Worldwide spying network is revealed

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,496820,00.html

[Hmmm, One has to wonder how much longer we will have to wait before
they take the wraps off that UFO's are real? :)  - WK]


Stuart Millar, Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black
Saturday May 26, 2001
The Guardian 

For years it has been the subject of bitter controversy, its existence
repeatedly claimed but never officially acknowledged.  At last, the
leaked draft of a report to be published next week by the European
parliament removes any lingering doubt: Echelon, a shadowy, US-led
worldwide electronic spying network, is a reality.

Echelon is part of an Anglo-Saxon club set up by secret treaty in
1947, whereby the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, divided
the world between them to share the product of global eavesdropping.
Agencies from the five countries exchange intercepts using
supercomputers to identify key words.

The intercepts are picked up by ground stations, including the US base
at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, and GCHQ's listening post at
Morwenstow in Cornwall.

In the cold war, eavesdropping - signals intelligence, or Sigint as it
is known in the trade - was aimed at military and diplomatic
communications. Helped by increasingly sophisticated computers, it has
now switched to industrial, commercial targets - and private
individuals.

Echelon computers can store millions of records on individuals,
intercepting faxes, phone calls, and emails.

The MEP's report - which faced opposition from the British and
American governments and their respective security services - was
prompted by claims that the US was using Echelon to spy on European
companies on behalf of American firms.

France, deeply suspicious of Britain's uniquely close intelligence
links with the US, seized on reports that Echelon cost Airbus
Industrie an 8bn contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994, after the US
intercepted communications between Riyadh and the Toulouse
headquarters of Airbus - in which British firms hold a 20% stake.

The MEPs admitted they had been unable to find conclusive proof of
industrial espionage. The claim has been dismissed by all the Echelon
governments and in a new book by an intelligence expert, James
Bamford.

More disturbing, as Mr Bamford and the MEPs pointed out, was the
threat Echelon posed to privacy. "The real issue is whether Echelon is
doing away with individual privacy - a basic human right," he said.
The MEPs looked at statements from former members of the intelligence
services, who provided compelling evidence of Echelon's existence, and
the potential scope of its activities.

One former member of the Canadian intelligence service, the CSE,
claimed that every day millions of emails, faxes and phone
conversations were intercepted. The name and phone number of one
woman, he said, was added to the CSE's list of potential terrorists
after she used an ambiguous word in an innocent call to a friend.

"Disembodied snippets of conversations are snatched from the ether,
perhaps out of context, and may be misinterpreted by an analyst who
then secretly transmits them to spy agencies and law enforcement
offices around the world," Mr Bamford said.

The "misleading information", he said, "is then placed in NSA's
near-bottomless computer storage system, a system capable of storing 5
trillion pages of text, a stack of paper 150 miles high".

Unlike information on US citizens, which officially cannot be kept
longer than a year, information on foreigners can he held "eternally",
he said.

The MEP's draft report concludes the system cannot be as extensive as
reports have assumed. It is limited by being based on worldwide
interception of satellite communications, which account for a small
part of communications.

Eavesdropping on other messages requires either tapping cables or
intercepting radio signals, but the states involved in Echelon, the
draft report found, had access to a limited proportion of radio and
cable communications.

But independent privacy groups claimed Britain, the US and their
Echelon partners, were developing eavesdropping systems to cope with
the explosion in communications on email and internet.

In Britain, the government last year brought in the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act, which allowed authorities to monitor email
and internet traffic through "black boxes" placed inside service
providers' systems. It gave police authority to order companies or
individuals using encryption to protect their communications, to hand
over the encryption keys. Failure to do so was punishable by a
sentence of up to two years.

The act has been condemned by civil liberties campaigners, but there
are signs the authorities are keen to secure more far reaching powers
to monitor internet traffic.

Last week, the London-based group, Statewatch, published leaked
documents saying the EU's 15 member states were lobbying the European
commission to require that service providers kept all phone, fax,
email and internet data in case they were needed in criminal
investigations.






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