This should dispel all doubts not just about if surveilance exists but
also about it's all-pervasiveness.
MichaelP

==========================This is a repost of a Covert Action Quarterly
article on ECHELON.



EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

by Nicky Hager


IN THE LATE 1980S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE US PROMPTED NEW
ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM.
HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY
HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE
PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S
TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.

For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government
Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)  the nation's equivalent of the US
National Security Agency (NSA)  had been helping its Western allies to spy
on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the
New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA
did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had
decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were
providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand's
intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have
worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.

The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South
Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept
secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.

Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept
ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the
world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy
systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for
non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and
individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every
person communicating between (and sometimes within)  countries anywhere in
the world.

It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into
e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the
material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise
information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its
capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular
individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by
indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and
using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass
of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been
established around the world to tap into all the major components of the
international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications
satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio
communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the
US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the
communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search
through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing
pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities,
subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message
intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a
specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they
pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer
finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.

SOMEONE IS LISTENING

The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network,
as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search
through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but
the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers
and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole.
The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals
intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure
names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain,
the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense
Signals Directorate (DSD)  in Australia.

The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to
intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in
1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are
today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective
countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and
phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence
resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the
UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but
each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from its own
stations.

Under ECHELON, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not
only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in
for other agencies. In New Zealand's satellite interception station at
Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate
search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own.
Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the
agencies' keywords, it automatically picks it and sends it directly to the
headquarters of the agency concerned.  No one in New Zealand screens, or
even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the
foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function
for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located
on their soil.

The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically
targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats)
used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is
positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as
a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax,
and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the
communications carried by the Intelsats.

The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the
sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling
operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe,
and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at
Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the
mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down
toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington
State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima
Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats
and to the east.

The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be
intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia.  Their South
Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides
the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in
West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).

Each of the five stations' Dictionary computers has a codename to
distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for
instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and
Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station
has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the
beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around
the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the
interception occurred.

New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA's
Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a
project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five
UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from
all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned
for general UKUSA monitoring.3 Until New Zealand's integration into
ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the
Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to
the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and
writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the
codebreaking programs).

"COMMUNICATION" THROUGH SATELLITES

The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite
communications not carried by Intelsat.In addition to the UKUSA stations
targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations
homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These
stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin
in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just
south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American
satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.

A group of facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications
systems is the final element of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and
radio, the other main method of transmitting large quantities of public,
business, and government communications is a combination of water cables
under the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid
across seabeds between countries, account for much of the world's
international communications. After they come out of the water and join
land-based microwave networks they are very vulnerable to interception.
The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying
messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight)  across the
countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications
across a country. Interception of them gives access to international
undersea communications (once they surface) and to international
communication trunk lines across continents.  They are also an obvious
target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.

Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite
communications use large aerials and dishes that are difficult to hide for
too long, that network is reasonably well documented. But all that is
required to intercept land-based communication networks is a building
situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground
from the legitimate network into some anonymous building, possibly far
removed. Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave
interception from space by United States spy satellites also occurs.4 The
worldwide network of facilities to intercept these communications is
largely undocumented, and because New Zealand's GCSB does not participate
in this type of interception, my inside sources could not help either.

NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A MICROWAVE

A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-authored by one of
its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of
foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 18). It described UKUSA
"embassy collection" operations, where sophisticated receivers and
processors are secretly transported to their countries' overseas embassies
in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in foreign
capitals.

Since most countries' microwave networks converge on the capital city,
embassy buildings can be an ideal site. Protected by diplomatic privilege,
they allow interception in the heart of the target country.  The Canadian
embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps in the American
and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in
many capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990.  Separate
sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy
collection.  On the territory of UKUSA nations, the interception of
land-based telecommunications appears to be done at special secret
intelligence facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well
placed to intercept the large amounts of the world's communications that
cross their territories.

The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world
was in relation to one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central
London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ official spoke anonymously to
Granada Television's World in Action about the agency's abuses of power.
He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer
Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out
of, or through London, feeding them into powerful computers with a program
known as "Dictionary." The operation, he explained, is staffed by
carefully vetted British Telecom people: "It's nothing to do with national
security. It's because it's not legal to take every single telex. And they
take everything:  the embassies, all the business deals, even the birthday
greetings, they take everything.  They feed it into the Dictionary." What
the documentary did not reveal is that Dictionary is not just a British
system; it is UKUSA-wide.

Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US
Menwith Hill station in Britain taps directly into the British Telecom
microwave network, which has actually been designed with several major
microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into
the station.

The NSA Menwith Hill station, with 22 satellite terminals and more than
4.9 acres of buildings, is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in
the UKUSA network. Located in northern England, several thousand
kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it was awarded the NSA's "Station of the
Year" prize for 1991 after its role in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists
in the interception of microwave communications in another way as well, by
serving as a ground station for US electronic spy satellites. These
intercept microwave trunk lines and short range communications such as
military radios and walkie talkies.  Other ground stations where the
satellites' information is fed into the global network are Pine Gap, run
by the CIA near Alice Springs in central Australia and the Bad Aibling
station in Germany.  Among them, the various stations and operations
making up the ECHELON network tap into all the main components of the
world's telecommunications networks. All of them, including a separate
network of stations that intercepts long distance radio communications,
have their own Dictionary computers connected into ECHELON.

In the early 1990s, opponents of the Menwith Hill station obtained large
quantities of internal documents from the facility. Among the papers was a
reference to an NSA computer system called Platform. The integration of
all the UKUSA station computers into ECHELON probably occurred with the
introduction of this system in the early 1980s. James Bamford wrote at
that time about a new worldwide NSA computer network codenamed Platform
"which will tie together 52 separate computer systems used throughout the
world. Focal point, or `host environment,' for the massive network will be
the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.  Among those included in Platform will
be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ."

LOOKING IN THE DICTIONARY

The Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA
communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency
headquarters. This is where all the intercepted messages selected by the
Dictionaries end up. Each morning the specially "indoctrinated" signals
intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa,Cheltenham, Canberra, and
Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary
system. After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory
that lists the different categories of intercept available in the data
bases, each with a four-digit code. For instance, 1911 might be Japanese
diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian CSE), 3848
might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might
be any messages about distribution of encryption technology.

They select their subject category, get a "search result" showing how many
messages have been caught in the ECHELON net on that subject, and then the
day's work begins.  Analysts scroll through screen after screen of
intercepted faxes, e-mail messages, etc. and, whenever a message appears
worth reporting on, they select it from the rest to work on. If it is not
in English, it is translated and then written into the standard format of
intelligence reports produced anywhere within the UKUSA network either in
entirety as a "report," or as a summary or "gist."

INFORMATION CONTROL

A highly organized system has been developed to control what is being
searched for by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the
heart of ECHELON operations and works as follows.

The individual station's Dictionary computers do not simply have a long
list of keywords to search for. And they do not send all the information
into some huge database that participating agencies can dip into as they
wish. It is much more controlled.

The search lists are organized into the same categories, referred to by
the four digit numbers. Each agency decides its own categories according
to its responsibilities for producing intelligence for the network.  For
GCSB, this means South Pacific governments, Japanese diplomatic, Russian
Antarctic activities, and so on.

The agency then works out about 10 to 50 keywords for selection in each
category. The keywords include such things as names of people, ships,
organizations, country names, and subject names. They also include the
known telex and fax numbers and Internet addresses of any individuals,
businesses, organizations, and government offices that are targets. These
are generally written as part of the message text and so are easily
recognized by the Dictionary computers.

The agencies also specify combinations of keywords to help sift out
communications of interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic
cables containing both the words "Santiago" and "aid," or cables
containing the word "Santiago" but not "consul" (to avoid the masses of
routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers
(and combinations), under a particular category, that get placed in the
Dictionary computers.  (Staff in the five agencies called Dictionary
Managers enter and update the keyword search lists for each agency.)

The whole system, devised by the NSA, has been adopted completely by the
other agencies. The Dictionary computers search through all the incoming
messages and, whenever they encounter one with any of the agencies'
keywords, they select it. At the same time, the computer automatically
notes technical details such as the time and place of interception on the
piece of intercept so that analysts reading it, in whichever agency it is
going to, know where it came from, and what it is. Finally, the computer
writes the four-digit code (for the category with the keywords in that
message) at the bottom of the message's text.  This is important. It means
that when all the intercepted messages end up together in the database at
one of the agency headquarters, the messages on a particular subject can
be located again. Later, when the analyst using the Dictionary system
selects the four- digit code for the category he or she wants, the
computer simply searches through all the messages in the database for the
ones which have been tagged with that number.

This system is very effective for controlling which agencies can get what
from the global network because each agency only gets the intelligence out
of the ECHELON system from its own numbers. It does not have any access to
the raw intelligence coming out of the system to the other agencies. For
example, although most of the GCSB's intelligence production is primarily
to serve the UKUSA alliance, New Zealand does not have access to the whole
ECHELON network. The access it does have is strictly controlled. A New
Zealand intelligence officer explained: "The agencies can all apply for
numbers on each other's Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with are the
Americans. ... [There are] more hoops to jump through, unless it is in
their interest, in which case they'll do it for you."

There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the
alliance, will have access to the full potential of the ECHELON system the
agency that set it up.  What is the system used for? Anyone listening to
official "discussion" of intelligence could be forgiven for thinking that,
since the end of the Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA
intelligence machine are terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic
intelligence. The idea that economic intelligence has become very
important, in particular, has been carefully cultivated by intelligence
agencies intent on preserving their post-Cold War budgets. It has become
an article of faith in much discussion of intelligence. However, I have
found no evidence that these are now the primary concerns of organizations
such as NSA.

QUICKER INTELLIGENCE,SAME MISSION

A different story emerges after examining very detailed information I have
been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA
allies and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence
reports New Zealand receives from its four allies each week. There is
quite a lot of intelligence collected about potential terrorists, and
there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive
monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations.  But
by far, the main priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be
political and military intelligence to assist the larger allies to pursue
their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the particular
governments are concerned about can become a target.

With capabilities so secret and so powerful, almost anything goes. For
example, in June 1992, a group of current "highly placed intelligence
operatives" from the British GCHQ spoke to the London Observer: "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 charitable organizations,
including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer
reported:  "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 it is called Mayfly.
By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the source was able to
demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three organizations. "It is then possible
to key in a trigger word which enables us to home in on the telex
communications whenever that word appears," he said. "And we can read a
pre-determined number of characters either side of the keyword."12 Without
actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how the
ECHELON Dictionary system works. Again, what was not revealed in the
publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON
means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred
anywhere in the network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that
the four-digit code covering Third World aid be placed.

Note that these GCHQ officers mentioned that the system was being used for
telephone calls.  In New Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept
written communications: fax, e-mail, and telex. The reason, according to
intelligence staff, is that the agency does not have the staff to analyze
large quantities of telephone conversations.

Mike Frost's expos of Canadian "embassy collection" operations described
the NSA computers they used, called Oratory, that can "listen" to
telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Just as we can
recognize words spoken in all the different tones and accents we
encounter, so too, according to Frost, can these computers. Telephone
calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of
other calls and recorded digitally on magnetic tapes for analysts back at
agency headquarters. However, high volume voice recognition computers will
be technically difficult to perfect, and my New Zealand-based sources
could not confirm that this capability exists. But, if or when it is
perfected, the implications would be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA
agencies could use machines to search through all the international
telephone calls in the world, in the same way that they do written
messages. If this equipment exists for use in embassy collection, it will
presumably be used in all the stations throughout the ECHELON network.  It
is yet to be confirmed how extensively telephone communications are being
targeted by the ECHELON stations for the other agencies.

The easiest pickings for the ECHELON system are the individuals,
organizations,and governments that do not use encryption. In New Zealand's
area, for example, it has proved especially useful against already
vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use any coding, even for
government communications (all these communications of New Zealand's
neighbors are supplied, unscreened, to its UKUSA allies). As a result of
the revelations in my book, there is currently a project under way in the
Pacific to promote and supply publicly available encryption software to
vulnerable organizations such as democracy movements in countries with
repressive governments. This is one practical way of curbing illegitimate
uses of the ECHELON capabilities.

One final comment. All the newspapers, commentators, and "well placed
sources" told the public that New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence
in the mid-1980s. That was entirely untrue. The intelligence supply to New
Zealand did not stop, and instead, the decade since has been a period of
increased integration of New Zealand into the US system.  Virtually
everything the equipment, manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and
so on, used in the GCSB continues to be imported entirely from the larger
allies (in practice, usually the NSA). As with the Australian and Canadian
agencies, most of the priorities continue to come from the US, too.

The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy.
On the day my book arrived in the book shops, without prior publicity,
there was an all-day meeting of the intelligence bureaucrats in the prime
minister's department trying to decide if they could prevent it from being
distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political costs
were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated.

Throughout my research, I have faced official denials or governments
refusing to comment on publicity about intelligence activities. Given the
pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and stonewalling, it is always hard for
the public to judge what is fact, what is speculation, and what is
paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand's role in the NSA-led alliance,
my aim was to provide so much detail about the operations the technical
systems, the daily work of individual staff members, and even the rooms in
which they work inside intelligence facilities that readers could feel
confident that they were getting close to the truth. I hope the
information leaked by intelligence staff in New Zealand about UKUSA and
its systems such as ECHELON will help lead to change. n

CAQ SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

CAQ (CovertAction Quarterly) has won numerous awards for investigative
journalism. In 1996, it won 4 of "Project Censored" top 25 awards for
investigative reporting. CAQ is read around the world by investigative
reporters, activists, scholars, intelligence buffs, news junkies, and
anyone who wants to know the news and analysis behind the soundbites and
headlines.  Recommended by Noam Chomsky;  targeted by the CIA.

Each article in the 64-page magazine, which is in its 19th year of
publication, is extensively footnoted and accompanied by photographs and
graphics.

For a single issue, send $6.
 A one year subscription:
 US $22;
 Canada/Mexico $27;
 Latin America/Europe $33;
 Other areas $35. A two year US subscription is $38

 Please send check or money order in $US to:
 CAQ
 1500 Massachusetts Ave. #732
 Washington, DC 20005, USA

Mail, phone or fax Mastercard or Visa with

address info and expiration date Phone: 202-331-9763 Fax: 202-331-9751
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

CHECK OUT OUR WEB SITES: http://mediafilter.org/caq
http://www.worldmedia.com/caq