18 July 1998

Note: the original URL for this report has lapsed; we offer this copy to replace it. Thanks to DR for noting.

    To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
    Subject: echelon/nsa (usjournal)
    Date: Mon, 15 Jun 98 13:47:07 -0700
    From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>

    ------- Forwarded Message

    Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 12:42:55 -0500
    From: jlbtexas <jlbtexas@swbell.net>
    To: Ignition Point <Ignition-Point@majordomo.pobox.com>
    Subject: IP: [Fwd: ECHELON: AMERICA'S SPY IN THE SKY]

    Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 09:18:48 -0600
    To: (Recipient list suppressed)
    From: Robert Huddleston <cabhop@highfiber.com>
    Subject: ECHELON: AMERICA'S SPY IN THE SKY

          http://www.usajournal.com/page34.htm [now lapsed]
         USJournal 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 . ***

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