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• Echelon 1: Quick Virginia, the Dog's Microchip!
• Echelon 2: Trick or Treat?
• Echelon 3: Europe angered by Claims of US Spying

Echelon 1: Quick Virginia, the Dog's Microchip!

We now know that the notorious surveillance system, code named Echelon, set up by UmErUhca's National Security Agency some fifty years ago, comprises a bunch of paranoid wankers with a bottomless well of taxpayer funded money and the world's most powerful super computers. The question is are they zoomed in on our pathetic e-mails, faxes and phone calls? No doubt. But, as Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNeally once said, "There's no privacy. Get over it."

Sounds like good advice. We might just as well get on with our lives as if the snoopers didn't matter. For it seems that with Globalism being what it is, Echelon is more concerned with securing insider information on international corporate deals than it is with how many times you or I type one or more words from their fright list in our e-mails (see SCATT Archives Echelon: The Right Wing Plays God). Millions of e-mails are sent daily; no amount of well-paid conspiracy nutters can handle that. If I send someone an e-mail that includes the line: "most of us are secretly glad that hackers have the potential power to impose denial of service to Globalism's Greedy Gluttons," will my comment be noted and my humble self subsequently arrested? Probably. And if so, so what? Life may not have been meant to be easy, but it was meant to be courageous. So Fuck Echelon.

Of course that's easier said than adhered to. Organisations like Echelon depend on secrets and greed for their very existence. Uncovering our secrets is what they have always used to compromise us into deceiving our comrades, our countries, and our loved ones. Imagine a world without secrets or greed? Impossible of course since secrets are part of being human on this gravity bound planet, where the concept "to know thyself" relates only to consumerism, and our corporate role models teach us that greed is good. If there were no one to catch, the catchers would wither away like Sci-fi ghouls and the rule of paranoid, misanthropic elites would be neutralised.

It is a shame that Echelon's mega search engine cannot be put to something useful. But then, technological boons so often begin as some dark military experiment. As for paranoid conspiracies, they always fail because the conspirators can always be bought. The information they use to entrap or entice others will eventually be used to entrap or entice them.

Meanwhile, Echelon's covers are being pulled everywhere. Our aspirating foreign correspondent, Jerzy Wiçiçiwiç, has offered the article below. We are reprinting a Los Angeles Times article, Europe Angered by Claims of US Spying. See also the end of the article (in SCATT Archives) Echelon: The Right Wing Plays God for several links.

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Echelon 2: Trick or treat?
by Jerzy Wiçiçiwiç

Several months ago, a lone TV commentator, Bill O'Reilly, broke a story on his Fox News Cable TV show, The O'Reilly Factor. It was a scary story dealing with a new high tech system developed by the United States to fight terrorists. While the U.S. government denied any knowledge at the time, enough credible sources were talking to break the rather sketchy story. The basis of what was said on that broadcast was as follows: This new system, code name Echelon, has the capability to monitor any cell or portable phone conversations, FAX transmissions, or e-mail anywhere, any place, at any time. It acts, via satellites, as a giant search engine set off by a top secret list of words (supposedly used by terrorists) enabling the government to listen or read any electronic transmission anywhere on this planet. It was noted on The O'Reilly factor that this system was not only in place but has been up and running for several years. Viewers expressed concern that while this may be very effective in catching terrorists, what about privacy laws guaranteed by the United States Constitution? Within the next two or three weeks Echelon would be a subject again on the O'Reilly Factor with bits and pieces of new information added (i.e. Australia, Britain, and Canada were also involved) and then, as if by magic, the story disappeared.

By and large the mainstream media remained silent. Suddenly, on February 24th, The Los Angeles Times printed a front-page story, "Europe Angered by Claims of U.S. Spying" (reprinted below). Somebody smelled a rat! The basis of the article was that Europeans were afraid that someone was eavesdropping on their e-mail, pagers, and scanning their faxes. The article went on to say, "The suspected snoops mostly work for America's most secretive spy service, the National Security Agency." In essence, the charge was that the NSA is intercepting millions of electronic communications from around the world each day under the pretense of discovering threats to U.S. National security. The Europeans made further charges that this system was being used for corporate spying purposes. A European panel was told of two mysterious successes of U.S. corporations in 1994. "In one," the article stated, "Airbus Industrie, the jet-liner consortium, lost out on a six billion dollar sale to Saudi Arabia after U.S authorities alerted Saudi authorities that Airbus was offering bribes." America's Boeing got the job. The other instance: "U.S. firm Raytheon beat out Thompson-CSF of France for a one billon dollar deal to build radar to keep watch over Brazil's Amazon rain forest." Europe is fuming. America is denying.

On February 27th, CBS's venerated "60 Minutes" ran a 20-minute segment on Echelon. New sources were talking. Echelon's high tech satellites are located at U.S. air force bases around the world. According to a Canadian, who was trained in the spy game by the NSA, Echelon has the capability to cover every square inch of this planet. He cited one example, while working with Echelon during training, that the search engine went off when a mother, talking with her neighbor by portable phone, said that her son "bombed" in a school play. The operator, erring on the side of caution, zeroed in on the poor lady's name and address and entered her as a possible terrorist. It was also disclosed in the "60 Minutes" program that large European corporations are now codifying their transmissions so Echelon cannot eavesdrop. The NSA had the audacity, for the sake of controlling terrorist activity, to request they be given the "key" to the encryption. The Europeans told the NSA where to put that request. Unless the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Australia prove that safeguards and accountability are in place to avoid the misuse of Echelon, the codes will remain.

Denying that this illegal operation goes on is easy. It's an old spy trick left over from the cold war. The U.S. quietly asks Britain to do a bit of dirty work for them and Britain asks Canada to do something for them while Australia asks the U.S. to aid them in a "situation". Each can then safely say to their constituents, "WE didn't do it!"

Yes, the NSA is accountable to a Senate committee. Recently, when that committee asked for information from the NSA on Echelon, they had to kick, yell and scream to get anything. The information was read, in private, by the committee and returned. Nothing, for national security reasons, was released to the press. With such awesome capabilities, who's to say the senators aren't afraid of Echelon? Who are the people at the NSA? The potential for misuse is staggering. Nixon would have been like a kid in a candy store with this system.

Personally, if the U.S. government wants to waste it's time searching my electronic transmissions, I could care less. However, this goes beyond my personal feelings. This flies in the face of the basic privacy laws protected under the constitution of the United States. I feel that democracy and a free floating market economy is a bad form of government but unless something better comes along (it hasn't) then ALL of us should abide by the law and play fair. If, in order to catch cowardly, murdering terrorists, we must invade the privacy of law abiding citizens then, in a way, the terrorists have already won.

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Europe Angered by Claims of US Spying
by John-Thor Dahlburg and Bob Drogin

BRUSSELS--Is there any privacy left in the Internet Age? Not according to some Europeans, who fear that the U.S. government regularly eavesdrops on their phone calls, reads their e-mail, checks their pagers and scans their faxes.

The suspected snoops mostly work for America's largest and perhaps most secretive spy service, the National Security Agency. Responsible for providing U.S. policymakers with foreign "signals intelligence," the NSA intercepts millions of electronic communications around the world each day in a search for threats to national security.

Just whom the NSA listens to--and why--is increasingly a matter of international dispute. Critics,especially in Europe, say a computer network built during the Cold War and code-named "Echelon" is used to indiscriminately spy on civilians and to conduct economic espionage on behalf of U.S. companies.

"How the United States Spies on You" was the alarming headline Wednesday in the French newspaper Le Monde. The same day, a committee of the 15-nation European Parliament heard a British physicist and journalist, Duncan Campbell, claim that Echelon was used to help Boeing Co. and Raytheon Co. beat out European competitors in foreign markets.

Campbell has made the charge before but has offered no evidence. NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel denied the allegation in a telephone interview from agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., adding that such collusion would be illegal.

"We're not authorized to provide intelligence information to private firms for their economic advantage," she said.

Independent experts, at least in the United States, tend to agree. Still, because Echelon's inner workings remain shrouded in secrecy, even an unproven allegation that it has helped U.S. companies in the global marketplace could evolve into a major source of friction between the United States and Western Europe, often-testy partners in the world's largest trade and investment relationship.

Actually, the NSA runs Echelon jointly with Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. And European experts acknowledge that France, Germany and Russia routinely engage in industrial espionage to ferret out the commercial secrets of other countries. But it is Echelon's vacuum-cleaner effectiveness that many here find alarming.

"You have a feeling you are in some kind of James Bond film," a Spanish member of the EuropeanParliament gasped Wednesday as Campbell, equipped with graphics controlled from his laptop computer, addressed the committee about Echelon.

James Bamford, a U.S. journalist now writing his second book on the NSA, said Echelon's supposed omnipotence has become an "urban myth." He said it makes "no sense" that the NSA would risk scandal and censure by illegally feeding secret intercepts to U.S. corporations.

"The NSA's targets are on the front pages of the newspaper every day--Osama bin Laden, North Korea, missile transfers to Iran, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India," Bamford said. "They don't care about [European consortium] Airbus, they don't care about Boeing, they don't care about the Acme Shoe Co. in Des Moines."

By most accounts, Echelon works like an Internet search engine. Powerful computers are based at ground stations in the five countries and search for key words, specific phrases, voices or other target information in data taken from civilian communications satellites overhead. Only a tiny fraction of the vast data stream is thus intercepted.

"The NSA doesn't come in in the morning and twist its dials and say, 'Let's see what we can find,' " said a U.S. official familiar with its operations. "We have government requirements and we have priorities, from terrorism to proliferation."

Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group in Washington that often is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community, said the idea that Echelon literally taps every telephone call, fax and e-mail in every language around the world is "utter nonsense."

The NSA has never publicly confirmed Echelon's existence, but it has been written about since the early 1980s. It only became controversial in January 1998 after a report by the European Parliament claimed that "within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted" by the NSA.

Partly in response, anti-Echelon activists dubbed last Oct. 21 "Jam Echelon Day." They urged e-mail users around the world to send as many messages as possible containing words like "bomb" and "terrorist" in an attempt to overload the NSA computers. It's unclear if they had any effect.

A 1978 U.S. law prohibits the NSA from deliberately eavesdropping on Americans at home or abroad unless the agency can establish probable cause that they are agents of a foreign government committing espionage or other crimes.

Moreover, if the NSA does intercept communications from, to or about a U.S. citizen, the information cannot be disseminated and must be destroyed within 24 hours unless it contains a threat of death or serious bodily harm to someone.

NSA officials also deny that the Echelon partners trade information that they can't legally collectthemselves. "We can't go to the Brits and say, 'Do this for us because we can't do it legally ourselves.' And they can't ask us," said a Defense Department official familiar with the U.S. intelligence community.

The NSA isn't the only target of French ire. French politicians lambasted London and its GCHQ spy service this week for allegedly using Echelon to gain unfair economic advantage. But British Prime Minister Tony Blair denied Wednesday during a visit to Brussels that Britain spied on its European Union partners.

"These things are governed by extremely strict rules, and those rules will always be applied properly," Blair said.

But French hackles rose when Campbell told the European panel that intelligence from Echelon played a role in two commercial successes for U.S. companies in 1994.

In one, Airbus Industrie, the jetliner-building consortium, allegedly lost out on a $6-billion sale to Saudi Arabia after U.S. officials alerted Saudi authorities that Airbus was offering bribes. Boeing got the contract instead.

In a similar case, U.S. firm Raytheon beat out Thomson-CSF of France for a $1.4-billion deal to build a radar to keep watch over Brazil's Amazon rain forest. Le Monde's lengthy articles about Echelon cited these two examples as evidence of inappropriate spying by the U.S.

Despite the lack of proof, Nicole Fontaine, the European Parliament's French president, accused Echelon of violating European citizens' "fundamental rights."

"We cannot stop them, and they will continue," Campbell concluded.

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This article first appeard in the Los Angeles Times. Dahlburg reported from Brussels and Drogin from Washington.

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