..Yep, they're listening!
Since 1981 The U.S. and other countries have been tapping the majority of all voice, fax, and e-mail communications of their own citizens, and sharing the information with their partners. The Echelon system links the spy agencies of five nations in filterning all voice and data traffic worldwide.
"Role and function of POLITICAL CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES"
A draft European Parliament report [19] on the role and function of political control technologies was circulated last month. The Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) describes the worldwide intelligence-gathering and distribution system named Echelon. Much of the current knowledge of Echelon came out of New Zealand, where in 1996 Nicky Hagar published the book "Secret Power." See this summary [20] published in CovertAction Quarterly. Echelon coordinates the signals intelligence of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Echelon system listens in real-time, from earth and space, to the vast majority of all e-mail, fax, telex, and voice traffic worldwide and filters it for words or phrases of interest to one of the five countries' intelligence services. Each country provides a "dictionary" of words and phrases, as well as a target list of organizations or persons to be monitored. There are no external controls to determine who may be monitored: target requests are routinely serviced and the results delivered back to the requesting country.
The STOA report covers
- Interrogation, Torture Techniques and Technologies
- The Role & Function of Political Control Technologies
- Developments in Surveillance Technologies
- New Prison Control Systems
- Recent Trends and Innovations
- Further Research
British MEP Glyn Ford is the sponsor of the STOA report
which originated out of the European Parliament.
For a hardcopy to be sent by mail, fax a request to
STOA in Luxembourg: 352-4300-22418.
Or contact Glyn Ford's staff
ISDN anyone?
Recently ISDN has been made cheaply available for residential as well as business service. What is not widely known is that built in to the international CCITT protocol is the ability to take phones 'off hook' and listen into conversations occurring near the phone, without the user being aware that it is happening. (SGR Newsletter, No.4, 1993) This effectively means that a national dial up telephone tapping capacity is built into these systems from the start. ISDN is not limited to just allowing digital devices (e.g. fax, modem, telephone) to share the system with existing lines. It also allows data originating from those devices to be shared with the eavesdroppers. Appropriately, this technology has been named "System X".
Similarly, the digital technology required to pinpoint mobile phone users for incoming calls, means that all mobile phone users in a country when activated, are mini-tracking devices, giving their owners whereabouts at any time and stored in the company's computer for up to two years. Coupled with System X technology, this is a custom built mobile track, tail and tap system par excellence. (Sunday Telegraph, 2.2.97).
Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK.
The system was first uncovered in the 1970's by a group of researchers in the UK (Campbell, 1981). The researchers used open sources but were subsequently arrested under Britain's Official Secrets legislation. The 'ABC' trial that followed was a critical turning point in researcher's understanding of the technology of political control.
Other work on what is now known as "signals intelligence" was undertaken by researchers such as James Bamford, which uncovered a billion dollar world wide interceptions network, which he nicknamed 'Puzzle Palace'.
A recent work by Nicky Hager, Secret Power, (Hager,1996) provides the most comprehensive details to date of a project known as ECHELON. Hager interviewed more than 50 people concerned with intelligence to document a global surveillance system that stretches around the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, Internet, e-mail, faxes and telexes. These sites are based at Sugar Grove and Yakima, in the USA, at Waihopai in New Zealand, at Geraldton in Australia, Hong Kong, and Morwenstow in the UK.
The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like Memex to find key words.
Five nations share the results with the US as the senior partner under the UKUSA agreement of 1948. Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are very much acting as subordinate information servicers. Each of the five centres supply "dictionaries" to the other four of keywords, phrases, people and places to "tag" and the tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country.
Whilst 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.
But Hager found that by far the main priorities of this system continued to be military and political intelligence applicable to their wider interests. Hager quotes from a "highly placed intelligence operatives" who spoke to the Observer in London. "We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charities, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes its called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to third world aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three organisations.
With no system of accountability, it is difficult to discover what criteria determine who is not a target.
More info:
S o u r c e s TBTF home and archive at http://www.tbtf.com/ . To subscribe send the message "subscribe" to tbtf-request@world.std.com.
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Key words to assist those who may be scanning this for applicability:
And in conclusion, courtesy of meta-X spook (see TBTF for 4/13/95) [21], let me CIA plutonium Peking DES kibo Panama NSA PLO domestic radar disruption Khaddafi supercomputer BATF North Korea Serbian just state that our great country will never be truly free until Nazi genetic Ft. Meade South Africa nuclear plutonium Ft. Bragg colonel cryptographic Kennedy FBI Delta Force radar Uzi Mossad bomb Marxist strategic AK-47 terrorist.
Government's fear of electronic encryption (secrecy) is not a modern phenomena.
It also existed in the 28th Congress.
"...What was this telegraph to do? Would it transmit letters and newspapers? Under what power in the constitution did Senators propose to erect this telegraph? He was not aware of any authority except under the clause for the establishment of post roads. And besides the telegraph might be made very mischievous, and secret information after communicated to the prejudice of merchants."
Source: Statement of Senator George McDuffie, Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd session, 1344-45. p. 366.
The above was found at http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.html#loc050