3-billion radar contract to the
U.S. corporation Raytheon.
Mike Frost, a former CSE employee and author of Spyworld, which is about his
career in Canada's secret service, claims
that as far back as 1981 Canada was using its U.S.-produced spy technology
to eavesdrop on the American ambassador to
Ottawa. In one instance, Canadian spies managed to overhear the ambassador
discussing a pending trade deal with China on
a mobile telephone and used that information to undercut the Americans in
landing a $2.5-billion Chinese grain sale.
On another occasion, in 1983, Mr. Frost says British intelligence officials
invited their Canadian counterparts to come to
London to eavesdrop on two British cabinet ministers whose political loyalty
was doubted by Margaret Thatcher, then the
British prime minister. Since it would have been illegal for British
officials to do the surveillance themselves, they had the
Canadians do the job using eavesdropping equipment in the Canadian embassy.
After three weeks of snooping, the
Canadians quietly turned over all their findings to the British, Mr. Frost
says.
"It should hardly be surprising that Echelon ends up being used by elected
and bureaucratic officials to their political
advantage or by the intelligence agencies themselves for the purpose of
sustaining their privileged powers and bloated
budgets," says Mr. Poole. "The availability of such invasive technology
practically begs for abuse."
Ottawa bureaucrat Claude Hisson, the commissioner for the Communications
Security Establishment, is charged with
investigating any complaints into CSE operations. In his most recent annual
report, he admits that, on occasion, our spies
intercept private conversations. But he insists there is nothing to worry
about. "The sophistication of CSE's technology has led
to speculation about the organization's capability to intercept the
communications of Canadians," Mr. Hisson says.
"However, I have observed that CSE's activities are driven not by the
capabilities of the technology it deploys but by its
mandate to fulfill the foreign intelligence requirements established by the
Government of Canada. ... In keeping with the policy
of the government, CSE goes to considerable effort to avoid collecting
Canadian communications."
Still, critics of Echelon warn the potential for abuse never goes away.
"This whole thing is so bizarrely powerful that the opportunity or
temptation for abuse is fairly substantial," says Mr. Pike of
the American Federation of Scientists. "How many people in your organization
always obey the rules?
"The notion that NSA or any other of these spy networks is the only large
organization in human history in which everyone
always obeys the rules just flies in the face of common sense," he says.
ENDS..............
Australian Govt Confirms Global Spy Agency Exists
Taken from Scoop - Friday, 5 November 1999, 2:42 pm
Article: John Howard
Confirmation has come from the Australian government that Echelon, a global
network which can eavesdrop on phone, fax or
e-mail anywhere on the planet, does exist. US Congressmen are calling for a
full inquiry. John Howard reports.
New Zealander, Nicky Hagar, had earlier written about Echelon in one of his
books.
Now the man who oversees Australia's security services, Inspector-General of
Intelligence and Security, Bill Blick, has
confirmed in a BBC interview that their Defence Signals Directorate does
form part of the Echelon network.
Now that is has been acknowledged US congressman, led by Republican Bob
Barr, are taking the threat to civil liberties
seriously and are calling for a full inquiry.
With listening posts around the world the Echelon project, is controlled and
managed by the US National Security Agency at
Fort Mead.
Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail or radio transmission can be
listened to by powerful computers capable of voice
recognition. Allegedly the system is looking for evidence of international
crime like terrorism.
But by its very nature of using key words or patterns of messages, Echelon
gathers up and analyses far more information than
just terrorist and criminal threats. The system of key words is so
widespread that all sorts of private communications, often of
a sensitive commercial nature, are recorded and processed.
There are literally hundreds of keywords like, - government, law, captain,
privacy, Kenya, SAFE, Blenheim, Waihopai, FBI,
garbage, archives, bet, White House, Secure Internet Connections, enigma,
real, spies, contacts, watchers, eavesdropping,
debugging, Exon Shell, executive, explicit - and yes, there's even Scully
and Mulder plus surprisingly, Bugs Bunny.
Then there's - CRA, TWA, NATIA, DT, OTP, SBI, BROMURE, TRD OC3, ISSAA
SURSAT, ASIS, ISA, SATCOMA,
MI6, SIS, ELF, RFX, SETA, TSCM, BBE.
Of course, we would expect to see explosives, guns, conspiracy, primers,
detonators, initiators, ambush, motorcade,
charcoal, body armour, cordite, teflon bullets, assault team,
nitrocellulose, fuses, picric acid, silver nitrate, presidential
motorcade, boobytraps, detcord, pmk40, Air Force One, platter charge, ddnp,
lead styphante, munitions, weapons,
hostages, main charge, AK-47, hrt, resistance, c4, amatol, nitrostarch,
thermite - the list goes on and on.
By now the Echelon system is probably having heart failure with my use of
the above words.
So, when you're told on the phone or e-mail to take the garbage out when you
get home from work or tell the kids they can't
watch Bugs Bunny - watch out. And if you live in Blenheim - move because
you'll be under constant surveillance.
Are they serious? - you can bet on it. Oops, there I go again.
ends
For more on Echelon:
http://fire.net.nz/echelon.htm