- "Today it gives 55,000 British and American operatives
access to data gathered by 120 spy satellites worldwide. Every minute of
every day, the system can process three million electronic communications."
-
- One after another the shutters in Washington came down
on the European Union delegation as soon as they mentioned Echelon.
-
- No one in the United States Government would admit that
the electronic spying system, the most powerful in the world, even existed.
And if it did, they made clear, they would rather not go into it.
-
- The National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the State Department and even the Department of Commerce refused
to talk to the committee of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on
a fact-finding trip last month.
-
- Stonewalled wherever they turned, the MEPs left, angry
and frustrated, cutting short their trip.
-
- Now, with the European Parliament's groundbreaking report
into the global spy network published in Brussels, the MEPs who were left
out in the cold know whom to blame. Not just the American authorities but
the British Government, they are convinced, colluded in the obstruction.
-
- The 108-page report, the fruit of seven months' investigation
by the Parliament, does nothing to dampen the controversy long associated
with the clandestine network and raises fresh, disturbing questions.
-
- Echelon was set up during the Cold War by the United
States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to collate electronic
intelligence. The network has grown to keep pace with the explosion in
information technology.
-
- Today it gives 55,000 British and American operatives
access to data gathered by 120 spy satellites worldwide. Every minute of
every day, the system can process three million electronic communications.
-
- The spy network is very much an Anglo-American show,
with the Americans as senior partners, run from Fort Meade in Maryland,
Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, and GCHQ at Cheltenham. In Germany, 750 Americans
operate an intercept station near Bad Aibling, taken over by the US Army
in 1952.
-
- New Zealand espionage expert and author Nicky Hager says
New Zealand's Waihopai surveillance facility near Blenheim eavesdrops on
two major satellites funnelling enormous amounts of information across
the Pacific, whether between Asia and the Americas or between countries
on Asia's Pacific edge.
-
- This daily barrage is fed through a computer system which
sifts out messages containing keywords or individual names and divides
them between various intelligence agencies for further study.
-
- Officers of New Zealand's largest intelligence agency,
the GCSB or Government Communications Security Bureau, sit in Wellington
checking screen after screen of communications from Pacific sources.
-
- "The bureau has a name designed to be forgotten,"
says Hager. "Despite a best-selling book about them, very few people
know they exist."
-
- The communications passed to the GCSB can come from any
Pacific nation or source south of the equator and east of Papua New Guinea.
-
- Other data received in New Zealand, but obtained from
different areas, is never sighted here but sent direct to Washington or
Canberra.
-
- Hager doubts whether there is any political will in New
Zealand to withdraw from this alliance as it would fundamentally alter
our relationship with the United States.
-
- One of Europe's main worries is the claim that Echelon
gathers industrial espionage from European companies for American rivals.
-
- Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are said to have beaten
France to a $6 billion contract to supply Airbus jets to Saudi Arabia,
thanks to Echelon intercepts of faxes and phone calls.
-
- There has also been scathing criticism of Britain - and
its obsession with secrecy - from its European partners for siding with
the "Anglo-Saxon" club rather than Europe in espionage matters.
-
- The MEPs were alarmed to learn that their mobile phones
were being used to track their movements and could be transformed into
bugging devices.
-
- At least they can take some comfort from claims that
the network is just as capable of being used against the United States.
-
- A former employee of Canada's security agency has claimed
that Canadian spies once managed to overhear the American ambassador in
Ottawa discussing a pending trade deal with China on a mobile phone.
-
- The information gained was used to undercut the Americans
and land a $2.5 billion Chinese grain sale.
-
- But while the European report is revealing, the authors
did not vindicate all the claims made about the spy system. They failed
to prove conclusively that Echelon had been used by the United States,
or indeed Britain, for commercial spying on European competitors. And its
scope is not as extensive as had been feared. But the report warned businesses
and ordinary individuals that they were being spied on and that users should
encrypt their e-mails. It said: "That a global system for intercepting
communications exists ... is no longer in doubt. They do tap into private,
civilian and corporate communications."
-
- Nicky Hager expects increasing concern over Echelon and
similar networks to encourage more individuals and businesses to turn to
encryption, which will in turn pressure communication networks to offer
such a service to customers.
-
- "Moving to encryption is a similar step to deciding
to start using e-mail. It's very simple, but it isn't a great hassle to
intelligence agencies yet because hardly anyone knows about them other
than the very people the United States says Echelon is aimed at, such as
terrorists shipping plutonium."
-
- Hager uses an apparently unbreakable encryption system
which can be easily downloaded free from www.pgpi.org.
-
- "As long as the person you are e-mailing has the
same system, you simply push a button and the message can be decoded in
20 seconds. To break the encryption would take about 100 years and I don't
think you'd be around to worry about it."
-
- But even as the means to negate electronic surveillance
becomes available, Hager fears the United States is moving to another level.
-
- The Navy's newly launched $2.5 billion Seawolf-class
attack submarine USS Jimmy Carter is the third of a class suspected of
being capable of attaching tapping devices directly to the fibre-optic
cables which criss-cross our oceans.
-
- The 106.7m, 9297-tonne nuclear-powered vessel can dive
to a depth of 800m where it can deploy minisubs and remote-controlled underwater
vehicles.
-
- Such taps would be extremely difficult to detect and
easy to replace.
-
- But if the European Union appears powerless to do much
about such developments within America, the members' report has pointed
out that Britain's role could breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
-
- And, as the report was being debated in Brussels, the
MEPs voiced their suspicion of a British hand in ensuring their investigation
in Washington DC went nowhere.
-
- Gerhard Schmid, the vice-president of the European Parliament,
who drafted the report for the MEP Echelon committee, said: "We think
perhaps it was one-half of this famous Anglo-American partnership telling
the people in Washington not to be too open with us."
-
- Elly Plooij-van Gorsel, vice-chairwoman of the committee,
added: "The way we were treated in Washington was very insulting to
a senior mission. We were very surprised when all these meetings began
to be cancelled by officials using exactly the same language.
-
- "The visit had been arranged by the EU mission in
the US and we had been told it was all right. We are very concerned about
the role we think the British Government has played in this. There is a
lot of concern it was they who had told the Americans not to speak to us.
-
- "But we must also question the behaviour of the
British. When Britain held the [EU] presidency in 1997, I asked about Echelon
and I was told it did not exist.
-
- "Britain will have to decide where it wants to stand.
How can we have a common European Union security policy if they continue
with this attitude towards other member states."
-
- The committee members did meet the oversight committee
of Congress and former intelligence officials and civil liberties groups.
-
- "Not one Government official would even admit even
the name Echelon," said Ms Plooij-van Gorsel. "The only person
who did was James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA. He said it was
just a codename for a search engine."
-
- Mr Woolsey had conceded that the United States did spy
on European companies "but only because they bribe" to get lucrative
contracts.
-
- And although European states criticise Britain and the
United States, they have been busy building their own electronic eavesdropping
networks.
-
- France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Denmark all
have similar systems in place. But Echelon and the British connection is
a difficult field for British members of the European Parliament.
-
- One MEP, Neil MacCormick, says: "Obviously, national
security should be protected, but the UK Government must be aware of its
obligation not just towards human rights but member states of the European
Union."
-
- The four-year search for the truth about Echelon began
in one of the more obscure outposts of the European Parliament, the Scientific
and Technological Options Assessments unit, which keeps MEPs abreast of
complicated areas of new technology.
-
- In the 1970s the Labour MEP Glyn Ford had read a book
called The Technologies of Political Control. He wondered whether the Parliament's
researchers could lift the lid on the murky world of electronic surveillance.
-
- Mr Ford pulled out of the race for an official position
on the committee after eyebrows were raised in the Labour Party hierarchy.
-
- This week he said he did not want to pursue past agendas
but was looking forward.
-
- "Maybe you cannot prove that Echelon exists but
you can make a reasonable judgment. There are good reasons to believe it
exists and it has been abused. There may not be hard evidence that it has
been abused, but we want a system to guarantee that it isn't."
-
- Mr Ford and his colleagues say the work raises fundamental
issues about respect for individual rights.
-
- But Echelon is not always the all-pervasive, powerful
monster sometimes portrayed.
-
- "Often," he says, "it just takes them
so long to analyse this stuff that it is useless. Maybe in three weeks,
they will find out that the Independent is planning to write an article
on Echelon today."
|
