2thirds World: Echelon - global survellance

A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks, backed up by a web of ships, planes and radar 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.

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.

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."

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. There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have access to the full potential of the ECHELON system (NSA) the agency that set it up.

Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use signal intelligence as a key source of information. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.

"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."

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.

The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each
serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats.

The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station
at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.
The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).

In addition to the UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.
As in the United Kingdom, from 1945 onwards NSA and its predecessors had systematically obtained cable traffic from the offices of major cable companies - RCA Global, ITT World Communications and Western Union. Over time, the collection of copies of telegrams on paper was replaced by the delivery of magnetic tapes and eventually by direct connection of the monitoring centres to international communications circuits.

By the early 1970s, the laborious process of scanning paper printouts for names or terms appearing on the "watch lists" had begun to be replaced by automated computer systems. These computers performed a task essentially similar to the search engines of the internet. Prompted with a word, phrase or combination of words, they will identify all messages containing the desired words or phrases.

In the February, 2000 60 Minutes story, former spy Mike Frost made clear that Echelon monitored practically every conversation — no matter how seemingly innocent.

'A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a——a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that.

The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w——was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.'

'This is not urban legend you're talking about. This actually happened?' Kroft asked.

'Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.'

Mike Frost spent 20 years as a spy for the CSE, the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, and he is the only high-ranking former intelligence agent to speak publicly about the Echelon program.

Mr. FROST: Everything from--from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATMs...

KROFT: Baby monitors?

Mr. FROST: Oh, yeah. Baby monitors give you a lot of intelligence.

KROFT: The Menwith Hill Station in the Yorkshire countryside of Northern England, even though on British soil, Menwith Hill is an American base operated by the National Security Agency. It's believed to be the largest spy station in the world.

KROFT: Inside each globe are huge dishes which intercept and download satellite

communications from around the world. The information is then sent on to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where acres of supercomputers scan millions of transmissions word by word, looking for key phrases and, some say, specific voices that may be of major significance.

Mr. FROST: Everything is looked at. The entire take is looked at.

KROFT: The National Security Agency won't talk about those successes or even confirm that a program called Echelon exists.

KROFT: Back in the 1970s, the NSA was caught red-handed spying on anti-war protesters like Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock, and it turns out they had been recording the conversations of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King in the 1960s. When Congress found out, it drafted strict, new laws prohibiting the NSA from spying on Americans.