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Revelations about Echelon spy network intensify US-European tensions
By Steve James - 12 April 2000
The British government is losing its fight to suppress debate in the
European Parliament on the role of US intelligence gathering,
particularly a spy system known as Echelon in which the UK has long
been a crucial partner.
Last week, 171 out of 626 European MPs signed a petition calling for
two further debates and a public commission of inquiry into Echelon.
This easily exceeded the 160-signature requirement to inaugurate an
inquiry, and was supported by the regionalist UK partiesthe Scottish
National Party and the Welsh Plaid Cymru, along with the Green party.
Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats all fiercely opposed it.
The debate threatens to undermine the UK's efforts to integrate more
fully into Europe while maintaining close economic and military
connections with the United States. It would expose Britain's role as
an American ear in Europe.
The call for an inquiry into Echelon was led by the Portuguese
presidency of the European Union (EU)each country holds the post for
six monthsafter several years during which Echelon has emerged from
complete obscurity to become a source of economic and political
tensions between the United States and Europe.
Echelon is an information processing system that relies on a network
of spy satellites and ground listening stations operated under the
terms of a 1947 UK-USA treaty. Full details of the agreement remain
secret, but it was intended to build on the transatlantic intelligence
cooperation established during World War II. It was aimed primarily at
spying on the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern
Europe. The network also monitored parties, groups and individuals
opposed to aspects of US and British foreign policy.
The UK-USA treaty allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the
British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) to share
information and resources. A series of spy bases were established, the
most important being Menwith Hill on the North Yorkshire moors in
England, which is directly linked with the NSA headquarters in Fort
Mead, Maryland. Other listening posts were set up around the globe, as
other countries became involved in spying operations. Canada,
Australia and New Zealand were significant participants in the scheme,
along with Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Norway, South Korea and Japan.
Over the years, the system has acquired an extraordinary degree of
sophistication and information gathering capacity. Ground-posts
collect transmissions picked up from spy satellites, the first of
which was launched in 1968. Menwith Hill alone has around 30 radio
receivers pointing in different directions, indicating it is receiving
data from many different satellites. The system can monitor telephone
conversations, faxes, email and cell phones, and can decrypt secure
communication and generally intercept most transmitted data.
Using "dictionary" programmes to sift through the billions of
transmissions received every hour, the Echelon system attempts to
identify information of interest to the spy services and their
national governments.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold
War, Echelon has been increasingly reporting on so-called "economic"
intelligence. It is this, and not the subversion of the democratic
rights of the world's citizens, which has provoked opposition from
some EU governments. They have become concerned that European
companies are losing contracts to US companies because of information
supplied by Echelon.
In 1998, the European Parliament received a report it had
commissioned"An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control"by
Steve Wright of the Omega Foundation, a UK-based human rights
organisation. Wright comprehensively summarised developments in crowd
control, sub-lethal weapons, torture, prison control, DNA databanks,
and mass surveillance. Within the last category, he reviewed Echelon
and noted the decades of effort by investigative journalists who had
painstakingly collected and collated data on the system. Wright was
highly critical of many aspects of European policy, including the
export of torture and sub-lethal crowd control equipment, and the
formation of an all-European spy organisation, Enfopol.
In September 1998, when the European Parliament debated the matter,
very little of Wright's report was mentioned. However, a resolution
was passed which called for "surveillance technologies to be subject
to proper open debate both at national and EU level, as well as
procedures which ensure democratic accountability".
The resolution, a copy of which was forwarded to the US Congress, went
on to state, in point 14: "[The European Parliament] considers that
the increasing importance of the Internet and worldwide
telecommunications in general and in particular the Echelon System,
and the risks of their being abused, require protective measures
concerning economic information and effective encryption."
In February this year "Interception Capabilities 2000", another report
prepared by the European Parliament's Justice Committee with
assistance from investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, focussed
more closely on Echelon and other communication interception systems.
This report comprehensively charted the growth of the network of
ground-bases and satellite surveillance (presently around 120
satellite systems are thought to be in operation). Submarine telephone
cables have been subject to interception from 1971 onwards.
The Internet is particularly vulnerable to surveillance, because the
majority of its traffic passes through the US at some point. Even data
packets transmitted between addresses outside the US often pass
through American-based routers. There are nine points at which this
traffic is routinely picked up. From 1995, the NSA has employed
"packet sniffer" software to identify traffic of interest to its
sponsors. Leading US software companies are also implicated. Campbell
stated that Netscape, Microsoft and Lotus reduced the encryption
capacities of their exported versions of e-mail packages to facilitate
NSA decryption.
Section 5 of the report deals with "economic intelligence" and cites a
series of instances in which European-based companies have been
undermined in favour of US outfits. In 1993, the "Panavia European
Fighter Aircraft" was specifically targeted. In 1994, the French
company Thomson CSF lost a $1.3 billion contract to Raytheon of the US
after the NSA intercepted their phone calls. In 1995, the European
Airbus Company lost a $6 billion contract to Boeing, after the NSA
intercepted its fax transmissions. Campbell stated that there have
been numerous other instances when the US has used information picked
up by the NSA operations during trade negotiations.
The publication of this report has brought both transatlantic and
inter-European disputes to a head. France, which operates its own
advanced electronic spy system, has been particularly vociferous.
Former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, a member of the EU Justice
Committee, said, "The rules of the game are rigged and they are rigged
especially by the British. This is shocking." French Justice Minister
Elisabeth Guigou warned European companies, "Communications must never
carry vital information, especially when the link is made via a
satellite." French lawyer Jean-Pierre Millet is launching a class-
action court case against the British and US governments, pointing to
Echelon's role in undermining French and European commercial and trade
negotiations.
On March 30, Erkki Liikanen, EU Enterprise and Information
Commissioner, told the European parliament that efforts to establish
the EU in the "knowledge economy" depended on electronic communication
that could be trusted, and that encryption was the key to this.
European encryption should challenge US technology. Liikanen alluded
to the suspicions of there being built-in decryption facilities in US
software: "Software whose source code is not open, leaves the user in
uncertainty, the possibility of built-in circumvention of encryption
cannot be excluded."
Liikanen reported that the US government had denied they were involved
in any industrial espionage. But a more frank and bellicose assessment
of US operations came from James Woolsey, CIA chief from 1993 to 1995.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal the week before, Woolsey said,
"That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because
you bribe. When we have caught you at it, you might be interested, we
haven't said a word to the US companies in the competition. Instead we
go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we
don't take kindly to such corruption."
Woolsey's astonishing outburstjustifying spying on the grounds of
European corporate corruptionmakes clear that the Echelon revelations,
and the transatlantic encryption war now being joined, mark a new and
noisy low in US/European relations. European corporate interests will
not tolerate having all their internal and external discussions
monitored, particularly when they are up against US rivals, as is the
case in all strategic areas of economic life.
At the same time, the European governments' new emphasis on encryption
poses them with a fresh dilemma. How can they defend corporate,
financial and state security from US spying without prejudicing the
interception and surveillance efforts directed against their own
citizens by all European governments?
The British government seized on this quandary to declare its
preference for a discussion that would cover the issue in the round,
rather than focusing on just one member state [Britain]. There is no
incompatibility between our position as an EU member state and our
duty to maintain national security. Others are in the same position."
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 1998-2000 World Socialist Web Site All rights reserved
========= Researching Echelon URL:
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/5993/1.html
Researching Echelon Nicky Hager 11.04.2000
Don't assume that secretive organisations are impenetrable
Many people have asked how I uncovered information about Echelon. They
are experiences I think are worth sharing. The starting point for my
research was finding out the names and job titles of all the staff
within the New Zealand electronic intelligence agency. The
breakthrough came when I realised that all their names had been hidden
within public service staff lists, scattered through pages and pages
of military staff. Because hardly anyone knew even of the
organisation's existence, they presumably thought the names would
never be noticed.
Deutsche Fassung
========================= Geraldton spy station, New Zealand
By obtaining other lists of military staff that were compiled without
the spies, and subtracting one list from the other, I was left with a
near-perfect list of the hundreds of people inside the spy agency; and
many more who had worked there in the past. Comparing this list to
other public service lists gave me general job titles for all these
people. Combined with some early leaks, I was gradually able to
construct the entire top-secret organisational plan from relatively
open sources. The job then began of identifying people in the various
sections willing to talk.
People have varied reasons for deciding to leak information. There is,
for instance, simply the relief of talking to someone who knows about
their work after years of never being able to tell even their wives or
husbands what they have done at work all day. But the main reason in
this case was the officers' concerns that an important area of
government activity had been too secret for too long, both from the
public and Parliament. Some people felt strongly about intelligence
activities they regarded as immoral or not in the country's interests.
I decided who might be willing to talk to me, seeking people from all
the various compartmentalised sections I wanted to study, and then
quietly approached them. I am still surprised that most of the people
I approached were prepared to talk to me, resulting in hundreds of
pages of interview notes about the high-tech spy systems they operate.
Once the information had started, it poured in. It became known within
the spy agencies that I was reearching them - new staff were warned
about me in security briefings although they had no idea how much I
had learnt or that I was writing a book - but, if anything, this
seemed to help the leaks. For a long time I felt a slight thrill when
I put my hand in my postbox in case I found secret papers left
anonymously inside.
Some information came because 'high security' can be more about
impressions than reality. For example, the spy bosses must surely have
wondered why I repeatedly requested the latest copies of the agency's
internal newsletters, when they always released them with every
meanful word blacked out. These people are our government's chief
advisors on security issues, but what they never realised was that by
holding the photocopied newsletters up to my desk light I could, with
care, read virtually everything - all the details of new or refocussed
sections, staff changes, overseas postings and so on - that had been
deleted.
High security at the agency's most secret spying facility, the
Waihopai station, was also more impression than reality. Despite
electric fences, sensors and razor wire, I went there several times
while writing the book and later was able to take a television
documentary crew inside, where they filmed the Echelon equipment in
the main operations room and even the titles of Intelsat
(International Satellite Organisation) manuals on the desks (which
confirmed the facility's role spying on ordinary public
telecommunications networks).
While there was very secret information I could only learn from
insiders, a lot of the information came from careful fieldwork (such
as observing changes over the years in various Echelon stations around
the world as telecommunications technology changed) and collating
snippets of information from unclassified documents and news reports.
Various of the inside sources were friends of friends of friends who I
located simply by asking around widely. Don't assume that secretive
organisations are impenetrable. There is important research work
waiting to be done on many subjects in every country.
With his book [External Link] Secret Power, 1996, Nicky Hager has
produced the most detailed account about the organisation and
operations of New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau
(GCSB) and its role in the UKUSA alliance, operating the global
surveillance system called Echelon. The STOA-report for the European
Parliament's Civil Liberties Commission entitled 'An Appraisal of
Technologies of Political Control' made extensive references to
Hager's research - and with this Echelon has entered the political
stage.
======================
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* The Activist *
http://get.to/activist * http://activist.cjb.net
This is not about the world that we inherited from our forefathers,
It is about the world we have borrowed from our children !!
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