Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998


   http://www.usajournal.com/page34.htm

   US Journal Federal Page

   ECHELON: AMERICA'S SPY IN THE SKY

   Patrick S. Poole

   WASHINGTON -- Imagine what reaction the American
   public would have if they were suddenly to discover that
   a top-secret government intelligence agency was
   listening to virtually every phone conversation and
   reading almost every email and fax transmitted across
   the world each day, including their own. Now imagine
   how our European allies would react if they found out
   that this enormous intelligence gathering effort was
   particularly focused upon them by that same US
   intelligence agency. Think they'd be upset? Well, such
   as system exists, and in fact they are rather upset.

   ECHELON. Every American interacts with this system
   on a daily basis, and yet virtually no one on this side of
   the Atlantic is aware of its existence. ECHELON is
   actually a computer component to a global spy system
   controlled by the National Security Agency (NSA) and
   shared with the GCHQ of England, the CSE of
   Canada, the Australian DSD, and the GCSB of New
   Zealand. These organizations are bound together
   under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms
   and text remain under wraps even today.

   But European diplomats are tearing the shroud of
   secrecy, tired of snooping by the US on their citizens.
   The use of ECHELON against European citizens was
   a central topic in a European Parliament STOA report
   published this past January, "Technologies of Political
   Control," which confirmed a decades worth of reports
   by several determined journalists about global spying
   by the NSA.

   This global spy system itself is fairly simple in design:
   position communications receiving stations all over the
   world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and
   fiber-optic traffic, and then process this information
   through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA,
   including voice recognition and OCR technology, and
   look for code words or phrases (known as the
   ECHELON "dictionaries"). Intelligence analysts at each
   of the respective "listening stations" analyze any
   conversation or document flagged by the system and
   forward any relevant information back to NSA
   headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.

   The vast majority of information gathered by this
   system passes through without notice to the
   intelligence agencies. But should you mention the word
   "bomb" in a phone conversation, you can be assured
   that some intelligence analyst will be reviewing the
   transcript of your conversation to ensure that you are
   not engaged in a terrorist plot.

   Now you may wonder how it is that the NSA can
   conduct spying within US borders in violation of its
   charter barring domestic surveillance. This is where
   UKUSA works to their advantage. The two primary
   listening stations at Sugar Grove, West Virginia and
   Yakima, Washington are manned by "on loan"
   intelligence officials from the one of the cooperating
   agencies. If they uncover information regarding a US
   citizen, they walk across the hall and give the
   information to the NSA liaison officer, effectively
   circumventing the domestic surveillance prohibition.

   At this point you're probably thinking that I've read one
   too many issues of the Black Helicopter Gazette or the
   Branch Davidian Times, however, my sources come
   from such "covert" sources as the London Times, the
   New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, La
   Monde and the BBC. Much of the recent press
   coverage has focused on the growing European
   outrage at the use of ECHELON and the British
   participation in the UKUSA intelligence arrangement.

   A May 31st article by Nicholas Rufford in the Sunday
   (London) Times quoted several officials from the
   German, French and Italian intelligence agencies
   decrying the expansion of the NSA facility on the
   windswept North Yorkshire moors of Menwith Hill,
   England (Field Station F83). Menwith Hill is the largest
   spy station in the world, and operated exclusively by
   the NSA. It monitors all communications traffic crossing
   the Atlantic and the European continent.

   Last September in a trial of two Menwith Hill
   trespassers, British Telecomm inadvertently released
   top secret documents to defense attorneys which
   confirmed that the three main digital optical fiber
   cables for the British Isles - each carrying 100,000
   calls each at any time - run through the Menwith Hill
   facility to ease spying against Anglo citizens. Judge
   Jonathan Crabtree immediately lambasted the phone
   company, stating "BT had no business whatsoever to
   disclose anything of the kind...The national interest of
   the United Kingdom, even if it is conducted
   dishonestly, requires this to be kept a secret."

   ECHELON was designed during the heated days of
   the Cold War to combat the Soviet Union's creep into
   Western Europe - a noble cause indeed. During that
   time, however, the Watergate scandal uncovered that
   US law enforcement and intelligence agencies were
   targeting US citizens for surveillance based on their
   political affiliations. In hearings held in 1975, Senator
   Frank Church cautioned against the technological
   power of the NSA, and we should heed his warning
   today:

       "That capability at any time could be turned around on
       the American people and no America would have any
       privacy left. There would be no place to hide. If this
       government ever became a tyranny, the technological
       capacity that the intelligence community has given the
       government could enable it to impose total tyranny.
       There would be no way to fight back, because the most
       careful effort to combine together in resistance to the
       government, no matter how privately it was done, is
       within the reach of the government to know. Such is the
       capacity of this technology."

   It is truly a difficult thing to admit that America - land of
   the free and home of the brave - may be behind the
   largest surveillance effort in the history of mankind. If
   we should become as outraged as the Europeans
   about the use of the NSA's vast technological
   resources against US citizens, one could rightly ask
   what we could actually do about it. Sadly, the answer
   may be - not much. As Lord Acton's dictum goes,
   "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
   As power goes, it does not get any more absolute than
   ECHELON.

   If you think that I'm smoking a little too much strange
   tobacco, I would encourage you to visit this site that
   has links to reprints of many of the mainstream
   European press articles and the European Parliament
   STOA report that discuss ECHELON:

  http://www.qainfo.se/~lb/echelon.htm

   Copyright 1998 Covenant Syndicate.
   Patrick S. Poole is a columnist for USA Journal Online and
   the Assistant Director for Technology Policy at the Free
   Congress Foundation.