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ECHELON

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This article is about the spy network. For other uses, see Echelon.

ECHELON is a name used to describe a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network said to be run by the UKUSA Community (composed of intelligence agencies of five English-speaking nations), that has been reported by a number of sources including, in 2001, a committee of the European Parliament (EP report[1]). Its existence was first revealed by Duncan Campbell in a 1988 article, "Someone's listening," published in the New Statesman. According to some sources ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts.[2] The EP committee, however, concluded that "the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed" (EP report, p. 11).

A radome at RAF Menwith Hill, a site with satellite downlink capabilities that some believe to be used by ECHELON.

Name

The EP committee stated that "it seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail." (EP report, p. 11) The U.S. intelligence community uses many code names. See, for example, CIA cryptonym.

Margaret Newsham claims that she worked on the configuration and installation of some of the software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, for whom she worked from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California and in Menwith Hill, England.[3] At that time, according to Newsham, the code name ECHELON was NSA's term for the computer network itself. Lockheed called it P415. The software programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX would intercept communications. An image available on the internet of a fragment apparently torn from a job description shows Echelon listed along with several other code names.[4]

History

Reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early sixties, today ECHELON is believed to search also for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealers' plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. But some critics, including the European Union committee that commissioned the EU report, claim the system is being used also for large-scale commercial theft and invasion of privacy.

While details of methods and capabilities are highly sensitive and protected by special laws (e.g. 18 USC 798), gathering signals intelligence (SIGINT) is an acknowledged mission of the U.S. National Security Agency. As of August 2006, their web site had a FAQ page on the topic,[5] which states:

NSA/CSS’s Signal Intelligence mission is to intercept and analyze foreign adversaries' communications signals, many of which are protected by codes and other complex countermeasures. We collect, process, and disseminate intelligence reports on foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements set at the highest levels of government. ... Foreign intelligence means information relating to the capabilities, intentions, and activities of foreign powers, organizations or persons.

In 2001, the EP report (p. 19) recommended that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy. In the UK, the government introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which gives authorities the power to demand that citizens hand over their encryption keys, without a judge-approved warrant. In April 2004, the European Union decided to spend 11 million euros developing secure communication based on quantum cryptography — the SECOQC project — a system that would theoretically be unbreakable by ECHELON or any other espionage system. European governments have been leery of ECHELON since a December 3, 1995 story in the Baltimore Sun claiming that aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the NSA reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[6][7]

Capabilities

The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic (EP report p. 30 ff) During World War II and through the 1950s, high frequency ("short wave") radio was widely used for military and diplomatic communication (The Codebreakers, Ch. 10, 11), and could be intercepted at great distances (EP report p. 33). The rise of geostationary communications satellites in the 1960s presented new possibilities for intercepting international communications. The EP report states (p. 34) "If UKUSA states operate listening stations in the relevant regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all telephone, fax and data traffic transmitted via such satellites." Many, if not most reports on ECHELON focus on satellite interception. (e.g.[8])

The role of satellites in point-to-point voice and data communications has largely been supplanted by fiber optics. As of 2006, 99 percent of the world's long-distance voice and data traffic is carried over optical-fiber cables.[9] The 2001 EP report (p. 37) states that "the proportion of international communications accounted for by satellite links has decreased substantially over the past few years in Central Europe; it lies between 0.4 and 5%." Even in less developed parts of the world, such as Latin America, communications satellites are used largely for point-to-multipoint applications, such as video.[10] The EU report concludes (p. 11) "this means that the majority of communications cannot be intercepted by earth stations, but only by tapping cables and intercepting radio signals, something which — as the investigations carried out in connection with the report have shown — is possible only to a limited extent."

One approach is to place intercept equipment at locations where fiber optic communications are switched. For the Internet, much of the switching occurs at a relatively small number of sites. There have been reports of one such intercept site in the United States. In the past, much Internet traffic was routed through the U.S. and the UK. However this is less true at present. According to the 2001 EP report (p. 33), "95% of intra-German Internet communications are routed via a switch in Frankfurt." Thus for a worldwide surveillance network to be comprehensive, either illegal intercept sites would be required on the territory of friendly nations or cooperation of local authorities would be needed. The EP report points out (p. 27) "interception of private communications by foreign intelligence services is by no means confined to the US or British foreign intelligence services." U.S. intelligence maintains liaison relationships with countries all over the world.[11] Some reports of cooperation involving signals intelligence have come to light since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Monitoring of mobile phones in Pakistan was reportedly used to track Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before he was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003 (How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web, New York Times, March 4, 2004).

Controversy

US intelligence agencies are generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US, and other Western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries.

Conspiracy theorists allege that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance might have been used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilities spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data. There is, however, no evidence to suggest this is the case, and in fact it would be just as illegal as spying directly. The NSA states on its SIGINT FAQ web page that "we have been prohibited by executive order since 1978 from having any person or government agency, whether foreign or U.S., conduct any activity on our behalf that we are prohibited from conducting ourselves. Therefore, NSA/CSS does not ask its allies to conduct such activities on its behalf nor does NSA/CSS do so on behalf of its allies."

The proposed US-only "Total Information Awareness" program relied on technology similar to that supposedly used by ECHELON, and is believed to have been intended to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically with the "taps" already supposedly compiled by ECHELON. It was canceled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.

It has been alleged that in 2002 the Bush Administration extended the ECHELON program to domestic surveillance. This controversy was the subject of the New York Times eavesdropping exposé of December, 2005.[12][13][14][15]

Former CSE agent, Fred Stock, revealed in the Ottawa Citizen (May 22, 1999) that Canada had used the surveillance system known as ECHELON to spy on the French Government over the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon boundary dispute.

Industrial spying

The ECHELON system has also allegedly been used to advance American commercial interests by gathering proprietary information. Examples include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon.[16] [17] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie. [citation needed]

Organization

The UKUSA intelligence alliance has maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Each member of the UKUSA alliance is allegedly assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern mainland China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern mainland China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

As the EP report concludes, it seems likely that, rather than being an all-seeing surveillance system, ECHELON is simply a method of sorting captured signals, and is just one of the many arrows in the intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated bugging and communications interception techniques, satellite tracking, through-clothing scanning, automated biometric recognition systems that can recognize faces, fingerprints & retina patterns.

The U.S. communications-intelligence agency is the National Security Agency (NSA), which is headquartered at Fort Meade, just outside Washington, DC. Although the NSA budget is classified,[18] as of 1996 the agency was estimated to have a global staff of roughly 38,000 and a budget of approximately US$3.6-billion.[19] The UK equivalent organisation is the Government Communications Headquarters GCHQ based at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Further, smaller organisations exist to provide communications technology and expertise (e.g. Her Majesty's Government Communication Centre HMGCC).

By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a branch of the Canadian Department of National Defence. It has a staff of over 1600 people[20] and an annual budget of $225 million CAD.[21] The CSE's headquarters is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in the nation's capital of Ottawa, Ontario, and its main communications intercept site is located on an armed-forces radio station in Leitrim, just south of Ottawa.

On July 6, 2000 the BBC published an article called Echelon: Big brother without a cause? that said:

The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute. [...] Echelon evolved out of Cold War espionage arrangements set up by the US and UK in 1948, and later bringing in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, in their capacity as Britain's Commonwealth partners. The biggest of Echelon's global network of listening posts is at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, where about 30 "giant golf balls" called radomes litter the landscape. The system also boasts 120 American satellites in geostationary orbit. Bases in the five countries are linked directly to the headquarters of the secretive US National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The system's superpowerful voice recognition capability enables it to filter billions of international communications for whatever key words or word patterns are programmed in.[22]

The claim that there are 120 American satellites involved in signals intelligence collection is a common error that apparently originated in a misreading of British researcher Duncan Campbell's report that, as of the year 2000, the UKUSA nations were "operating at least 120 satellite based collection systems", including 40 satellite dishes monitoring commercial communications satellites, 50 monitoring or formerly monitoring ex-Soviet communications satellites, and 30 operating signals intelligence satellites.[23] The presence of errors of this nature casts some doubt on the reliability of this BBC article.

Hardware

According to its web site NSA is "a high technology organization, ... on the frontiers of communications and data processing." In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA was at risk of electrical overload, because of insufficient internal electrical infrastructure at Fort Meade to support the amount of computer equipment being installed.[24]

While there are occasional stories speculating on the types of computers involved,[25] Jonathan Meier, in his biography, has stated of his time at the NSA that:

"Conjecture and speculation were rampant on the [ECHELON] projects, even internally. Truthfully, very few individuals were privy to the logistics involved."

At least one company, Narus, is publicly selling systems for mass surveillance of Internet traffic and one of its systems was apparently installed in 2003 in Room 641A, allegedly an intercept station run by AT&T on behalf of NSA.

In 1999 the Australian Senate Joint Standing Committee on Treaties was told by Professor Desmond Ball that the Pine Gap facility was used as a ground station for a satellite based interception network. The satellites are claimed to be large radio dishes between 20 and 100 meters across, parked in geostationary orbits. The original purpose of the network was to monitor the telemetry from 1970s Soviet weapons, air defense radar, communications satellites and ground based microwave communications.[26] The network is still operational and coordinated by US, British and Australian intelligence communities.[citation needed]

Ground stations

 
Guard tower foundation near Antenna 1 in former Echelon intelligence gathering station at Silvermine, Cape Peninsula, South Africa

Some of the ground stations suspected of belonging to or participating in the ECHELON network include:

Likely satellite intercept stations

The following stations are listed in the EP report (p.54 ff) as likely to have a role in intercepting transmissions from telecommunications satellites:

Possible satellite intercept stations

The following stations are listed in the EP report (p.57 ff) as ones whose roles "cannot be clearly established":

Various other ground stations

 
Radomes at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, UK

The following facilities have been claimed to host various intelligence gathering stations of U.S. intelligence agencies and armed forces or their allies.[citation needed]

Former ground stations

[citation needed]

Trivia

ECHELON functioned as an important plot device in Willam Gibson 's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.

In Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell universe, THIRD ECHELON, a fictional subsect of the National Security Agency, uses "traditional spying techniques" to recover data. Most notable of these agents is Sam Fischer.

See also

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Echelon.

Further reading

  • Keefe, Patrick Radden Chatter: dispatches from the secret world of global eavesdropping; Random House Publishing, New York, NY; ISBN 1-4000-6034-6; 2005

Sources and notes

  1. ^ "European Parliament Report on ECHELON" (PDF). 2001. Retrieved 2006-08-14. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  2. ^ "ECHELON; WORLDWIDE CONVERSATIONS BEING RECEIVED BY THE ECHELON SYSTEM MAY FALL INTO THE WRONG HANDS AND INNOCENT PEOPLE MAY BE TAGGED AS SPIES". 60 Minutes. 2000-02-27. Retrieved 2006-07-02.
  3. ^ Elkjær, Bo (November 17, 1999). "ECHELON Was My Baby". Ekstra Bladet. Retrieved 2006-05-17. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you all my duties. I am still bound by professional secrecy, and I would hate to go to prison or get involved in any trouble, if you know what I mean. In general, I can tell you that I was responsible for compiling the various systems and programs, configuring the whole thing and making it operational on main frames"; "Margaret Newsham worked for the NSA through her employment at Ford and Lockheed from 1974 to 1984. In 1977 and 1978, Newsham was stationed at the largest listening post in the world at Menwith Hill, England...Ekstra Bladet has Margaret Newsham’s stationing orders from the US Department of Defense. She possessed the high security classification TOP SECRET CRYPTO."
  4. ^ "Names of ECHELON associated projects - image without any context". Retrieved 2006-08-27.
  5. ^ "SIGINT Frequently Asked Questions". Retrieved 2006-08-27.
  6. ^ "BBC News". Retrieved 2006-08-27. {{cite web}}: Text "EUROPE" ignored (help); Text "Echelon: Big brother without a cause" ignored (help)
  7. ^ "Interception capabilities 2000". Retrieved 2006-08-27.
  8. ^ "Nicky Hager Appearance before the European Parliament ECHELON Committee". 2001. Retrieved 2006-07-02. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  9. ^ "NSA eavesdropping: How it might work". Retrieved 2006-08-27. {{cite web}}: Text "CNET News.com" ignored (help)
  10. ^ "Commercial Geostationary Satellite Transponder Markets for Latin America : Market Research Report". Retrieved 2006-08-27.
  11. ^ "International Cooperation". Retrieved 2006-08-27.
  12. ^ "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts". New York Times. 2005-12-16. Retrieved 2006-07-02.
  13. ^ "NSA uses ECHELON against US citizens". The Register. 2006-12-16. Retrieved 2006-07-02.
  14. ^ "Posner to the Left: Get a Life". Redstate. 2005-12-22. Retrieved 2006-07-02.
  15. ^ "MOUNTAIN VIEWS: EAVESDROPPING REVELATIONS STUNNING". Niagara Falls Reporter. 2005-12-20. Retrieved 2006-07-02.
  16. ^ Die Zeit: 40/1999 "Verrat unter Freunden" ("Treachery among friends", German), available at archiv.zeit.de
  17. ^ Report A5-0264/2001 of the European Parliament (English), available at European Parliament website
  18. ^ Aftergood, S. (2004). "MSA Extends Budget Secrecy". Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy. 2004 (31). Retrieved 2006-05-13. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help), "Previously, SIGINT resource information was UNCLASSIFIED if the information was 25 years or older but SECRET if less than 25 years old. It is now SECRET for all time frames," according to a February 12, 2001 NSA policy decision obtained by Secrecy News.
  19. ^ Pike, J. (1996). "Intelligence Agency Budgets: Commission Recommends No Release But Releases Them Anyway". Federation of American Scientists Intelligence Resource Program. Retrieved 2006-05-13. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help), "The NSA budget is around $3.6 billion..."
  20. ^ "Population Affiliation Report". Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
  21. ^ "Report on Plans and Priorities 2006-2007 National Defence". Department of National Defence, Canada. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
  22. ^ Asser, M. (July 6, 2000). "Echelon: Big brother without a cause?". BBC News Europe. Retrieved 2006-05-15.
  23. ^ Campbell, Duncan. "Interception Capabilities 2000". Retrieved 2006-12-23.
  24. ^ Gorman, Siobhan. "NSA risking electrical overload". Retrieved 2006-08-06.
  25. ^ Mellor, Chris (15 October 2004). "Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?". Techworld.com. Retrieved 2006-05-17. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link), "Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US government with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it...Hutsell says the SAM systems, 'are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta...'"
  26. ^ Official Committee Hansard, JOINT STANDING COMMITTEE ON TREATIES, Reference: Pine Gap, MONDAY, 9 AUGUST 1999
  27. ^ "Where the Spies are Listening". Ekstra Bladet. 1999-09-18. Retrieved 2006-10-12.
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