ECHELON : The New Space Invaders - Spies In The Sky
By Peter Goodspeed
National Post - Canada Feb. 18, 2000
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.