http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/33vest.shtml
Listening In
Suppose, this past weekend, you sent an e-mail to a friend overseas.
There's a reasonable possibility your communication was intercepted by a
global surveillance system--especially if you happened to discuss last
week's bombings in East Africa.
Or suppose you're stuck in traffic and in your road rage you whip out a
cell phone and angrily call your congressman's office in Washington.
There's a chance the government is listening in on that conversation, too
(but only for the purposes of "training" new eavesdroppers).
Or suppose you're on a foreign trip--vacation, business, relief work--and
you send off a fax to some folks that Washington doesn't view too keenly.
Your message could be taken down and analyzed by the very same system.
That system is called ECHELON and it is controlled by the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA). In America, it is the Intelligence Network That
Dare Not Be Acknowledged. Questions about it at Defense Department
briefings are deftly deflected. Requests for information about it under
the Freedom of Information Act linger in bureaucratic limbo. Researchers
who mention possible uses of it in the presence of intelligence officials
are castigated. Members of Congress--theoretically, the people's
representatives who provide oversight of the intelligence
community--betray no interest in helping anyone find out anything about
it. Media outlets (save the award-winning but low-circulation Covert
Action Quarterly) ignore it. In the official view of the U.S.
Government, it doesn't exist.
But according to current and former intelligence officials, espionage
scholars, Australian and British investigative reporters, and a dogged New
Zealand researcher, it is all too real. Indeed, a soon-to-be finalized
European Parliament report on ECHELON has created quite a stir on the
other side of the Atlantic. The report's revelations are so serious that
it strongly recommends an intensive investigation of NSA operations.
The facts drawn out by these sources reveal ECHELON as a powerful
electronic net--a net that snags from the millions of phone, fax, and
modem signals traversing the globe at any moment selected communications
of interest to a five-nation intelligence alliance. Once intercepted
(based on the use of key words in exchanges), those communiqués are sent
in real time to a central computer system run by the NSA; round-the-clock
shifts of American, British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand
analysts pour over them in search of . . . what?
Originally a Cold War tool aimed at the Soviets, ECHELON has been
redirected at civilian targetsworldwide. In fact, as the European
Parliament report noted, political advocacy groups like Amnesty
International and Greenpeace were amongst ECHELON's targets. The system's
awesome potential (and potential for abuse) has spurred some traditional
watchdogs to delve deep in search of its secrets, and even prompted some
of its minders within the intelligence community to come forward. "In some
ways," says Reg Whittaker, a professor and intelligence scholar at
Canada's York University, "it's probably the most useful means of getting
at the Cold War intelligence-sharing relationship that still continues."
While the Central Intelligence Agency--responsible for covert operations
and human-gathered intelligence, or HUMINT--is the spy agency most people
think of, the NSA is, in many respects, the more powerful and important of
the U.S. intelligence organizations. Though its most egregious excesses
of 20 years ago are believed to have been curbed, in addition to
monitoring all foreign communications, it still has the legal authority to
intercept any communication that begins or ends in the U.S., as well as
use American citizens' private communications as fodder for trainee spies.
Charged with the gathering of signals intelligence, or SIGINT--which
encompasses all electronic communications transmissions--the NSA is
larger, better funded, and infinitely more secretive than the CIA. Indeed,
the key document that articulates its international role has never seen
the light of day.
That document, known as the UKUSA Agreement, forged an alliance in 1948
among five countries--the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand--to geographically divvy up SIGINT-gathering responsibilities,
with the U.S. as director and main underwriter. Like the NSA--hardly known
until the Pike and Church congressional investigations of the '70s--the
other four countries' SIGINT agencies remain largely unknown and
practically free of public oversight. While other member nations conduct
their own operations, there has "never been any misunderstanding that
we're NSA subsidiaries," according to Mike Frost, an ex-officer in
Canada's SIGINT service, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).
Moreover, all the signatory countries have NSA listening posts within
their borders that operate with little or no input from the local agency.
[snip... please see URL for rest of article.]
-o-
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Received on Sat Aug 15 22:31:17 1998