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Echelon :: Echelon_Fleet
 

ECHELON is a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network run by the UKUSA Community (otherwise described as the "Anglo-Saxon alliance") . ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes and e-mails nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts .

History

Reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early sixties, ECHELON is today believed to also search for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealers' plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. But some critics claim the system is also being used for large-scale commercial theft and invasion of privacy.

In May 2001, the European Parliament produced a report on ECHELON which, among other things, recommended that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy. In the UK, the government introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which gives authorities the power to demand that citizens hand over their encryption keys, without a judge-approved warrant. In April 2004, the European Union decided to spend 11 million EUR developing secure communication based on quantum cryptography — the SECOQC project — a system that would theoretically be unbreakable by ECHELON or any other espionage system.

ECHELON monitoring of mobile phones in Pakistan was reportedly used to track Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before he was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003.

US intelligence agencies are generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US, and other Western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilites spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data (perhaps even automatically through the ECHELON system without human intervention). The proposed US-only "Total Information Awareness" program relied on technology similar to ECHELON, and was to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the "taps" already compiled by ECHELON. It was cancelled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.

It has been alleged that in 2002 the Bush Administration extended the ECHELON program to domestic surveillance. This controversy was the subject of the New York Times eavesdropping exposé of December, 2005 .

Organization

The members of the English-speaking alliance are part of the UKUSA intelligence alliance that has maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Various sources claim that these states have positioned electronic-intercept stations and space satellites to capture most radio, satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic. The captured signals are then processed through a series of supercomputers, known as dictionaries, that are programmed to search each communication for targeted addresses, words, phrases or even individual voices.

Each member of the UKUSA alliance is assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

Supporters stress that ECHELON is simply a method of sorting captured signals and is just one of the many arrows in the intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated bugging and communications interception techniques, satellite tracking, through-clothing scanning, automated biometric recognition systems that can recognize faces, fingerprints & retina patterns.

The U.S. communications-intelligence agency is the National Security Agency (NSA), which is headquartered at Fort Meade, just outside Washington, DC. Although the NSA budget is classified, "Previously, SIGINT resource information was UNCLASSIFIED if the information was 25 years or older but SECRET if less than 25 years old. It is now SECRET for all timeframes," according to a February 12, 2001 NSA policy decision obtained by Secrecy News., as of 1996 the agency was estimated to have a global staff of roughly 38,000 and a budget of approximately US$3.6-billion, "The NSA budget is around $3.6 billion...". The UK equivalent organisation is the Government Communications Headquarters GCHQ based near Cheltenham. Further, smaller organisations exist to provide communications technology and expertise (e.g. Her Majesty's Government Communication Centre HMGCC).

By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a branch of the Canadian Department of National Defence. It has a staff of 890 people and an annual budget of $110 million CAD. The CSE's headquarters is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in the nation's capital of Ottawa, Ontario, and its main communications intercept site is located on an old armed-forces radio base in Leitrim, just south of Ottawa.

On July 6, 2000 the BBC published an article called Echelon: Big brother without a cause? that said:

Critics accuse the United States' intelligence community and its English-speaking partners of waging what is in effect a new Cold War. At stake are international contracts worth billions of dollars, and at the disposal of the spymasters is an intelligence gathering system of immense power. The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute. Its owners insist the system is dedicated to intercepting messages passed between terrorists and organised criminals. But a report published by the European Parliament in February alleges that Echelon twice helped US companies gain a commercial advantage over European firms. Duncan Campbell, the British intelligence expert and journalist who wrote the report, raises the prospect that hundreds of US Department of Commerce "success stories", when US companies beat off European and Japanese commercial opposition, could be attributed to the filtering powers of Echelon. Echelon evolved out of Cold War espionage arrangements set up by the US and UK in 1948, and later bringing in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, in their capacity as Britain's Commonwealth partners. The biggest of Echelon's global network of listening posts is at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, where about 30 "giant golf balls" called radomes litter the landscape. The system also boasts 120 American satellites in geostationary orbit. Bases in the five countries are linked directly to the headquarters of the secretive US National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Mead, Maryland. The system's superpowerful voice recognition capability enables it to filter billions of international communications for whatever key words or word patterns are programmed in. Mr Campbell believes that when the Cold War ended, this under-employed intelligence apparatus was put to use for economic gain. "There's no safeguards, no remedies, " he said. "There's nowhere you can go to say that they've been snooping on your international communications. It is a totally lawless world." The journalist, who has spent much of his life investigating Echelon, has offered two alleged instances of US snooping in the 1990s, which he says followed the newly-elected Clinton administration's policy of "aggressive advocacy" for US firms bidding for foreign contracts. The first came from a Baltimore Sun report which said the European consortium Airbus lost a $6bn contract with Saudi Arabia after NSA found Airbus officials were offering kickbacks to a Saudi official. The paper said the agency "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information. Mr Campbell also alleges that the US firm Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF. The US strenuously denies passing on commercial information to individual US firms, saying that there are clear laws to prevent it. But former CIA director James Woolsey, in an article in March for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that the US did conduct economic espionage against its European allies, though he did not specify if Echelon was involved. However, he poured scorn on the Campbell allegations that the US was using its technological edge to gain unfair advantage in international business. "We have spied on you because you bribe," the ex-CIA boss wrote. "(European) products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than (their) American competitors'. As a result (they) bribe a lot." But that is not an argument that will have much influence among concerned European countries, which are currently investigating the threat or otherwise posed by the world's most powerful intelligence-gathering machine.

"The United States will occasionally have the United Kingdom keep an eye on individuals in this country inside the US, with the understanding that if Britain turns up any interesting tidbits, it will slide them across the table." - from the book, "CHATTER: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping"

Hardware

According to an article in UK's Techworld, Echelon may be similar to a Texas Memory Systems SAM supercomputer, which incorporates a solid state disk (SSD) and a digital signal processor (DSP) , "Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US government with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it...Hutsell says the SAM systems, 'are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta...'".

Margaret Newsham claims that she worked on the configuration and installation of some of the software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, for whom she worked from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California and in Menwith Hill, England “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you all my duties. I am still bound by professional secrecy, and I would hate to go to prison or get involved in any trouble, if you know what I mean. In general, I can tell you that I was responsible for compiling the various systems and programs, configuring the whole thing and making it operational on main frames"; "Margaret Newsham worked for the NSA through her employment at Ford and Lockheed from 1974 to 1984. In 1977 and 1978, Newsham was stationed at the largest listening post in the world at Menwith Hill, England...Ekstra Bladet has Margaret Newsham’s stationing orders from the US Department of Defense. She possessed the high security classification TOP SECRET CRYPTO.". At that time, according to Newsham, the ECHELON system was based on a VAX, and code named P415 . Its two main programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX would intercept communications. Alongside VORTEX were NEXUS,SCOUT, and NOSTRADAMUS, widely reputed to be the first satellite deployed with a 64-bit processor.

Jonathan Meier, in his acclaimed biography, has stated of his time at the NSA that:

"Conjecture and speculation were rampant on the * projects, even internally. Truthfully, very few individuals were privy to the logistics involved."

Ground stations

Some of the known or suspected ground stations belonging to or participating in the ECHELON network include the following:

The largest and best-attested ground stations

Various other ground stations

The following are various intelligence gathering stations of US intelligence agencies and armed forces or their allies.

Former ground stations

See also

Further reading

  • Hager, Nicky; Secret Power, New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network; Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, NZ; ISBN 0908802358; 1996 (ONLINE EDITION)

  • Keefe, Patrick Radden Chatter: dispatches from the secret world of global eavesdropping; Random House Publishing, New York, NY; ISBN 1400060346; 2005

Sources and notes

National Security Agency | Government databases in the United States | Espionage | Data collection | Privacy of telecommunications | Security | State security | Lockheed Martin

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "ECHELON".

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