From: Para
To: Recipient list suppressed
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 10:04 PM
Subject: The Biggest Brother of all.

The Biggest Brother of all.
Dominic Midgley investigates.

Quietly but relentlessly, the most powerful eavesdropping system in history has been built under the direction of the United States. No phone-call, email or fax anywhere in the world is safe from the long ears of Echelon.
And now the Europeans are up in arms about it.

“Echelon intercepts up to three billion communications every day, including faxes and emails”

“Incensed by the Americans approach, the Germans have given notice to the US staff at Bad Aibling, Germany”

Britain's schizophrenia over the euro may dominate the nation's political debate, but a much more shadowy controversy has already created a deep rift in our relations with the most powerful nation in Europe, Germany And, like our attitude to the euro, our approach to this matter is a litmus test of where our loyalties as a nation lie, with Europe or the US.

Ironically, it centres upon something that officially does not even exist, a top-secret electronic global eavesdropping system known as Echelon. While it is ostensibly an instrument of the American National Security Agency (NSA), designed to counter terrorism and secure the land of the free, European politicians fear that it is being used to help US industry win an estimated £4.5 billion of extra contracts by spying on European competitors.

The fact that Britain is a key partner in the system is putting it at loggerheads with the European Parliament and the Germans in particular.

Incensed by the Americans' approach, the government of Chancellor Schroder has given notice to the hundreds of Americans who work at the world's first satellite spy base at Bad Aibling, south of Munich. This followed a row over US attempts to control the design and distribution of encryption software so that the market would only consist of packages they could break.

Earlier this year, the German military and foreign services were banned from using Microsoft Windows in their IT systems because the program code has never been published and, therefore, there is no guarantee that it does not allow for so-called back-door access by US security services to anyone using it.

Instead of relying on Echelon, the Germans want to see the creation of a joint European satellite receiving station at Torrejon, in Spain. Fearful of a progressive erosion of its stranglehold on the global eavesdropping market, however, the US has mounted a spirited defence of its turf.

Of the hundreds of Americans who will quit Bad Aibling in September 2002, a substantial number are not going back to the US but to RAF Menwith Hill, near Harrogate, which is the largest electronic listening station in the world and doubles as the British end of President Bush's Star Wars project.

Bush will also be pleased at having effectively picked off the Spanish - the putative hosts of the European system - by offering right-wing Prime Minister Jose' Maria Aznar help with his battle against the Basque separatist terrorists, ETA.

And the US has recently extended bilateral links with a number of other European countries including Norway, Denmark and Switzerland and has offered terrorist intelligence-sharing to both the Greeks and the Italians.

Indeed, apart from the Germans, the only big player in Europe not involved with Echelon is France, which would have been enraged by the Spanish deal because ETA surveillance would inevitably involve the interception of communications in Southwest France, where most of the group's cells are believed to be based. Unlike Germany, it has its own me-too surveillance system using listening posts in South America and the south Pacific.

But nothing can compare to the sophistication and reach of Echelon. Britain's intelligence-gathering has been closely linked to the US since 1947 when the UK/US agreement was signed. The Echelon system itself dates back to 1971, but it has become increasingly sinister, as technological advances have made possible the interception of communication on a previously unimagined scale.

It has been suggested that Echelon, co-ordinated by the spooks at Fort Meade in Maryland - or the Puzzle Palace, as it is known - intercepts up to three billion communications every day, including phone conversations, emails, internet downloads, faxes, and satellite transmissions. It can even monitor net browsing histories.

This is a colossal task that involves a number of different media. It is thought that a network of huge radio antennae - based in the US, Britain, Italy, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and elsewhere - intercept satellite transmissions. When a 300ft radio mast was erected at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus earlier this year, the arrest of a protester led to rioting. Some sites are also reputedly responsible for tapping surface traffic.

Emails are allegedly intercepted by what are known as sniffer devices, which collect information from data packets as they traverse the internet via several key junctions.

Underwater tapping equipment laid by American divers is used to monitor cables that carry phone calls across the Atlantic.

Indeed, given the thoroughness of Echelon's approach, one of the few ways to avoid its snoopers appears to be to make a phone call that travels on fibre-optic lines.

The vast amount of information collected is then sifted through sophisticated artificial intelligence aids, such as Memex. A report commissioned by the European Parliament gave a fascinating insight into the process.

Each of the five centres (the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) supplies dictionaries to the other four, listing keywords, phrases, people and places to tag, according to the report. The tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country.

While there is much information gathered about potential terrorists, there is a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in the GATT negotiations.

While some degree of intrusion is inevitable in the interests of national security, the European Parliament, in particular, is concerned about the ways in which the system could be used to distort commercial competition by spying on business communications.

The Temporary Committee on the Echelon Interception System published its report last month. If the system is used purely for intelligence purposes, it says, there is no violation of EU law, since operations in the interests of state security are not subject to the EC treaty. If, on the other hand, the system is abused for the purposes of gathering competitive intelligence, such action is at odds with the member states' duty of loyalty and with the concept of a common market based on free competition. If a member state participates in such a system, it violates EC law.

The report also claims that five per cent of intelligence gathered through non-open sources is used for economic intelligence and that this could enable US industry to earn up to £4.5 billion in terms of contracts.

The battle to prevent this happening is to be fought on a number of fronts. The committee is keen to alert the public and companies to the potential risks and intends to lead from the front. It urges the Commission to support the development of European encryption software and proposes the creation of a network of advisory centres to offer guidance on issues such as information security.

It notes that sufficiently secure encryption systems already exist at affordable prices and that some are available free from the internet. Even private individuals should be urged to encrypt emails. As it says: an unencrypted email message is like a letter without an envelope.

The value of this exercise is doubtful, however, as under Britain's Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (2000), law enforcement agencies are entitled to demand
the handover of encryption keys. Failure to hand over a key on demand is punishable by up to two years in prison.

The committee concedes that other states may have similar systems of their own but
concludes that only France and, perhaps, Russia would have the geographical spread of overseas territories or allies to enable them to operate such a system effectively.

Britain's problem is that it is an accessory to whatever the US is up to and, while the
Americans are not bound by article eight of the EC's Human Rights Act, Britain is. The relevant passage in article eight is the part which refers to proportionality - that is, any infringement of the EU citizen's right to privacy must be balanced by the value of the information obtained by breaching it.

As the rules governing the activities of the US intelligence services abroad are classified, no member state could know whether article eight was being upheld or not.

Part of the remit of foreign intelligence services is to gather economic data, says the
report, such as details of developments in individual sectors of the economy, trends on
commodity markets, compliance with economic embargoes, observance of rules on
supplying dual-use goods, etc. For these reasons, the firms concerned are often
subject to surveillance.

The situation becomes intolerable when intelligence services allow themselves to be used for the purposes of securing a competitive advantage for firms in the home country. It is frequently maintained that Echelon has been used in this way, but no such case has been substantiated.

Campaigners have welcomed the European Parliament's efforts to discover more about it, but they still have reservations. The report has been welcomed by the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. The campaign's spokeswoman, Annie Rainbow, says: "It's only encouraging in so far as they actually went ahead and did it. They didn't have any help when they went over to America to speak to the people in the know. They were kept hanging around and treated quite discourteously"

Meanwhile, the fact is Big Brother is watching you as never before.
============================================================
Punch 137 15th Aug. 2001