February 24, 1998

By BRUNO GIUSSANI


European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses

A massive telecommunications interception network operates within Europe
and, according to a new study circulating on the Internet, "targets the
telephone, fax  and e-mail messages of private citizens, politicians, trade
unionists and companies alike."

The report says that the network has the ability to tap into almost all
international telecommunications as well as parts of domestic phone traffic
and is apparently operated by intelligence agencies without any mechanism
of democratic control.

The network, dubbed Echelon, is described in a new study by the European
Parliament titled "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control."

The 112-page document, dated January 6, 1998, is considered an internal
working paper and, therefore, has not been posted on the parliament's own
Web server. While paper copies of the report have been made public, in the
last three weeks, it has begun to be reproduced on the Internet by civil
liberties advocates and is now available from several Web sites.

The report was written by Steve Wright, an analyst with the Omega
Foundation, a British human rights organization, on behalf of a research
unit of the European Parliament known as STOA (Scientific and Technological
Options Assessment). [The European Parliament is the legislative body of the 
European Union (EU), an economic and political alliance of 15 countries.]

According to the report, in the last few years many governments have
spent huge sums on the development of new technologies   from surveillance
systems to paralyzing weapons  for their police and security forces.

While the adoption of these technologies may have legitimate law
enforcement functions and may be relatively harmless when accompanied by
strong regulation and accountability mechanisms, "without such democratic
controls they provide powerful tools of oppression," the report states. 
Outmatched by the speed and complexity of technological innovation, the fear is 
that these controls have been quickly weakening in recent years.

The rapid and unchecked proliferation of surveillance devices among both the
private and public sector presents today "a serious threat to civil
liberties in Europe" and could have "awesome implications," the document
stresses.

Drawing from sources as diverse as academia, intelligence agencies and
non-governmental organizations, the STOA study offers a rare description and
evaluation of the technologies of political control  what it calls weaponry
aimed "as much at hearts and minds as at body."

This includes electronic surveillance systems; data gathering, processing
and filtering devices; biometric and other human identity recognition tools;
so-called "less-lethal" weapons for crowd control; new prison control
systems, and torture and execution techniques.

One core trend identified by Wright has been "towards a militarisation of
the police and a paramilitarisation of military forces in Europe," meaning
that the technologies used by police and the army converge and become "more
or less indistinguishable."

This "parallels a political shift in targeting," the report adds. Instead of
investigating crime (which is a reactive activity) law enforcement agencies
are now increasingly "tracking certain social classes and races of people
living in the red-lined areas before any crime is committed"  a form of
pre-emptive policing dubbed "data-veillance" and based on military models of
gathering huge amounts of low-grade intelligence and digging out deviant
patterns.

The term data-veillance covers an impressive range of methods and devices,
including vision technology; bugging and interception techniques; satellite
tracking; through-clothing human scanning; automatic fingerprinting; human
recognition systems that can recognize genes, odor and retina patterns, and
biometric systems.

Electronic surveillance technology, the systems that can monitor the
movements of individuals and their communications, "is one of the areas
where outdated regulations have not kept pace with an accelerating pattern
of abuses" by law enforcement agencies and private companies, Wright says in
the report.

The report paints a frightening picture of an Orwellian world. For example,
it states that Britain has set up the first DNA databank, and at least one
political party is suggesting "to DNA-profile the nation from birth."
Face-recognition systems "are perhaps five years off." Parabolic and laser
microphones can detect distant conversation, even behind closed windows.
Stroboscopic cameras can individually photograph all the participants in a
march.

Among the more futuristic scenarios portrayed in the study, robots called
neural network bugs, built like small cockroaches, can crawl to the best
location for surveillance. Researchers are now working on controlling and
manipulating real cockroaches by implanting microprocessors and electrodes
in their bodies. "The insects can be fitted with micro-cameras and sensors
to reach the places other bugs can't reach," Wright says.

Cameras used for traffic monitoring can easily be adapted to security
surveillance. "Democratic accountability is the only criterion which
distinguishes a modern traffic control system from an advanced dissident
capture technology," Wright states, adding that several companies have been
exporting traffic control devices to Lhasa in Tibet recently.

"Lhasa does not as yet have any traffic control problem," he adds.

The most explosive section of the report discusses the Echelon system.

As Wright describes it, this global surveillance machine "stretches around
the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites
used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, Internet traffic,
e-mail, faxes and telexes," according to the report. Unlike many of the
electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, Echelon "is designed
primarily for non-military targets: governments, organisations and
businesses in virtually every country."

Wright says the system works by indiscriminately intercepting industrial 
quantities of communications and then siphoning out what could be valuable, 
using artificial intelligence aids and keywords searches.  Dictionaries of 
keywords, phrases and people are defined by each of the five countries 
participating in network: the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and 
Australia, yet the main actor appears to be the United States National Security 
Agency.

"Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are 
routinely intercepted by the NSA," the report charges, acknowledging that 
while there is much information gathered about potential terrorists through 
such methods, there is a lot of economic intelligence that gets caught, as well.

Wright also reports that in 1995 the EU states signed a memorandum of
understanding (which remains classified) to set up a new international
telephone tapping network.

The document apparently reflects concerns among European intelligence
agencies that modern scrambling and coding technology  could prevent them
from tapping private communications. The EU governments agreed to cooperate
closely on this issue with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "yet early
minutes of these meetings suggest that the original initiative came from
Washington,"  Wright's report says.

Under the agreement, he says, "Network and service providers in the EU
will be obliged to install 'tappable' systems and to place under 
surveillance any person or group when served with an interception 
order."

These plans have "never been subject to proper parliamentary
discussion [in Europe]," Wright stresses. He suggests that the time
has now arrived to bring much of this technology back within the reach
of democratic supervision and accountability.

The basic assumption behind the deployment of these technologies of
political control is that they enhance policing capacities and allow a
faster response time and a greater cost-effectiveness in fighting crime.

In addition, some people feel that only those with something to hide need to
fear the enlarged data-gathering capacities of police computers.

Yet the bookkeeping and paternalistic approach of the phenomenon cannot be
satisfying in democratic societies. There is a pressing need to determine
the extent to which these new technologies are about political and social
control rather than citizen protection, the report says.

"Explicit and publicly available criteria should be agreed upon for deciding
who should be targeted for surveillance and who should not, how such data is
stored, processed and shared," Wright writes.

"The European parliament should reject proposals from the United States for
making private messages via the Internet accessible to U.S. intelligence
agencies," he adds. Nor should it agree on new encryption controls without
considering "the civil and human rights of European citizens and the
commercial rights of companies to operate  without unwarranted surveillance
by intelligence agencies operating in conjunction with multinational
competitors"  an obvious reference to American agencies, which are often
perceived as sharing collateral economic intelligence with U.S. companies.

Bruno Giussani at giussani@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

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