Hi everybody,
There was a brief stir recently when it was revealed that the UN weapons
inspection team in Iraq had facilitated the illicit monitoring of
communications within that country by the United States. It is only right
that this should have occasioned some outrage - indeed, the outcry was
much less than it ought to have been - but I feel we should also spare
some of our anger for conditions closer to home.
The USA (with assistance from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand
and Canada) maintains a surveillance network capable of intercepting
almost all electronic transmissions worldwide. Moreover, it is not a
question of this system (codenamed ECHELON) being capable in principle of
such global oversight : this gargantuan spy operation is at work this
moment, as it has been for many years.
ECHELON operatives have access to just about very telephone conversation,
interactive cable television broadcast, fax and e-mail message anywhere
(and everywhere) on earth. Without regard to national and international
guarantees of privacy rights ECHELON agents screen the communications of
organizations and individuals at will.
For regular operating purposes ECHELON casts a very broad net : for all
intents and purposes the sum total of global telecommunications is
trawled. Obviously with such a vast target there is a need to establish
strict search parameters. This is done by programming computers to pick
out e-mail or faxes which contain specified terms.
These key words are top secret but one can surely make reasonable guesses
at some of them. Likely some are topical (e.g. "Jaggi Singh" might have
been put on the list in the run-up to APEC-Vancouver) while others would
be of longer standing ("Iraq") and still others permanent ("nuclear
device").
Once the computers have separated out correspondence containing suspicious
terminology the messages are then examined by humans to determine if the
references are consequential. This is still an enormous task - which is
one of the reasons why the National Security Agency (NSA; the top secret
United States spy organization at the heart of ECHELON) has 20,000
personnel; far more than the much better known Central Intelligence
Agency.
Another manner in which ECHELON can be deployed is for the tracking of
predetermined targets. The system does this by logging all communications
originating from a given source. These could be files from a particular
computer, calls from a given telephone and so on.
Nicky Hager, a New Zealand journalist who has been most prominent in
uncovering the workings of the UKUSA pact, also mentions a voice decoding
device said to be used by the NSA. According to one of Hager's sources
ECHELON deploys a program (Oratory) which ostensibly is able to monitor
phone conversations and recognize the use of key words. Hager notes that
he could not independently confirm this claim.
ECHELON has its roots in World War 2, when intelligence agencies from the
five states mentioned above collaborated in analysis of enemy radio
transmissions. In 1947 the quintet formalized these arrangements in the
so-called UKUSA treaty (even this name is somewhat misleading : of the 5
signatories only the US has access to all data collected). Since then the
operation has grown ever larger, fuelled - especially latterly - by
advances in telecommunication technologies. The justification, of course,
was the need to know what the communists were up to.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union ECHELON, in common with the rest of
the military/industrial complex, had to seek a new rationale for its
existence. Given the extreme secrecy surrounding it this was perhaps
easier for ECHELON than for others. On the very rare occasions that the
operation has been challenged it is said that the information it seeks and
gathers pertains to the activities of suspected terrorists. While some
recognize that "terrorist" is a politically loaded term (e.g. Sandinistas
were terrorists because they opposed US interests; contras were "freedom
fighters" because they were pro-US) many people would tend to approve of
"anti-terrorist" activity.
While this is doubtless one of the ends to which ECHELON data is put the
system is also employed for a number of other purposes, all of them
designed to advance Washington's perceived interests. Thus during the
Uruguay Round negotiations on the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade - international trade rules in force from 1945) ECHELON was used to
eavesdrop on closed-door parleys between the non-US delegations and
between emissaries and their home governments. ECHELON has even been used
to aid individual American corporations by, e.g., tipping them of to
details on sealed bids for international contracts.
Beyond its applications to the fields of counter-terrorism and industrial
espionage ECHELON is preoccupied with the defence of US "national
interests", domestically and abroad. This means scanning for any groups or
individuals known or believed to oppose any of Washington's policies
deemed significant.
Those at all familiar with the deeply conservative world view common to
state security apparatuses will not then be surprised to find that ECHELON
has long spied unceasingly on such dangerous organizations as Christian
Aid and Amnesty International. Anyone finding this farfetched has only to
consider that Canadian security forces have investigated the Raging
Grannies as well as Joan Russow, the leader of Canada's Green Party.
Nor is ECHELON the only game in town : in 1997 the US, Canada, Australia,
Norway, New Zealand and the European Union signed a memorandum of
understanding for a whole new international scheme of clandestine
surveillance. Under the EU element of the plan, Enfopol 98, European
telecommunications companies will be required to build tapping connections
into their systems. Each EU country's 'interception interface' must be
capable of allowing member states to tap communications throughout the EU.
One response to revelations concerning these extraordinary assaults on
privacy has been the use of encryption technologies on the Internet. As
the name suggests encryption renders data in coded forms intelligible only
to those privy to the cipher's key. The US, naturally, has campaigned
vigorously against encryption and in December/98 persuaded the 33
signatories of the Wassenaar Agreement to place strict export controls on
such technologies.
For those interested in further reading on this subject I would recommend
Nicky Hager's ECHELON expose Secret Power, published in 1996 by
Covert Action Quarterly. A chapter from Secret Power and
information on how to order the book is available at http://jya.com/echelon.htm
An excellent online resource is the September/98 official report to the
European Parliament on "Technologies of Political Control". This harrowing
document covers a number of topics including : crowd control; prison
control; interrogation techniques; and torture techniques. Its discussion
of ECHELON can be found at : http://jya.com/stoa-atpc-so.htm#7.4
---Antoni