Shhh�� they're listening - Internet spying

The journalist who first uncovered Echelon, a major electronic spy network, reveals how international surveillance touches us all

Constellations of giant golf balls can be spotted in the most remote locations across the world, from China's Pamir mountains to the swampy north coast of Australia and atop tiny coral atolls in the Indian Ocean. Between 30 and 50 metres wide, these smooth, symmetrical white domes also loom among rice fields in northern Japan and the vineyards and mountains of New Zealand's South Island.

The clusters are the most visible signs of concealed electronic networks that watch the world. Each dome is filled with satellite tracking dishes that silently soak up and examine millions of faxes, email messages, phone calls and computer data that keep business and political affairs afloat. Unknown to the communicators, their messages are running through the domes, into computer networks and onto listeners who may be on the other side of the planet.

As the world has globalized and international communications have become central to human affairs, these listening networks have grown exponentially. They are part of systems called signals intelligence or "sigint," operated by a handful of advanced countries.

For many years, sigint networks were secret: discussion of their existence was strongly discouraged or even forbidden by law in the countries concerned. Now the European Parliament is seriously investigating sigint organizations and their impact on human rights and international trade. Europe is focusing on "Echelon," a system that relies on listening stations in about ten countries to intercept and process international satellite communications. Echelon is just one part of an immense network run by the U.S. and its English-speaking allies--Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand--known as UKUSA after a secret agreement that created the alliance in 1948. Little escapes the UKUSA network, which intercepts messages from the Internet, undersea cables and radio transmissions as well as from monitoring equipment installed in embassies. It even operates in space with a fleet of orbiting satellites.

The history of systems like Echelon is as old as radio itself. The first international scandal over secret listening occurred in the 1920s, when the U.S. Senate discovered that British agents were copying every international telegram sent by American telegraph companies. Today's international networks were founded in the early years of the Cold War, when many western countries began jointly monitoring the former Soviet Union.

Fear not the word "bomb"

Who is listened to, and why? Officially governments only admit that surveillance is aimed at commonly agreed perils such as arms proliferation, terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime. But this is the tip of the iceberg. The main aim is to spy on other governments' diplomatic messages and military plans while collecting information about trade. In fact, in 1992, the U.S. re-adjusted its national intelligence priorities, specifying that 40 percent would be economic or "economic in nature," according to Robert Gates, director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time. International and non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and Greenpeace are also targets.

While UKUSA is the world's largest network, France, Germany and the Russian Federation have similar systems. On a smaller scale, so do countries in Scandinavia and the Middle East, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The budgets of all government sigint agencies probably add up to an annual expenditure of $20 billion, according to my calculations for a European Parliament report published last year.

Despite the extraordinary scale of Echelon and its sister systems, the press has mistakenly reported that the network could intercept "all email, telephone, and fax communications." Nor can it recognize the content of every telephone call. And it is pure fiction that by typing key words like "bomb" in an email, you can trigger a tape recorder in some secret base. For every million messages or phone calls intercepted, less than 10 will be used for intelligence purposes. Most personal communications are ignored except those of "important" individuals, like politicians, top business executives and their families.

The UKUSA network, however, does have the power to access and process most of the world's satellite communications and relay contents to client states. The system provides participating countries an enormous, unfair political advantage, since most developing nations cannot afford the expertise and equipment necessary to protect the privacy and security of their networks.

Spying on the government for the people

News about these systems began to leak out in the 1970s as U.S. intelligence agencies came under scrutiny in the "Watergate" affair, when former president Richard Nixon used electronic bugging against his election opponents. Since then, an increasing number of whistleblowers have revealed the scale and effects of sigint spying.

I first wrote about electronic spying by Britain in the 1970s. While completing a university degree in physics, I'd noted that the countryside was dotted with mysterious radio and satellite stations. In 1976, I uncovered the British dimension to the activities of America's National Security Agency (NSA), which had been revealed the previous year by Congressional enquiries. Officials were aghast that a sacred cow of eternal and indivisible secrecy had been slaughtered. Soon after the article's publication, my American co-author was deported from Britain as a "threat to national security."

The government then arrested me, along with another journalist and our source. The authorities didn't dare accuse us of espionage for a foreign country. Our "crime" was spying on the government for the people. Had the prosecution succeeded, we would have faced heavy jail sentences.

Over the next 20 years, official secrecy relaxed as U.S. Congressional investigations notably turned the spotlight on sigint agencies. In Britain in the 1980s, a controversial ban on trade union membership at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) boomeranged by shifting attention on its spying activities.

The growth of the public information culture on the Internet has taken these developments a step further. Now, even GCHQ and NSA have websites to reassure UKUSA citizens that they are not targets. No such safeguards apply to the rest of the world: these citizens are by default denied the right to privacy. The countries intercepting their communications are free to use the intelligence for whatever they wish.

Such conduct violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Telecommunications Convention, which assures the privacy of international communications. Indeed sigint agencies trample over a long line of treaties.

While individuals probably never know that they have been spied upon, their organizations and countries may pay a high price for it. During trade negotiations, sigint agencies can sweep up the messages of a producer nation to discover their bottom line. Armed with such secret reports, the negotiators for the developed world can force prices down to a minimum. Several governments have recently begun targeting environmental organizations or those protesting unfair world trade.

Even when there are no direct adverse consequences, the mere existence of powerful surveillance systems can exercise a chilling effect on free speech, inhibiting political and cultural development.

As these activities have become more controversial, the U.S. has tried to expand its circle of collaborators. Countries like Switzerland and Denmark are currently building new satellite stations to gather and trade spy data with the U.S. But, as the ongoing European Parliament inquiry indicates, public awareness and concern are growing fast. Yet vigilance is not enough: if countries and peoples are to have equal rights in the global information infrastructure, concerted action must quickly follow.

COPYRIGHT 2001 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group