I. ECHELON PART ONE: THE NSA’s GLOBAL SPYING NETWORK by Patrick Poole
Using a system of satellites and supercomputers that recognize code-words, the US National Security Agency and its UKUSA partners keep governments, corporations and citizens under constant surveillance.
In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, code-named ECHELON, which captures and analyses virtually every phone call, fax, e-mail and telex message sent anywhere in the world.
ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with:
the General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of the UK
the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada
the Defense Security Directorate (DSD) of Australia
the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand
These organizations are bound together under a secret agreement, the UKUSA Security Agreement of 1948, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today.
The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fibre-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the NSA’s massive computer capabilities-including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs-and look for code-words or code-phrases (using what’s known as the ECHELON Dictionary) that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective “listening stations” maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept.
But apart from directing their ears towards terrorists and rogue states, ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of “unpopular” political affiliation or for no probable cause at all-in violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution-is consistently impeded by very elaborate and complex legal arguments and privilege claims by the intelligence agencies and the US Government. The guardians and caretakers of our liberties, our duly elected political representatives, give scarce attention to these activities, let alone to the abuses that occur under their watch.
Among the activities that the ECHELON targets are:
Political spying: Since the close of World War II, the US intelligence agencies have developed a consistent record of trampling the rights and liberties of the American people. Even after the investigations into the domestic and political surveillance activities of the agencies that followed in the wake of the Watergate fiasco, the NSA continues to target the political activity of “unpopular” political groups and our duly elected representatives.
One whistleblower charged, in a 1988 Cleveland Plain Dealer interview, that while she was stationed at the Menwith Hill facility in the 1980s she heard real-time intercepts of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. A former Maryland Congressman, Michael Barnes, claimed in a 1995 Baltimore Sun article that under the Reagan Administration his phone calls were regularly intercepted-something he discovered only after reporters had been passed transcripts of his conversations by the White House. One of the most shocking revelations came to light after several GCHQ officials became concerned about the targeting of peaceful political groups, and told the London Observer in 1992 that the ECHELON Dictionaries targeted Amnesty International, Greenpeace and even Christian ministries.
Commercial espionage: Since the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, the intelligence agencies have searched for a new justification for their surveillance capability in order to protect their prominence and their bloated budgets. Their solution was to redefine the notion of “national security” to include economic, commercial and corporate concerns. The Office of Intelligence Liaison was created within the US Department of Commerce to forward intercepted materials to major US corporations. In many cases, the beneficiaries of this commercial espionage effort are the very companies that helped the NSA develop the systems that power the ECHELON network. This incestuous relationship is so strong, that sometimes this intelligence information is sued to push other American manufacturers out of deals in favor of these mammoth US defense and intelligence contractors who frequently are the source of major cash contributions to both political parties.
While signals intelligence technology was helpful in containing and eventually defeating the Soviet empire during the Cold War, what was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world. The European Parliament is now asking whether the ECHELON communications interceptions violate the sovereignty and privacy of citizens in other countries. In some cases, such as at the NSA’s Menwith Hill station In England, surveillance is conducted against citizens on their own soil and with the full knowledge and cooperation of their government.
This report suggests that Congress pick up its long-neglected role as watchdog of the constitutional rights and liberties of the American people, instead of play its current role as lap dog to the US intelligence agencies. Congressional hearings, similar to the Church and Rockefeller Committee hearings held in the mid-1970s, ought to be held to find out to what extent ECHELON targets the personal, political, religious and commercial communications of US citizens.
The late US Senator Frank Church warned that the technology and capability embodied in the ECHELON system represent a direct threat to the liberties of the American people. Left unchecked, ECHELON could be used by either the political elite or the intelligence agencies themselves as a tool to subvert the civil protections of the Constitution and to destroy representative government in the United States.
ECHELON AND THE UK USA AGREEMENT
US National Security Agencies Remote Mind Control Head-Quarters at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, England.
The culmination of the Cold War conflict brought home hard realities for many military and intelligence agencies who were dependent upon the confrontation for massive budgets and little civilian oversight. World War II Allied political and military alliances had quickly become intelligence alliances in the shadow of the Iron Curtain that descended upon eastern Europe after the war.
But for some intelligence agencies, the end of the Cold War just meant a shift in mission and focus, not a loss of manpower or financial resources. One such US governmental organization is the National Security Agency. Despite the disintegration of communism in the former Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe, the secretive NSA continues to grow at an exponential rate in terms of budget, manpower and spying abilities. Other countries have noticed the rapid growth of NSA resources and facilities around the world, and have decried the extensive spying upon their citizens by the United States.
A preliminary report, released by the European Parliament in January 1998, detailed research conducted by independent researchers that uncovered a massive US spy technology network that routinely monitors telephone, fax and e-mail information on citizens all over the world, but particularly in the European Union (EU) and Japan. Titled “An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control”, this report, issued by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) Committee of the European Parliament, caused a tremendous stir in the establishment Press in Europe. At least one major US media outlet, the New York Times also covered the issuance of the report.
The STOA report also exposed a festering sore-spot between the US and its EU allies. The widespread surveillance of citizens in EU countries by the NSA has been known and discussed by European journalists since 1981. The name of the system in question is ECHELON, and it is one of the most secretive spy systems in existence.
ECHELON is actually a vast network of electronic spy stations located around the world and maintained by five countries:
the USA
the UK
Canada
Australia
New Zealand
These countries, bound together in a still-secret agreement, UKUSA [pronounced “you-koo-za”], spy on each other’s citizens by intercepting and gathering electronic signals of almost every telephone call, fax and e-mail message transmitted around the world daily. These signals are fed through the NSA’s massive supercomputers that look for certain keywords called the ECHELON Dictionaries.
Most of the details of this mammoth spy system-and the UKUSA agreement that supports it-remain a mystery. What is known of ECHELON is the result of the efforts of journalists and researchers around the world, who have laboured for decades to uncover the operations of our governments’ most secret systems. The 1996 publication of New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager’s book, Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network, provided the most detailed look at the system and inflamed interest in ECHELON as well as the debate regarding its propriety.
This paper examines the expanse of the ECHELON system, along with the intelligence agreements and exchanges that support it. The operation of ECHELON serves the NSA’s goal of spying on the citizens of other countries, while also allowing them to circumvent the prohibition on spying on US citizens. ECHELON is not only a gross violation of the US Constitution, but it violates the goodwill of the United States’ allies and threatens the privacy of innocent civilians around the world. The existence and expansion of ECHELON is a foreboding omen regarding the future of constitutional liberties. If a US Government agency can willingly violate the most basic components of the Bill of Rights without so much as congressional oversight and approval, we have reverted from a republican form of government to tyranny.
THE UKUSA PARTIES
The success of the Allied military effort in World War II was due in no small part to successes in gathering enemy intelligence information and cracking those military and diplomatic messages. In addition, the Allied forces were able to create codes and encryption devices that effectively concealed sensitive information from prying Axis-power eyes. These coordinated signal intelligence (SIGINT) programs kept Allied information secure and left the enemies vulnerable.
But at the close of the conflict, a new, threatening power-the Soviet Union-was beginning to provoke the Cold War by enslaving Eastern Europe. These signal intelligence agencies now had a new enemy towards which to turn their electronic eyes and ears to ensure that the balance of power could be maintained. The folleys of electronic hardware and espionage that would follow for 40 years would be the breeding ground of the ECHELON spy system.
The diplomatic foundation that was the genesis of ECHELON is the UKUSA agreement
The agreement has its roots in the BRUSA COMINT (communications intelligence) alliance formed in the early days of World War II and ratified on 17 May 1943 by the United Kingdom and the United States of America
The Commonwealth SIGINT Organization, formed in 1946-47, brought together the post war intelligence agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Forged in 1947 between the US and UK, the still-secret UKUSA agreement defined the relations between the SIGINT departments of those various governments
Direct agreements between the US and these agencies also define the intricate relationships of these organizations
Foremost among those agencies is the US National Security Agency (NSA) which represents the American interest.
The NSA is designated at the “First Party to the [UKUSA] Treaty”
The UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) signed the UKUSA agreement on behalf of the UK and its Commonwealth SIGINIT partners
This brought Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) into the arrangement
While these agencies are bound by additional direct agreements with the US and each other, these four countries are considered the “Second Parties to the Treaty”
Third Party members include Germany, Japan, Norway, South Korea and Turkey. There are sources that indicate China may also be included in this group, on a limited basis
THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
The prime movers in the UKUSA arrangement is undeniably the US National Security Agency. The majority of funds for joint projects and facilities (discussed below) as well as the directions for intelligence-gathering operations are issued primarily through the NSA. The participating agencies frequently exchange personnel, divide up intelligence collection tasks and establish common guidelines for classifying and protecting shared information. However, the NSA utilizes its role as the largest spy agency in the world to have its international intelligence partners do its bidding.
President Harry Truman established the NSA in 1952 with a presidential directive that remains classified to this day. The US Government did not acknowledge the existence of the NSA until 1957. Its original mission was to conduct the signal intelligence (SIGINT) and communications security (COMSEC) for the United States. President Ronald Reagan added the tasks of information systems security and operations security training in 1984 and 1988 respectively. A 1986 law charged the NSA with supporting combat operations for the Department of Defense.
Headquartered at Fort George Meade, located between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland, the NSA boasts the most enviable array of intelligence equipment and personnel in the world. The NSA is the largest global employer of mathematicians, featuring the best teams of codemakers and codebreakers ever assembled. The codebreakers’ job is to crack the encryption codes of foreign and domestic electronic communications, forwarding the revealed messages to their enormous team of skilled linguists who can review and analyze messages in over 100 languages. The NSA is also responsible for creating the encryption codes that protect the US Government’s communications.
In its role as gang leader for UKUSA, the NSA is primarily involved with creating new surveillance and codebreaking technology, directing the other cooperating agencies to their target and providing them with training and tools to intercept, process and analyze enormous amounts of signals intelligence. By possessing what is arguably the most technologically advanced communications, computer and codebreaking equipment of any government agency in the world, the NSA serves as a competent and capable taskmaster for UKUSA.
THE ECHELON NETWORK
The vast network created by the UKUSA community stretched across the globe and into the reaches of space. Land-based intercept stations, intelligence ships sailing the seven seas and top-secret satellites whirling 20,000 miles overhead all combine to empower the NSA and its UKUSA allies with access to the entire global communications network. Very few signals escape its electronic grasp.
Having divided up the world among the UKUSA parties, each agency directs its electronic “vacuum-cleaner” equipment towards the heavens and the ground to search for the most minute communications signals that traverse the system’s immense path.
the NSA facilities in the US cover the communications signals of both American continents
the GCHQ in Britain is responsible for Europe, Africa and Russia (west of the Ural Mountains)
the DSD in Australia assists in SIGINT collection In Southeast Asia, the south-west Pacific Ocean and eastern Indian Ocean areas
the GSCB in New Zealand is responsible for southern Pacific Ocean
the CSE In Canada handles interception of additional northern Russian, northern European and American communications
The backbone of the ECHELON network are the massive listening and reception stations directed at the Intelsat and Inmarsat satellites that are responsible for the vast majority of phone and fax communications traffic within and between countries and continents. The 20 Intelsat satellites follow a geostationary orbit locked onto a particular point on the equator. These satellites carry primarily civilian traffic, but they do additionally carry diplomatic and governmental communications that are of particular interest to the UKUSA parties.
Originally, only two stations were responsible for Intelsat intercepts: Morwenstow in England, and Yakima in the US state of Washington. However, when the Intelsat 5 series was replaced with the Intelsat 701 and 703 satellites-which had much more precise transmission beams that prohibited reception of southern hemisphere signals from the Yakima based in the northern hemisphere-additional facilities were constructed in Australia and New Zealand.
Today, the Morwenstow station directs its ears towards the Intelsats traversing the atmosphere above the Atlantic and Indian oceans and transmitting to Europe, Africa and western parts of Asia. The Yakima station, located in the grounds of the Yakima Firing Station, targets the Far East and Pacific Ocean communications in the northern hemisphere. Another NSA facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, covers traffic for the whole of North and South America. A DSD station at Geraldton, WA, Australia, and the GCSB facility at Waihopai, New Zealand, over Asia, the South Pacific countries and the Pacific Ocean. An additional station on Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean between Brazil and Angola is suspected of covering the Atlantic Intelsat’s southern hemisphere communications.
Non-Intelsat satellites are monitored from these same stations, as well as from bases in:
Menwith Hill, England
Shoal Bay, near Darwin, Australia
Leitrim, Canada
Bad Aibling, Germany
Misawa, Japan
These satellites typically carry Russian and regional communications. It is known that the Shoal Bay facility targets a series of Indonesian satellites, and that the Leitrim station intercepts communications from Latin American satellites, including the Mexican telephone company’s Morelos satellite.
Several dozen other radio listening posts operated by the UKUSA allies dot the globe as well, located at military bases on foreign soil and in remote locations. These stations played a critical role in the time prior to the development of satellite communications because much of the world’s communications traffic was transmitted on radio-frequency bands.
Particularly in the high-frequency (HF) range, radio communications continue to serve an important purpose, despite the wide-spread use of satellite technology, because their signals can be transmitted to military ships and aircraft across the globe. Shorter range, very high frequencies (VHF) and ultra high frequencies (UHF) are also used for tactical military communications within national borders. Major radio facilities in the UKUSA network include:
Tangimoana, New Zealand
Bamaga, Cape York, Australia
the joint NSA/GCHQ facility at the Indian Ocean atoll, Diego Garcia
A separate high-frequency direction-finding (HFGF) network intercepts communications signals for the unique purpose of locating the position of ships and aircraft. While these stations are not actually involved in the analysis of messages, they play a critical role in monitoring the movements of mobile military targets.
The Canadian CSE figures prominently in the UKUSA HFDF network, code-named CLASSIC BULLSEYE, hosting a major portion of the Atlantic and Pacific stations that monitored Soviet ship and submarine movements during the Cold War. Stations from Kingston and Leitrim in Ontario, to Gander, Newfoundland, on the Atlantic side, from Alert in the Northwest Territories (located at the northernmost tip of Canada on the Arctic Ocean, and able to listen to the Russian submarine bases at Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok) and finally to Masset, British Columbia, in the Pacific, monitor shipping and flight lanes under the direction of the NSA. The CSE also maintains a small contingent at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, which probably monitors Latin American communications targets.
Another major support for the ECHELON system is the US spy satellite network and its corresponding reception bases scattered about the UKUSA empire. These space-based electronic communications “vacuum cleaners” pick up radio, microwave and cellphone traffic on the ground. They were launched by the NSA in cooperation with its sister spy agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Ferret series of satellites in the 1960s, the Canyon, Rhyolite and Aquacade satellites in the 1970s, and the Chalet, Vortex, Magnum, Orion and Jumpseat series of satellites in the 1980s have given way to the new and improved Mercury, Mentor and Trumpet satellites during the 1990s.
Table 1 – US Spy Satellites in Current Use
Satellite
No.
Orbit
Manufacturer
Purpose
Advanced KH-11
3
200 miles
Lockheed Martin
5-inch resolution spy photographs
LaCrosse Radar Imaging
2
200-400 miles
Lockheed Martin
3 to 10-foot resolution spy photographs
Orion/Vortex
3
22,300 miles
TRW
Telecom surveillance
Trumpet
2
200-22,300 miles
Boeing
Surveillance of cellular phones
Parsae
3
600 miles
TRW
Ocean surveillance
Satellite Data Systems
2
200-22,300 miles
Hughes
Data Relay
Defense Support Program
4+
22,300 miles
TRW/Aerojet
Missile early warning
Defense Meteorological Support Program
2
500 miles
Lockheed Martin
Meteorology, nuclear blast detection
These surveillance satellites act as giant scoops, picking up electronic communications, cellphone conversations and various radio transmissions. The downlink stations that control the operations and targeting of these satellites are under the exclusive control of the United States, despite their location on foreign military bases.
The two primary downlink facilities are at Menwith Hill, England, and Pine Gap, central Australia.
THE MENWITH HILL FACILITY
Menwith Hill
The Menwith Hill facility is located in North Yorkshire, England, near Harrogate. The important role that Menwith Hill plays in the ECHELON system was recognized by the recent European Parliament STOA report:
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 Yorks Moors of the UK.
The existence and importance of the facility was first brought to light by British journalist/researcher Duncan Campbell in 1980. Today, it is the largest spy station in the world, with over 25 satellite receiving stations and 1,400 American NSA personnel working with 350 UK Ministry of Defense staff on site.
After revelations that the facility coordinates surveillance for the vast majority of the European continent, the base has become a target for regular protests organized by local peace activists. It has also become a target for regular protests organized by local peace activists. It has also become the target of intense criticism by European government officials who are concerned about the vast network of civilian surveillance and economic espionage conducted from the station by the United States.
The beginnings of Menwith Hill go back to December 1951, when the US Air Force and British War Office signed a lease for land that had been purchased by the British Government. The NSA took over the lease of the base in 1966 and has continued to build up the facility ever since.
Up until the mid-1970s, Menwith Hill was used for intercepting international leased carrier (ILC) communications and non-diplomatic communications (NDC). Having received one of the first sophisticated IBM computers in the early 1960s, Menwith Hill was also used to sort through the voluminous unenciphered telex communications, which consisted of international messages, telegrams and telephone calls from the government, business and civilian sectors, in the search for anything of political, military or economic value.
STEEPLEBUSH-Completed in 1984, this $160 million system expanded the satellite surveillance capability and mission of the spy station beyond the bounds of the installation that began in 1974.
RUNWAY- Running east and west across the facility, this system receives signals from the second-generation geosynchronous Vortex satellites and gathers miscellaneous communications traffic from Europe, Asia and the former Soviet Union. The information is then forwarded to the Menwith Hill computer systems for processing. RUNWAY may have recently been replaced or complemented by another system, RUTLEY.
PUSHER- This is an HFDF system that covers the HF frequency range between 3 MHz and 30 MHz-radio transmissions from CB radios, walkie-talkies and other radio devices. Military, embassy, maritime and air flight communications are the main targets of PUSHER.
MOONPENNY – Uncovered by British journalist Duncan Campbell in the 1980s, this system is targeted at the communication relay satellites belonging to other countries, as well as the main targets of PUSHER.
KNOBSTICKS I AND II – The purpose of these antennae arrays is unknown, but they probably target military and diplomatic traffic throughout Europe.
GT-6 – A new system installed at the end of 1996, GT-6 is believed to be the receiver for the third generation of geosynchronous satellites termed Advanced Orion or Advanced Vortex. A new polar orbit satellite called Advanced Jumpseat may be monitored from here as well.
STEEPLEBUSH II – An expansion of the 1984 STEEPLEBUSH system, this computer system processes information collected from the RUNWAY receivers that gather traffic from the Vortex satellites.
SILKWORTH – Constructed by Lockheed Corporation, the main computer system for Menwith Hill processes most of the information received by the various reception systems.
One shocking revelation about Menwith Hill came to light in 1997 during the trial of two women peace campaigners appealing their convictions for trespassing at the facility. In documents and testimony submitted by British Telecom in the case, Mr. R.G. Morris, BT’s head of Emergency Planning, revealed that at least three major domestic fibre-optic telephone trunk lines-each capable of carrying 100,000 calls simultaneously were wired through Menwith Hill, allowing the NSA to tap into the very heart of the British Telecom network. Judge Jonathan Crabtree rebuked British Telecom over his revelations and prohibited Mr. Morris from giving any further testimony in the case for “national security” reasons.
According to Duncan Campbell, the secret spying alliance between Menwith Hill and British Telecom began in 1975 with a coaxial connection to the British Telecom microwave facility at Hunter’s Stone, four miles away from Menwith Hill – a connection maintained even today.
Additional systems-TROUTMAN, ULTRAPURE, TOTALISER, SILVERWEED, RUCKUS et al.-complete the monumental SIGINT collection efforts at Menwith Hill.
Directing its electronic vacuum-cleaners towards unsuspecting communications satellites in the skies, receiving signals gathered by satellites that scoop up the most minute signals on the ground, listening in on the radio communications throughout the air or plugging into the ground-based telecommunications network, Menwith Hill – alongside its sister stations at Pine Gap, Australia, and Bad Aibling, Germany-represents the comprehensive effort of the NSA, with its UKUSA allies, to make sure that no communications signal escapes its electronic net.
THE ECHELON DICTIONARIES
The extraordinary ability of ECHELON to intercept most of the communications trafficking in the world is breathtaking in its scope. And yet the power of ECHELON resides in its ability to decrypt, filter, examine and codify these messages into selective categories for further analysis by intelligence agents from the various UKUSA agencies.
As the electronic signals are brought into the station, they are fed through the massive computer systems, such as Menwith Hill’s SILKWORTH, where voice recognition, optical character recognition (OCR) and data information engines get to work on the messages. These programs and computers transcend state-of-the-art; in many cases, they are well into the future.
MAGISTRAND is part of the Menwith Hill SILKWORTH supercomputer system that drives the powerful keyword search programs. One tool used to sort through the text of messages, PATHFINDER (manufactured by the UK company, MEMEX), sifts through large databases of text-based documents and messages looking for keywords and key phrases based on complex algorithmic criteria. Voice recognition programs convert conversations into text messages for further analysis. One highly advanced system, VOICECAST, can target an individual’s voice pattern so that every call that person makes is transcribed for future analysis.
Processing millions of messages every hour, the ECHELON systems churn away 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking for targeted keyword series, phone and fax numbers, and specified voice prints. It is important to note that very few messages and phone calls are actually transcribed and recorded by the system. The vast majority are filtered out after they are read or listened to by the system. Only those messages that produce keyword “hits” are tagged for future analysis. Again, it is not just the ability to collect the electronic signals that gives ECHELON its power; it is the tools and technology that are able to whittle down the messages to only those that are important to the intelligence agencies.
Each station maintains a list of keywords (the Dictionary) designated by each of the participating intelligence agencies. A Dictionary Manager from each of the respective agencies is responsible for adding, deleting or changing the keyword search criteria for their Dictionaries at each of the stations. Each station Dictionary is given a code-word, as COWBOY for the Yakima facility and FLINTLOCK for the Waihopai facility. These code-words play a crucial identification role for the analysts who eventually look at the intercepted messages.
Each message flagged by the ECHELON Dictionaries as meeting the specified criteria is sorted by a four-digit code representing the source or subject of the message (such as 5535 for Japanese diplomatic traffic, or 8812 for communications about distribution of encryption technology) as well as the date, time and station code-word. Also included in the message headers are the code-names for the intended agency:
ALPHA-ALPHA (GCHQ) – UK
ECHO-ECHO (DSD) – Australia
INDIA-INDIA (GCSB) – New Zeland
UNIFORM-UNIFORM (CSE) – Canada
OSCAR-OSCAR (NSA) – USA
These messages are then transmitted to each agency’s headquarters via a global computer system, PLATFORM, that acts as the information nervous system for the UKUSA stations and agencies.
Every day, analysts located at the various intelligence agencies review the previous day’s product. As it is analyzed, decrypted and translated, it can be compiled into the different types of analysis: reports, which are direct and complete translations of intercepted messaged, “gists”, which give basic information on a series of messages within a given category; and summaries, which are compilations from both reports and gists. These are then given classifications:
MORAY (secret)
SPOKE (more secret than MORAY)
UMBRA (top secret)
GAMMA (Russian intercepts)
DRUID (intelligence forwarded to non-UKUSA parties)
This analysis product is the raison d’être of the entire ECHELON system. It is also the lifeblood of the UKUSA alliance.
NATIONAL SECURITY & SURVEILLANCE OF CITIZENS
The ECHELON system is the product of the Cold War conflict-an extended battle replete with heightened tensions that teetered on the brink of annihilation, and the diminished hostilities of détente and glasnost. Vicious cycles of mistrust and paranoia between the United States and the Soviet empire fed the intelligence agencies to the point that, with the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe, the intelligence establishment began to grasp for a mission that justified its bloated existence.
But the rise of post-modern warfare-terrorism-gave the establishment all the justification it needed to develop an even greater ability to spy on its enemies, its allies and its own citizens. ECHELON is the result of those efforts. The satellites that fly thousands of miles overhead and yet can spy out the most minute details on the ground; the secret submarines that troll the ocean floors and tap into undersea communications cables-all power the efficient UKUSA signals intelligence machine.
In the United States there is a concerted effort by intelligence agency heads, federal law enforcement officials and congressional representatives to defend the capabilities of ECHELON. Their persuasive arguments point to the tragedies seen in the bombings in Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center in New York City. The vulnerability of Americans abroad, as recently seen in the bombing of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Nairobi, Kenya, emphasizes the necessity of monitoring those forces around the world that would use senseless violence and terror as political weapons against the US and its allies.
Intelligence victories add credibility to the arguments that defend such a pervasive surveillance system. The discovery of missile sites in Cuba in 1962, the capture of the Achille Lauro terrorists in 1995, the discovery of alleged Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque that killed one American (resulting in the 1996 bombing of Tripoli), and countless other incidents that have been averted (which are now covered by the silence of indoctrination vows and top-secret classifications), all for the national security of the United States.
But despite the real threats and dangers to the peace and protection of American citizens at home and abroad, the US Constitution is quite explicit in limiting the scope and powers of government.
List of government mass surveillance projects XKeyscore PRISM ECHELON Sentient Carnivore Dishfire Stone Ghost Tempora Frenchelon Fairview MYSTIC DCSN Boundless Informant Bullrun Pinwale Stingray SORM RAMPART-A Mastering the Internet Jindalee Operational Radar Network
Selected agencies
FVEY ASD CSE GCSB GCHQ NSA BND BSSN CNI DIH DGSE KGB MSS JSCU Spetssvyaz Unit 8200
Places
The Doughnut Fort Meade Menwith Hill Pine Gap Southern Cross Cable Utah Data Center Bad Aibling Station Dagger Complex GCHQ Bude
Laws
Five Eyes UKUSA Agreement Lustre U.S. USA Freedom Act FISA amendments EU Data Retention Directive Data Protection Directive GDPR China National Intelligence Law Cybersecurity Law UK Investigatory Powers Act 2016
Proposed changes
U.S. FISA Improvements Act Other proposals
Concepts
Mass surveillance Corporate Industry Culture of fear Secure communication Security sector governance and reform SIGINT Call detail record Surveillance issues in smart cities
Related topics
Intelligence field Espionage Intelligence agency Cryptography Tor VPNs TLS Human rights Privacy Liberty Satellites Stop Watching Us Nothing to hide argument
A radome at RAF Menwith Hill, a site with satellite uplink capabilities believed to be used by ECHELON
RAF Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, England
Misawa Air Base Security Operations Center (MSOC), Aomori Prefecture, Japan
ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement:[1] Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.[2][3][4]
Created in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, the ECHELON project became formally established in 1971.[5][6] By the end of the 20th century, it had greatly expanded.[7]
Organization
Map of the UKUSA Agreement countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States
The UKUSA intelligence community was assessed by the European Parliament (EP) in 2000 to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states:
the Government Communications Headquarters of the United Kingdom,
the National Security Agency of the United States,
the Communications Security Establishment of Canada,
the Australian Signals Directorate of Australia, and
the Government Communications Security Bureau of New Zealand.
List of intercept stations according to Edward Snowden’s documents
Operated by the United States
Country Location Operator(s) Codename
Brazil Brasília, Federal District
United States CIA[8]
United States NSA[8]
SCS
Germany Bad Aibling, Bavaria
Germany BND[9]
United States NSA[9]
GARLICK[10]
India New Delhi
United States CIA[11]
United States NSA[11]
SCS
Japan Misawa, Tōhoku region
United States US Air Force[12]
United States NSA[12]
LADYLOVE[13]
Thailand Khon Kaen, Isan
16°28’31.6″N 102°50’39.2″E
United States CIA (?)
United States NSA (?)
INDRA /
LEMONWOOD[14]
United Kingdom Menwith Hill, Harrogate
United States NSA[15]* United Kingdom GCHQ
MOONPENNY[14]
United States Sugar Grove, West Virginia
United States NSA[16]
TIMBERLINE[17]
Yakima, Washington
United States NSA[18]
JACKKNIFE[14]
Sábana Seca, Puerto Rico
United States NSA[8]
CORALINE[14]
Operated Jointly with the United States (2nd party)
Country Location Contributor(s) Codename
Australia Geraldton, WA
Australia ASD[12]
STELLAR[12]
Darwin, NT
Australia ASD[12]
SHOAL BAY[12]
New Zealand Waihopai Station
New Zealand GCSB[12]
IRONSAND[12]
United Kingdom Bude, Cornwall
United Kingdom GCHQ[19]
United States NSA[19]
CARBOY[17]
Cyprus Ayios Nikolaos Station
United Kingdom GCHQ[19]
United States NSA[19]
SOUNDER[20]
Kenya Nairobi
United Kingdom GCHQ[12]
SCAPEL[14]
Oman Seeb, Muscat
United Kingdom GCHQ[12]
SNICK[14]
Reporting and disclosures
Public disclosures (1972–2000)
Former NSA analyst Perry Fellwock, under the pseudonym Winslow Peck, first blew the whistle on ECHELON to Ramparts in 1972,[21] when he revealed the existence of a global network of listening posts and told of his experiences working there. He also revealed the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel in 1972, the widespread involvement of CIA and NSA personnel in drugs and human smuggling, and CIA operatives leading Nationalist Chinese (Taiwan) commandos in burning villages inside PRC borders.[22]
In 1982, investigative journalist and author James Bamford wrote The Puzzle Palace, an in-depth history of the NSA and its practices, which notably leaked the existence of the eavesdropping operation Project SHAMROCK. Project SHAMROCK ran from 1945 to 1975, after which it evolved into ECHELON.[23][24]
In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a Lockheed employee under NSA contract, disclosed the ECHELON surveillance system to members of Congress. Newsham told a member of the US Congress that the telephone calls of Strom Thurmond, a Republican US senator, were being collected by the NSA. Congressional investigators determined that “targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start”.[25]
Also in 1988, an article titled “Somebody’s Listening”, written by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman, described the signals intelligence gathering activities of a program code-named “ECHELON”.[25] Bamford described the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.[26]
A detailed description of ECHELON was provided by the New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network.[27] Two years later, Hager’s book was cited by the European Parliament in a report titled “An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control” (PE 168.184).[28]
In March 1999, for the first time in history, the Australian government admitted that news reports about the top-secret UKUSA Agreement were true.[29] Martin Brady, the director of Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD, now known as Australian Signals Directorate, or ASD) told the Australian broadcasting channel Nine Network that the DSD “does co-operate with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship”.[30]
In 2000, James Woolsey, the former Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed that US intelligence uses interception systems and keyword searches to monitor European businesses.[31]
Lawmakers in the United States feared that the ECHELON system could be used to monitor US citizens.[32] According to The New York Times, the ECHELON system has been “shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove”.[32] Critics said that the ECHELON system emerged from the Cold War as a “Big Brother without a cause”.[33]
European Parliament investigation (2000–2001)
The New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, who testified before the European Parliament and provided specific details about the ECHELON surveillance system[34]
The program’s capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001.[7] In July 2000, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was established by the European parliament to investigate the surveillance network.[35] It was chaired by the Portuguese politician Carlos Coelho, who was in charge of supervising investigations throughout 2000 and 2001.
In May 2001, as the committee finalised its report on the ECHELON system, a delegation travelled to Washington, D.C. to attend meetings with US officials from the following agencies and departments:
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)[36]
US Department of Commerce (DOC)[36]
US National Security Agency (NSA)[36]
All meetings were cancelled by the US government, and the committee was forced to end its trip prematurely.[36] According to a BBC correspondent in May 2001, “The US Government still refuses to admit that Echelon even exists.”[5]
In July 2001, the Committee released its final report.[37] The EP report concluded that it seemed likely that ECHELON is a method of sorting captured signal traffic, rather than a comprehensive analysis tool.[7] On 5 September 2001, the European parliament voted to accept the report.[38]
The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system.[7] The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers, including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic), and microwave links.[7]
Confirmation of ECHELON (2015)
Two internal NSA newsletters from January 2011 and July 2012, published as part of Edward Snowden’s leaks by the website The Intercept on 3 August 2015, for the first time confirmed that NSA used the code word ECHELON and provided some details about the scope of the program: ECHELON was part of an umbrella program with the code name FROSTING, which was established by the NSA in 1966 to collect and process data from communications satellites. FROSTING had two sub-programs:[39]
TRANSIENT: for intercepting Soviet satellite transmissions
ECHELON: for intercepting Intelsat satellite transmissions
The European Parliament’s Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System stated, “It seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail”.[7] The US intelligence community uses many code names (see, for example, CIA cryptonym).
Former NSA employee Margaret Newsham said that she worked on the configuration and installation of software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California, in the United States, and in Menwith Hill, England, in the UK.[40] At that time, according to Newsham, the code name ECHELON was NSA’s term for the computer network itself. Lockheed called it P415. The software programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX intercepted communications. An image available on the internet of a fragment apparently torn from a job description shows Echelon listed along with several other code names.[41][42]
Britain’s The Guardian newspaper summarized the capabilities of the ECHELON system as follows:
A global network of electronic spy stations that can eavesdrop on telephones, faxes and computers. It can even track bank accounts. This information is stored in Echelon computers, which can keep millions of records on individuals. Officially, however, Echelon doesn’t exist.[43]
Documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the ECHELON system’s collection of satellite data is also referred to as FORNSAT – an abbreviation for “Foreign Satellite Collection”.[44][45]
Intercept stations
First revealed by the European Parliament report (p. 54 ff)[7] and confirmed later by the Edward Snowden disclosures the following ground stations presently have, or have had, a role in intercepting transmissions from Satellite and other means of communication:[7]
RAF Little Sai Wan (Closed) (Hong Kong) Map
Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station (Geraldton, Western Australia) Map
RAF Menwith Hill (Yorkshire, England – Largest known ECHELON facility)[46] Map
Misawa Security Operations Center (Oura, Misawa, Aomori, Tōhoku, Japan) Map
GCHQ Bude (formerly CSO Morwenstow) (Cornwall, UK)[7] Map
Pine Gap (Outside Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia) Map
Sugar Grove (Closed) (West Virginia, US) Map
Yakima Training Center (Closed)[47] (Washington State, US) Map
Buckley Space Force Base (Aurora, Colorado)[48] Map
GCSB Waihopai (Marlborough, New Zealand)[49][50] Map
GCSB Tangimoana (Manawatū-Whanganui, New Zealand)[49] Map
CFS Leitrim (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)[51] Map
Teufelsberg (Closed 1992), *Berlin, Germany[52] – Responsible for listening in to the Eastern Bloc.)[53] Map
Ayios Nikolaos (British Sovereign Base area of Dhekelia, Cyprus – Cyprus)
Gibraltar (UK)
Diego Garcia (UK)
Bad Aibling Station (Bad Aibling, Germany – US)
relocated to Griesheim/Darmstadt in 2004.[54]
Fort Gordon (Georgia, US)
CFB Gander (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)[55][56]
Guam (Pacific Ocean, US)
Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center (Hawaii, US)
Lackland Air Force Base, Medina Annex (San Antonio, Texas, US)
RAF Edzell (Closed 1996) (Scotland)[7]
RAF Boulmer (England)[7]
SNICK International Processing Center (Seeb, Oman) Map
History and context
Equipment at the Yakima Research Station (YRS) in the early days of the ECHELON program
The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic.[7] During World War II and through the 1950s, high-frequency (“short-wave”) radio was widely used for military and diplomatic communication[57] and could be intercepted at great distances.[7] The rise of geostationary communications satellites in the 1960s presented new possibilities for intercepting international communications.[58] In 1964, plans for the establishment of the ECHELON network took off after dozens of countries agreed to establish the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), which would own and operate a global constellation of communications satellites.[29]
Teletype operators at the Yakima Research Station (YRS) in the early days of the ECHELON program
In 1966, the first Intelsat satellite was launched into orbit. From 1970 to 1971, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of Britain began to operate a secret signal station at Morwenstow, near Bude in Cornwall, England. The station intercepted satellite communications over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Soon afterwards, the US National Security Agency (NSA) built a second signal station at Yakima, near Seattle, for the interception of satellite communications over the Pacific Ocean.[29] In 1981, GCHQ and the NSA started the construction of the first global wide area network (WAN). Soon after Australia, Canada, and New Zealand joined the ECHELON system.[29] The report to the European Parliament of 2001 states: “If UKUSA states operate listening stations in the relevant regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all telephone, fax, and data traffic transmitted via such satellites.”[7]
Most reports on ECHELON focus on satellite interception. Testimony before the European Parliament indicated that separate but similar UKUSA systems are in place to monitor communication through undersea cables, microwave transmissions, and other lines.[59] The report to the European Parliament points out that interception of private communications by foreign intelligence services is not necessarily limited to the US or British foreign intelligence services.[7] The role of satellites in point-to-point voice and data communications has largely been supplanted by fiber optics. In 2006, 99% of the world’s long-distance voice and data traffic was carried over optical-fiber.[60] The proportion of international communications accounted for by satellite links is said to have decreased substantially to an amount between 0.4% and 5% in Central Europe.[7] Even in less-developed parts of the world, communications satellites are used largely for point-to-multipoint applications, such as video.[61] Thus, the majority of communications can no longer be intercepted by earth stations; they can only be collected by tapping cables and intercepting line-of-sight microwave signals, which is possible only to a limited extent.[7]
Concerns
British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager said in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes.[59] Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[7][62] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.[63]
In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the US intelligence agencies.[7]
American author James Bamford provides an alternative view, highlighting that legislation prohibits the use of intercepted communications for commercial purposes, although he does not elaborate on how intercepted communications are used as part of an all-source intelligence process.[64]
In its report, the committee of the European Parliament stated categorically that the Echelon network was being used to intercept not only military communications, but also private and business ones. In its epigraph to the report, the parliamentary committee quoted Juvenal, “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes” (“But who will watch the watchers”).[7] James Bamford, in The Guardian in May 2001, warned that if Echelon were to continue unchecked, it could become a “cyber secret police, without courts, juries, or the right to a defence”.[65]
Alleged examples of espionage conducted by the members of the “Five Eyes” include:
On behalf of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Communications Security Establishment allegedly spied on two British cabinet ministers in 1983.[66]
The US National Security Agency spied on and intercepted the phone calls of Diana, Princess of Wales right up until she died in a Paris car crash with Dodi Fayed in 1997. The NSA currently holds 1,056 pages of information about Princess Diana, which has been classified as top secret “because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security … the damage would be caused not by the information about Diana, but because the documents would disclose ‘sources and methods’ of US intelligence gathering”.[67] An official said that “the references to Diana in intercepted conversations were ‘incidental'”, and she was never a “target” of the NSA eavesdropping.[67]
UK agents monitored the conversations of the 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.[68][69]
US agents gathered “detailed biometric information” on the 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon.[70][71]
In the early 1990s, the US National Security Agency intercepted the communications between the European aerospace company Airbus and the Saudi Arabian national airline. In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[72] As a result, the American aerospace company McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) won the multibillion-dollar contract instead of Airbus.[73]
The United States defense contractor Raytheon won a US$1.3 billion contract with the Government of Brazil to monitor the Amazon rainforest after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting as a whistleblower, reported that Raytheon’s French competitor Thomson-Alcatel had been paying bribes to get the contract.[74]
In order to boost the United States position in trade negotiations with the then Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in 1995 the CIA eavesdropped on the conversations between Japanese bureaucrats and executives of car manufacturers Toyota and Nissan.[75]
Workings
System diagram of the ECHELON satellite intercept station of the NSA at the Yakima Research Station (YRS)[76]
TOPCO – Terminal Operations Control
CCS – Computer Control Subsystem
STEAMS – System Test, Evaluation, Analysis, and Monitoring Subsystem
SPS – Signal Processing Subsystem
TTDM – Teletype Demodulator
The first United States satellite ground station for the ECHELON collection program was built in 1971 at a military firing and training center near Yakima, Washington. The facility, which was codenamed JACKKNIFE, was an investment of about 21.3 million dollars and had around 90 people. Satellite traffic was intercepted by a 30-meter single-dish antenna. The station became fully operational on 4 October 1974. It was connected with NSA headquarters at Fort Meade by a 75-baud secure Teletype orderwire channel.[39]
In 1999 the Australian Senate Joint Standing Committee on Treaties was told by Professor Desmond Ball that the Pine Gap facility was used as a ground station for a satellite-based interception network. The satellites were said to be large radio dishes between 20 and 100 meters in diameter in geostationary orbits. The original purpose of the network was to monitor the telemetry from 1970s Soviet weapons, air defence and other radars’ capabilities, satellites’ ground stations’ transmissions and ground-based microwave transmissions.[77]
Examples of industrial espionage
In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind-energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later claimed that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon’s data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech.[78] However, later German media reports contradicted this story, as it was revealed that the American patent in question was actually filed three years before the alleged wiretapping was said to have taken place.[79] As German intelligence services are forbidden from engaging in industrial or economic espionage, German companies have complained that this leaves them defenceless against industrial espionage from the United States or Russia. According to Wolfgang Hoffmann, a former manager at Bayer, German intelligence services know which companies are being targeted by US intelligence agencies, but refuse to inform the companies involved.[80]
See also
Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present)
ADVISE
Frenchelon
List of government surveillance projects
Mass surveillance
Onyx (interception system), the Swiss “Echelon”
Operation Ivy Bells
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Notes and references
Given the 5 dialects that use the terms, UKUSA can be pronounced from “You-Q-SA” to “Oo-Coo-SA”, AUSCANNZUKUS can be pronounced from “Oz-Can-Zuke-Us” to “Orse-Can-Zoo-Cuss”.
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Rosenbach, Marcel; Stark, Holger (29 November 2010). “Diplomats or Spooks? How US Diplomats Were Told to Spy on UN and Ban Ki-Moon”. Der Spiegel. Archived from the original on 21 August 2013. Retrieved 27 August 2013.
“Echelon: Big brother without a cause”. BBC News. 6 July 2000. Archived from the original on 7 January 2009. Retrieved 27 August 2006.
“Airbus’s secret past”. The Economist. 14 June 2003. Archived from the original on 21 October 2013. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
“Big Surveillance Project For the Amazon Jungle Teeters Over Scandals”. The Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
David E. Sanger; Tim Weiner (15 October 1995). “Emerging Role For the C.I.A.: Economic Spy”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 10 July 2019. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
The Northwest Passage, Yakima Research Station (YRS) newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2011. Archived 22 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine.
“Pine Gap” (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 June 2011. Retrieved 19 August 2016., Official Committee Hansard, Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, 9 August 1999. Commonwealth of Australia.
Schmid, Gerhard (11 July 2001). “Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI))” (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 June 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2018.
Sattar, Majid (July 2013). “NSA-Affäre: Ja, meine Freunde, wir spionieren euch aus!”. FAZ.NET (in German). Archived from the original on 21 November 2022. Retrieved 21 November 2022.
Staunton, Denis (16 April 1999). “Electronic spies torture German firms”. The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 21 September 2018. Retrieved 6 August 2018.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Echelon.
Campbell, Duncan (3 August 2015). “GCHQ and Me, My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers”. The Intercept.
“Paper 1: Echelon and its role in COMINT”. Heise. 27 May 2001.
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Categories: AnglosphereNational Security AgencyGovernment databases in the United StatesPrivacy in the United StatesSignals intelligenceMass surveillancePrivacy of telecommunicationsLockheed MartinMass intelligence-gathering systemsCyberwarfareSurveillance databasesGlobal surveillanceLockheed CorporationCold War history of Australia
II. ECHELON: PART TWO: THE NSA’S GLOBAL SPYING NETWORK by Patrick Poole
The US National Security Agency uses the ECHELON system not only for surveillance of civilians and politicians, but also for spying on behalf of US corporations.
A fundamental foundation of free societies is that when controversies arise over the assumption of power by the state, power never defaults to the government, nor are powers granted without an extraordinary, explicit and compelling public interest.
As the late United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan pointed out:
The concept of military necessity is seductively broad and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security “necessities” to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties.
For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism: its very gravity counsels that courts be cautious when military necessity is invoked by the Government to justify a trespass on [Constitutional] rights.
Despite the necessity of confronting terrorism and the many benefits that are provided by the massive surveillance efforts embodied by ECHELON, there is a dark and dangerous side of these activities that is concealed by the cloak of secrecy surrounding the intelligence operations of the United States.
The discovery of domestic surveillance targeting American civilians for reasons of “unpopular” political affiliation or for no probable cause at all – in violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution – is regularly impeded by very elaborate and complex legal arguments and privilege claims by the intelligence agencies and the US Government.
The guardians and caretakers of our liberties – our duly elected political representatives – give scarce attention to the activities, let alone the abuses, that occur under their watch. As pointed out below, our elected officials frequently become targets of ECHELON themselves, chilling any effort to check this unbridled power.
In addition, the shift in priorities resulting from the demise of the Soviet Empire, and the necessity to justify intelligence capabilities, resulted in a redefinition of “national security interests” to include espionage committed on behalf of powerful American companies.
This quiet collusion between political and private interests typically involves the very same companies that are involved in developing the technology that empowers ECHELON and the intelligence agencies.
DOMESTIC AND POLITICAL SPYING
When considering the use of ECHELON on American soil, the pathetic historical record of NSA and CIA domestic activities in regard to the Constitutional liberties and privacy rights of American citizens provides an excellent guidepost for what may occur now with the ECHELON system.
Since the creation of the NSA by President Truman, its spying capability has frequently been used to monitor the activities of an unsuspecting public.
PROJECT SHAMROCK
In 1945, Project SHAMROCK was initiated to obtain copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States. With the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union (representing almost all of the telegraphic traffic in the US at the time), the NSA’s predecessor and later the NSA itself were provided with daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing and transiting telegraphs.
This system changed dramatically when the cable companies began providing magnetic computer tapes to the agency, which enabled the agency to run all the messages through its HARVEST computer to look for particular keywords, locations, senders or addresses.
Project SHAMROCK became so successful that in 1966 the NSA and CIA set up a front company in lower Manhattan (where the offices of the telegraph companies were located) under the code-name LPMEDLEY. At the height of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages a month were printed and analyzed by NSA agents.
NSA Director Lew Allen brought Project SHAMROCK to a crashing halt in May 1975 as congressional critics began to rip open the program’s shroud of secrecy.
The testimony of both the representatives from the cable companies and Director Allen at the hearings prompted Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken”.
PROJECT MINARET
A sister project to Project SHAMROCK, Project MINARET involved the creation of “watch lists”, by each of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, of those accused of “subversive” domestic activities. The watch lists included such notables as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
After the Supreme Court handed down its 1972 Keith decision – which held that, while the President could act to protect the country from unlawful and subversive activity designed to overthrow the government, that same power did not extend to include warrantless electronic surveillance of domestic organizations – pressure came to bear on Project MINARET.
Attorney General Elliot Petersen shut down Project MINARET as soon as its activities were revealed to the Justice Department, despite the fact that the FBI (an agency under the Justice Department’s authority) was actively involved with the NSA and other intelligence agencies in creating the watch lists.
Operating between 1967 and 1973, over 5,925 foreigners and 1,690 organizations and US citizens were included on the Project MINARET watch lists. Despite extensive efforts to conceal the NSA’s involvement in Project MINARET, NSA Director Lew Allen testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on the watch-listed Americans.
Additionally, the NSA Office of Security Services maintained reports on at least 75,000 Americans between 1952 and 1974. This list included the names of anyone who was mentioned in an NSA message intercept.
OPERATION CHAOS
While the NSA was busy snooping on US citizens through Projects SHAMROCK and MINARET, the CIA got into the domestic spying act by initiating Operation CHAOS. President Lyndon Johnson authorized the creation of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), whose purpose was to “exercise centralized responsibility for direction, support and coordination of clandestine cooperation activities within the United States”.
When Johnson ordered CIA Director John McCone to use the DOD to analyze the growing college student protests against the Administration’s policy towards Vietnam, two new units were set up to target anti-war protesters and organizations: Project RESISTANCE, which worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents; and Project MERRIMAC, which monitored any demonstrations being conducted in the Washington, DC, area.
The CIA then began monitoring student activists and infiltrating anti-war organizations by working with local police departments to pull-off burglaries, illegal entries (black bag jobs), interrogations and electronic surveillance. After President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of these domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS.
After the revelation of two former CIA agents’ involvement in the Watergate break-in, the publication of an article about CHAOS in the New York Times and the growing concern about distancing itself from illegal domestic spying activities, the CIA shut down Operation CHAOS.
But during the life of the project, the Church Committee and the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) revealed that the CIA had compiled files on over 13,000 individuals, including 7,000 US citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)
In response to the discovery of such a comprehensive effort by previous administrations and the intelligence agencies, Congress passed legislation (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) that created a top-secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to hear applications for electronic surveillance from the FBI and NSA to provide some check on the domestic activities of the agencies. In 1995, Congress granted the court additional power to authorize surreptitious entries. In all of these actions, congressional intent was to provide a check on the domestic surveillance abuses mentioned above.
The seven-member court, comprised of Federal District Court judges appointed by the Supreme Court Chief Justice, sits in secret in a sealed room on the top floor of the Department of Justice building. Public information about the FISC’s hearings is scarce, but each year the Attorney-General is required by law to transmit to Congress a report detailing the number of applications each year and the number granted.
With over 10,000 applications submitted to the FISC during the past 20 years, the court has only rejected one application (and that rejection was at the request of the Reagan Administration, which had submitted the application).
While the FISC was established to be the watchdog for the Constitutional rights of the American people against domestic surveillance, it quickly became the lap dog of the intelligence agencies. Surveillance requests that would never receive a hearing in a state or federal court are routinely approved by the FISC. This has allowed the FBI to use the process to conduct surveillance to obtain evidence in circumvention of the US Constitution, the evidence then being used in subsequent criminal trials.
But the process established by Congress and the courts ensures that information regarding the cause or extent of the surveillance order is withheld from defense attorneys because of the classified nature of the court.
Despite Congress’s initial intent for the FISC, it is doubtful that domestic surveillance by means of ECHELON comes under any scrutiny by the court.
POLITICAL USES OF ECHELON AND UKUSA
US National Security Agencies Remote Mind Control Head-Quarters at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, England.
Several incidents of domestic spying involving ECHELON have emerged from the secrecy of the UKUSA relationship. What these brief glimpses inside the intelligence world reveal is that, despite the best of intentions by elected representatives, presidents and prime ministers, the temptation to use ECHELON as a tool of political advancement and repression proves too strong.
Former Canadian spy Mike Frost recounts how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a request in February 1983 to have two ministers from her own government monitored when she suspected them of disloyalty.
In an effort to avoid the legal difficulties involved with domestic spying on high-level governmental officials, the GCHQ liaison in Ottawa made a request to CSE for them to conduct the three-week-long surveillance mission at British taxpayer expense. Frost’s CSE boss, Frank Bowman, traveled to London to do the job himself. After the mission was over, Bowman was instructed to hand over the tapes to a GCHQ official at head office.
Using the UKUSA alliance as legal cover is seductively easy.
As Spyworld co-author Michel Gratton puts it:
“The Thatcher episode certainly shows that GCHQ, like NSA, found ways to put itself above the law and did not hesitate to get directly involved in helping a specific politician for her personal political benefit…
“[T]he decision to proceed with the London caper was probably not put forward for approval to many people up the bureaucratic ladder. It was something CSE figured they would get away with easily, so checking with the higher-ups would only complicate things unnecessarily.”
Frost also told of how he was asked in 1975 to spy on an unlikely target: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife, Margaret Trudeau.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) Security service division was concerned that the Prime Minister’s wife was buying and using marijuana, so they contacted the CSE to do the dirty work. Months of surveillance in cooperation with the Security Service turned up nothing of note. Frost was concerned that there were political motivations behind the RCMP’s request:
“She was in no way suspected of espionage. Why was the RCMP so adamant about this? Were they trying to get at Pierre Trudeau for some reason or just protect him? Or were they working under orders from their political masters?”
The NSA frequently gets into the political spying act as well. Nixon presidential aide John Ehrlichman revealed in his published memoirs, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, that Henry Kissinger used the NSA to intercept the messages of then Secretary of State William P. Rogers, which Kissinger used to convince President Nixon of Rogers’ incompetence.
Kissinger also found himself on the receiving end of the NSA’s global net. Word of Kissinger’s secret diplomatic dealings with foreign governments would reach the ears of other Nixon administration officials, incensing Kissinger.
As former NSA Deputy Director William Colby pointed out:
“Kissinger would get sore as hell…because he wanted to keep it politically secret until it was ready to launch.”
However, elected representatives have also become targets of spying by the intelligence agencies. In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a former Lockheed software manager who was responsible for a dozen VAX computers that powered the ECHELON computers at Menwith Hill, came forth with the stunning revelation that she had actually heard the NSA’s real-time interception of phone conversations involving South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.
Newsham was fired from Lockheed after she filed a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that the company was engaged in flagrant waste and abuse. After a top-secret meeting in April 1988 with then Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Louis Stokes, Capitol Hill staffers familiar with the meeting leaked the story to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. While Sen.
Thurmond was reluctant to pressure for a thorough investigation into the matter, his office revealed at the time that it had previously received reports that the Senator was a target of the NSA. After the news reports, an investigation into the matter discovered that there were no controls or questioning over who could enter target names into the Menwith Hill system.
The NSA, under orders from the Reagan Administration, also targeted Maryland Congressman Michael Barnes. Phone calls he placed to Nicaraguan officials were intercepted and recorded, including a conversation he had with the Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, protesting the implementation of martial law in that country. Barnes found out about the NSA’s spying after White House officials leaked transcripts of his conversations to reporters.
CIA Director William Casey, later implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, showed Barnes a Nicaraguan Embassy cable that reported a meeting between embassy staff and one of Barnes’ aides. The aide had been there on a professional call regarding an international affairs issue, and Casey asked for Barnes to fire the aide. Barnes replied that it was perfectly legal and legitimate for his staff to meet with foreign diplomats.
Barnes commented:
“I was aware that NSA monitored international calls, that it was a standard part of intelligence gathering. But to use it for domestic political purposes is absolutely outrageous and probably illegal.”
Another former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has also expressed his concerns about the NSA’s domestic targeting.
“It has always worried me. What if that is used on American citizens?” queried former Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini. “It is chilling. Are they listening to my private conversations on my telephone?”
Seemingly non-controversial organizations have ended up in the fixed gaze of ECHELON, as several former GCHQ officials confidentially told the London Observer in June 1992. Among the targeted organizations they named were Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Christian Aid – an American missionary organization that works with indigenous pastors engaged in ministry work in countries closed to Western, Christian workers.
In another story published by the London Observer, a former employee of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, Robin Robison, admitted that Margaret Thatcher had personally ordered the communications interception of Lonrho, the parent company of the Observer, after the Observer had published a 1989 exposé charging that bribes had been paid to Thatcher’s son, Mark, in a multibillion-dollar British arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Despite facing severe penalties for violating his indoctrination vows, Robison admitted that he had personally delivered intercepted Lonrho messages to Mrs Thatcher’s office.
It should hardly be surprising that ECHELON ends up being used by elected and bureaucratic officials to their political advantage or by the intelligence agencies themselves for the purpose of sustaining their privileged surveillance powers and bloated budgets. The availability of such invasive technology practically begs for abuse, although it does not justify its use to those ends. But what is most frightening is the targeting of such “subversives” as those who expose corrupt government activity, protect human rights from government encroachments, challenge corporate polluters or promote the Gospel of Christ.
That the vast intelligence powers of the United States should be arrayed against legitimate and peaceful organizations is demonstrative not of the desire to monitor, but of the desire to control.
COMMERCIAL SPYING
With the rapid erosion of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s, Western intelligence agencies were anxious to redefine their mission to justify the scope of their global surveillance system. Some of the agencies’ closest corporate friends quickly gave them an option: commercial espionage. By redefining the term “national security” to include spying on foreign competitors of prominent US corporations, the signals intelligence game has got uglier. And this may very well have prompted the recent scrutiny by the European Union that ECHELON has endured.
While UKUSA agencies have pursued economic and commercial information on behalf of their countries with renewed vigor after the passing of communism in Eastern Europe, the NSA practice of spying on behalf of US companies has a long history.
Gerald Burke, who served as Executive Director of President Nixon’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, notes commercial espionage was endorsed by the US Government as early as 1970:
“By and large, we recommended that, henceforth, economic intelligence be considered a function of the national security, enjoying a priority equivalent to diplomatic, military and technological intelligence.”
To accommodate the need for information regarding international commercial deals, the intelligence agencies set up a small, unpublicized department within the Department of Commerce: the Office of Intelligence Liaison. This office receives intelligence reports from the US intelligence agencies about pending international deals that it discreetly forwards to companies that request it or may have an interest in the information.
Immediately after coming to office in January 1993, President Clinton added to the corporate espionage machine by creating the National Economic Council, which feeds intelligence to “select” companies to enhance US competitiveness. The capabilities of ECHELON to spy on foreign companies is nothing new, but the Clinton Administration has raised its use to an art.
In 1990, the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA had intercepted messages about an impending $200 million deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite manufacturer NEC Corp. After President Bush intervened in the negotiations on behalf of American manufacturers, the contract was split between NEC and AT&T.
In 1994, the CIA and NSA intercepted phone calls between Brazilian officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF about a radar system that the Brazilians wanted to purchase. The US firm Raytheon was a competitor as well, and was forwarded reports prepared from intercepts.
In September 1993, President Clinton asked the CIA to spy on Japanese auto manufacturers that were designing zero-emission cars and to forward that information to the Big Three US car manufacturers: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
In 1995, the New York Times reported that the NSA and the CIA’s Tokyo station were involved in providing detailed information to US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s team of negotiators in Geneva, facing Japanese car companies in a trade dispute. Recently, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi accused the NSA of continuing to monitor the communications of Japanese companies on behalf of American companies.
Insight magazine reported in a series of articles in 1997 that President Clinton ordered the NSA and FBI to mount a massive surveillance operation at the 1993 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, held in Seattle. One intelligence source for the story related that over 300 hotel rooms had been bugged for the event – a move which was designed to obtain information regarding oil and hydro-electric deals pending in Vietnam, that was passed on to high-level Democratic Party contributors competing for the contracts.
But foreign companies were not the only losers. When Vietnam expressed interest in purchasing two used 737 freighter aircraft from an American businessman, the deal was scuttled after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arranged favourable financing for two new 737s from Boeing.
But the US is not the only partner of the UKUSA relationship which engages in such activity. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the GCHQ to monitor the activities of international media mogul Robert Maxwell on behalf of the Bank of England.
Former CSE linguist and analyst Jane Shorten claimed that she had seen intercepts from Mexican trade representatives during the 1992-1993 NAFTA trade negotiations, as well as 1991 South Korean Foreign Ministry intercepts dealing with the construction of three Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors for the Koreans in a US$6 billion deal. Shorten’s revelation prompted Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps to launch a probe into the allegations after the Mexicans lodged a protest.
But every spy agency eventually gets beat at its own game. Mike Frost related in Spyworld how an accidental cellphone intercept in 1981, of the American Ambassador to Canada discussing a pending grain deal that the US was about to sign with China, provided Canada with the American negotiating strategy for the deal. The information was used to outbid the US, resulting in a three-year, $2.5 billion contract for the Canadian Wheat Board. CSE out-spooked the NSA again a year later when Canada snagged a $50-million wheat sale to Mexico.
Another disturbing trend regarding the present commercial use of ECHELON is the incestuous relationship that exists between the intelligence agencies and the US corporations that develop the technology that fuels their spy systems. Many of the companies that receive the most important commercial intercepts – Lockheed, Boeing, Loral, TRW and Raytheon – are actively involved in the manufacturing and operation of many of the spy systems that comprise ECHELON.
The collusion between intelligence agencies and their contractors is frightening in the chilling effect it has on creating any foreign or even domestic competition. But just as important is that it is a gross misuse of taxpayer-financed resources.
THE WARNING
Menwith Hill
The Menwith Hill facility is located in North Yorkshire, England, near Harrogate.
The important role that Menwith Hill plays in the ECHELON system was recognized by the recent European Parliament STOA report:
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 Yorks Moors of the UK.
While the UKUSA relationship is a product of Cold War political and military tensions, ECHELON is purely a product of the 20th century – the century of “statism”.
The modern drive toward the assumption of state power has turned legitimate national security agencies and apparati into pawns in a manipulative game, where the stakes are no less than the survival of the Constitution. The systems developed prior to ECHELON were designed to confront the expansionist goals of the Soviet Empire – something the West was forced out of necessity to do.
But as Glyn Ford, European Parliament representative for Manchester, England, and the driving force behind the European investigation of ECHELON, has pointed out:
“The difficulty is that the technology has now become so elaborate that what was originally a small client list has become the whole world.”
What began as a noble alliance to contain and defeat the forces of communism has turned into a carte blanche to disregard the rights and liberties of the American people and the population of the free world.
As has been demonstrated time and again, the NSA has been persistent in subverting not just the intent of the law in regard to the prohibition of domestic spying, but the letter as well. The laws that were created to constrain the intelligence agencies from infringing on our liberties are frequently flaunted, re-interpreted and revised according to the bidding and wishes of political spymasters in Washington, DC. Old habits die hard, it seems.
As stated above, there is a need for such sophisticated surveillance technology. Unfortunately, the world is filled with criminals, drug lords, terrorists and dictators who threaten the peace and security of many nations.
The thought that ECHELON can be used to eliminate or control these international thugs is heartening. But defenders of ECHELON argue that the rare intelligence victories over these forces of darkness and death give wholesale justification to indiscriminate surveillance of the entire world and every member of it. But more complicated issues than that remain.
The shameless and illegal targeting of political opponents, business competitors, dissidents and even Christian ministries stands as a testament that if we are to remain free, we must bind these intelligence systems and those that operate them with the heavy chains of transparency and accountability to our elected officials. But the fact that the ECHELON apparatus can be quickly turned around on those same officials in order to maintain some advantage for the intelligence agencies indicates that these agencies are not presently under the control of our elected representatives.
That Congress is not aware of or able to curtail these abuses of power is a frightening harbinger of what may come here in the United States. The European Parliament has begun the debate over what ECHELON is, how it is being used and how free countries should use such a system.
The US Congress should join that same debate with the understanding that the consequences of ignoring or failing to address these issues could foster the demise of our republican form of government.
Such is the threat, as Senator Frank Church warned the American people over twenty years ago: At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.
There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.
That is the abyss from which there is no return.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
Since this author’s ECHELON report was first sent to the US Congress in November 1998, increased attention has been directed at the spy system by international media outlets and governmental representatives. As news of the system’s sweeping technological capability comes to light, questions continue to be raised concerning the possible illicit uses of the system to circumvent domestic civil liberties protections.
The May 1999 publication of British investigator Duncan Campbell’s detailed report, “Interception Capabilities 2000”, for the European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel (STOA) continued to expose the scope of ECHELON’s supporting facilities and the reach of its surveillance technology.
Among the report’s key findings:
· While “word spotting” search systems have been previously thought to be widespread throughout the system, evidence indicates that this nascent technology is currently ineffective. However, ECHELON utilizes speaker recognition system “voice-prints” to recognize the speech patterns of targeted individuals making international telephone calls.
· US law enforcement agencies are working with their European counterparts under the auspices of a previously secret organization, ILETS (International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminar), to incorporate backdoor wiretapping capabilities into all existing forms of communications systems. In addition, the US Government is continuing to pursue diplomatic initiatives to convince other governments to adopt “key escrow” legislation requiring computer users to provide law enforcement agencies with encryption keys.
· The NSA continues to work with US software manufacturers to weaken the cryptographic capability of popular software programs, such as Lotus Notes and Internet browsers, to assist the intelligence agency in gaining access to a user’s personal information.
· Intelligence sources reveal the increasing use of signals intelligence facilities to provide commercial advantages to domestic companies involved in international trade deals.
· The report provides original, new documentation about the ECHELON system and its role in the interception of communications satellites. This includes details concerning how intelligence agencies are able to intercept Internet traffic and digital communications, including screen shots of traffic analysis from NSA computer systems.
Official UKUSA Confirmation
Privacy researchers were surprised in May when an Australian intelligence official confirmed the existence of the UKUSA intelligence-sharing treaty, in response to a formal information request by Channel 9 Sunday reporter Ross Coulthart.
Martin Brady, director of the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), admitted in a letter dated 16 March that his agency “does cooperate with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas under the UKUSA relationship”.
Parliamentary and Congressional Inquiries
The growing concern about the use of ECHELON has finally extended to capitals and elected representatives around the world. Pressure from the international business community has been brought to bear on government officials in response to mounting evidence that industrial espionage by the US is costing European firms billions of dollars each year.
Germany also followed the French example in June, when the cabinet issued a policy statement encouraging its companies and citizens to utilize encryption programs without restrictions. German business leaders were alerted to the extent of US commercial spying after an anonymous NSA employee admitted on German television in August 1998 that he had participated in stealing industrial secrets from the wind generator manufacturer, Enercon, which were passed on to its main US competitor, Kenetech.
Perhaps the most important governmental development is the growing interest of members of the US Congress regarding ECHELON and its surveillance capabilities. Since the NSA is the prime mover in the UKUSA intelligence partnership, any hope of reining-in the activities of the US intelligence agencies will require the involvement of congressional oversight committees.
IV. LOCATION OF THE WORLD’S REMOTE MIND CONTROL COMPUTER CENTRES
Click on the red dots for more information on each centre
NSA Echelon, Remote Mind Control Computer Centre, Menwith Hill , North Yorkshire, England.
HAARP, Remote Mind Control Computer Centre, Alaska.
NSA Echelon, Remote Mind Control Computer Centre, Pine Gap, Northern Territory, Australia.
NSA Echelon, Remote Mind Control Computer Centre, Fort Meade, Maryland, USA.
V. Uncovering ECHELON: The Top-Secret NSA/GCHQ Program That Has Been Watching You Your Entire Life
Lucas Matney
2:26 PM PDT · August 3, 2015
If history is written by the victors, government surveillance agencies will have an awfully long list of sources to cite.
Domestic digital surveillance has often seemed to be a threat endured mostly by the social media generation, but details have continued to emerge that remind us of decades of sophisticated, automated spying from the NSA and others.
Before the government was peering through our webcams, tracking our steps through GPS, feeling every keystroke we typed and listening and watching as we built up complex datasets of our entire personhood online, there was still rudimentary data to be collected. Over the last fifty years, Project ECHELON has given the UK and United States (as well as other members of the Five Eyes) the capacity to track enemies and allies alike within and outside their states. The scope has evolved in that time period from keyword lifts in intercepted faxes to its current all-encompassing data harvesting.
In a piece published today in The Intercept, life-long privacy advocate Duncan Campbell describes his past few decades tracking down the elusive Project ECHELON, “the first-ever automated global mass surveillance system.
GCHQ
Until Snowden placed the full capacities of the NSA and other government spying agencies in plain sight, ECHELON was largely just another codename in the conspiracy-theorist’s notebook.
Campbell made the first references to the program in his 1988 piece, titled Somebody’s Listening, where he detailed a program capable of tapping into “a billion calls a year in the UK alone.”
Campbell described his conversations with a source, preceding that piece’s publication.
The scale of the operation she described took my breath away (this was 1988, remember). The NSA and its partners had arranged for everything we communicated to be grabbed and potentially analyzed.
The program reportedly utilized massive ground-based radio antennas to intercept satellite transmissions containing the digital communications of millions. It then relied on its content-sensitive dictionaries of keywords and phrases to scour the communications for relevant information.
In February of 2000, 60 Minutes published a report detailing the existence and scope of ECHELON. Mike Frost, a former spy for Canada’s NSA-equivalent, CSE, told the host just how large the program’s reach really was, “Echelon covers everything that’s radiated worldwide at any given instant.”
Frost also recounted a tale of how exactly the program was being used.
While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a–a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w–was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.
Details of ECHELON outraged Europeans in the months following the reports from Campbell and 60 Minutes. In the summer of 2000, European Parliament appointed a special ad-hoc committee to spend a year investigating ECHELON, with some arguing that by spying on European communications, the U.S. was breaching the European Convention on Human Rights. Little materialized from the committee, other than a vote recognizing the program’s mere existence.
Following the 2005 discovery that the Bush Administration had been tapping Americans’ phones without warrants, some speculatively pointed to ECHELON as a tool that the government may have been using.
Since then, the program has largely been presented to the public only through posts on government surveillance/conspiracy forums with limited references in declassified documents to guide those questioning the program’s full potential.
It has largely faded from public consciousness, especially as details of its far more powerful offspring have been exposed, but it’s important to frame automated government surveillance as an issue of our lifetimes rather than short-sightedly confining its influence to the advent of the mainstream internet.
It is now abundantly clear, thanks to internal documents leaked by Snowden, that the program exists, but what is unclear is what that means. PRISM and XKeyscore certainly represent a more shocking invasion of the information we have digitally presented, but ECHELON shows us that the privacy of our communications have indeed always been under attack.
These instances of government surveillance have been justified by decades of disparate “threats” under multiple administrations that have repeatedly made promises to “prioritize privacy without compromising security,” while we all have been led by the current narratives.
As the broken record continues to play, further examining ECHELON suggests the importance of looking to the past to remember what sounds familiar.
VI. ECHELON Today: The Evolution of an NSA Black Program
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, November 14, 2013
Antifascist Calling and Global Research 13 July 2013
Region: USA
Theme: Intelligence, Police State & Civil Rights
People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
While the public is rightly angered by the illegal, unconstitutional nature of NSA programs which seize and store data for retrospective harvesting by intelligence and law enforcement officials, including the content of phone calls, emails, geolocational information, bank records, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, even medical records–in secret, and with little in the way of effective oversight–the historical context of how, and why, this vast spying apparatus came to be is often given short shrift.
Revelations about NSA spying didn’t begin June 5, 2013 however, the day when The Guardian published a top secret FISA Court Order to Verizon, ordering the firm turn over the telephone records on millions of its customers “on an ongoing daily basis.”
Before PRISM there was ECHELON: the top secret surveillance program whose all-encompassing “dictionaries” (high-speed computers powered by complex algorithms) ingest and sort key words and text scooped-up by a global network of satellites, from undersea cables and land-based microwave towers.
Past as Prologue
Confronted by a dizzying array of code-named programs, the casual observer will assume the spymasters running these intrusive operations are all-knowing mandarins with their fingers on the pulse of global events.
Yet, if disastrous US policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing capitalist economic meltdown tell us anything, it is that the American superpower, in President Nixon’s immortal words, really is “a pitiful, helpless giant.”
In fact, the same programs used to surveil the population at large have also been turned inward by the National Security State against itself and targets military and political elites who long thought themselves immune from such close attention.
Coupled with Snowden’s disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported here and here), revealed that the agency–far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his “secret and confidential” black files–has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.
While Tice’s allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American policy–elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations–despite being deep-sixed by US media, they confirm previous reporting about the agency.
When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA’s ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for New Statesman revealed that a whistleblower, Margaret Newsham, a software designer employed by Lockheed at the giant agency listening post at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England, stepped forward and told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session, that NSA was using its formidable intercept capabilities “to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals.”
Campbell’s reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s groundbreaking book, Secret Power, the first detailed account of NSA’s global surveillance system. A summary of Hager’s findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared in CovertAction Quarterly.
As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that “NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes,” said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Ironically enough, congressional efforts to mitigate abuses by the intelligence agencies exposed by the Church and Pike Committees in the 1970s, resulted in the 1978 creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. However, as The New York Times reported July 7, that court “in more than a dozen classified rulings . . . has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” a “parallel Supreme Court” whose rulings are beyond legal challenge.
In an 88-page report on ECHELON published in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Newsham said that when she worked on the development of SILKWORTH at the secret US base, described as “a system for processing information relayed from signals intelligence satellites,” she told Campbell and other reporters, including CBS News’ 60 Minutes, that “she witnessed and overheard” one of Thurman’s intercepted phone calls.
Like Thomas Drake, the senior NSA official prosecuted by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act, for information he provided The Baltimore Sun over widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the agency’s failed Trailblazer program, Newsham had testified before Congress and filed a lawsuit against Lockheed over charges of sexual harassment, “corruption and mis-spending on other US government ‘black’ projects.”
A year earlier, in a 1999 on the record interview with the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, Newsham spoke to journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, telling them of her “constant fear” that “certain elements” within the US secret state would “try to silence her”; a point not lost on Edward Snowden today.
“As a result,” the newspaper reported, “she sleeps with a loaded pistol under her mattress, and her best friend is Mr. Gunther–a 120-pound German shepherd that was trained to be a guard and attack dog by a good friend in the Nevada State Police.”
“To me,” the whistleblower said, “there are only two issues at stake here: right or wrong. And the longer I worked on the clandestine surveillance projects, the more I could see that they were not only illegal, but also unconstitutional.”
The Case for a Pardon of Edward Snowden by President Trump
“Even then,” between 1974 and 1984 when she worked on ECHELON, it “was very big and sophisticated.”
“As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating,” Newsham averred. “Since our satellites could in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be today.”
When queried about “which part of the system is named Echelon,” Newsham told the reporters: “The computer network itself. The software programs are known as SILKWORTH and SIRE, and one of the most important surveillance satellites is named VORTEX. It intercepts things like phone conversations.”
Despite evidence presented in her congressional testimony about these illegal operations, “no substantive investigation took place, and no report was made to Congress,” Campbell later wrote.
“Since then,” the British journalist averred, “investigators have subpoenaed other witnesses and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start.” (emphasis added)
This would explain why members of Congress, the federal Judiciary and the Executive Branch itself, as Tice alleges, tread lightly when it comes to crossing NSA. However, as information continues to emerge about these privacy-killing programs it should also be clear that the agency’s prime targets are not “terrorists,” judges or politicians, but the American people themselves.
In fact, as Snowden stated in a powerful message published by WikiLeaks: “In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised–and it should be.”
How did we get here? Is there a direct line from Cold War-era programs which targeted the Soviet Union and their allies, and which now, in the age of capitalist globalization, the epoch of planet-wide theft and plunder, now targets the entire world’s population?
ECHELON’s Roots: The UKUSA Agreement
Lost in the historical mists surrounding the origins of the Cold War, the close collaboration amongst Britain and the United States as they waged war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, by war’s end had morphed into a permanent intelligence-military alliance which predated the founding of NATO. With the defeat of the Axis powers, a new global division of labor was in the offing led by the undisputed superpower which emerged from the conflagration, the United States.
Self-appointed administrator over Europe’s old colonial holdings across Africa, Asia and the Middle East (the US already viewed Latin America as its private export dumping ground and source for raw materials), the US used its unparalleled position to benefit the giant multinational American firms grown larger and more profitable than ever as a result of wartime economic mobilization managed by the state.
By 1946, the permanent war economy which later came to be known as the Military-Industrial Complex, a semi-command economy directed by corporate executives, based on military, but also on emerging high-tech industries bolstered by taxpayer-based government investments, was already firmly entrenched and formed the political-economic base on which the so-called “American Century” was constructed.
While resource extraction and export market domination remained the primary goal of successive US administrations (best summarized by the slogan, “the business of government is business”), advances in technology in general and telecommunications in particular, meant that the system’s overlords required an intelligence apparatus that was always “on” as it “captured” the flood of electronic signals coursing across the planet.
The secret British and US agencies responsible for cracking German, Japanese and Russian codes during the war found themselves in a quandary. Should they declare victory and go home or train their sights on the new (old) adversary–their former ally, the Soviet Union–but also on home grown and indigenous communist and socialist movements more generally?
In opting for the latter, the UK-US wartime partnership evolved into a broad agreement to share signals and communications intelligence (SIGINT and COMINT), a set-up which persists today.
In 1946, Britain and the United States signed the United Kingdom-United States of America Agreement (UKUSA), a multilateral treaty to share signals intelligence amongst the two nations and Britain’s Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Known as the “Five Eyes” agreement, the treaty was such a closely-guarded secret that Australia’s Prime Minister was kept in the dark until 1973!
In 2010, the British National Archives released previously classified Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) files that provide an important historical overview of the agreement. Also in 2010, the National Security Agency followed suit and published formerly classified files from their archives. Accompanying NSA’s release was a 1955 amended version of the treaty.
It’s secretive nature is clearly spelled out: “It will be contrary to this Agreement to reveal its existence to any third party unless otherwise agreed by the two parties.”
In 2005, 2009 and 2013, The National Security Archive published a series of previously classified documents obtained from NSA under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed agency thinking on a range of subjects, from global surveillance to cyberwar.
What we have learned from these sources and reporting by Duncan Campbell and Nicky Hager, are that the five agencies feeding the surveillance behemoth, America’s NSA, Britain’s GCHQ, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), are subdivided into first and second tier partners, with the US, as befitting a hyperpower, forming the “1st party” and the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand forming “2nd party” partners.
Under terms of UKUSA, intelligence “products” are defined as “01. Collection of traffic. 02. Acquisition of communications documents and equipment. 03. Traffic analysis. 04. Cryptanalysis. 05. Decryption and translation. 06. Acquisition of information regarding communications organizations, procedures, practices and equipment.”
“Such exchange,” NSA informed us, “will be unrestricted on all work undertaken except when specifically excluded from the agreement at the request of either party and with the agreement of the other.”
“It is the intention of each party,” we’re told, “to limit such exceptions to the absolute minimum and to exercise no restrictions other than those reported and mutually agreed upon.”
This certainly leaves wide latitude for mischief as we learned with the Snowden disclosures.
Amid serious charges that “Five Eyes” were illegally seizing industrial and trade secrets from “3rd party” European partners such as France and Germany, detailed in the European Parliament’s 2001 ECHELON report, it should be clear by now that since its launch in 1968 when satellite communications became a practical reality, ECHELON has evolved into a global surveillance complex under US control.
The Global Surveillance System Today
The echoes of those earlier secret programs reverberate in today’s headlines.
Last month, The Guardian reported that the “collection of traffic” cited in UKUSA has been expanded to GCHQ’s “ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.”
Then on July 6, The Washington Post disclosed that NSA has tapped directly into those fiber optic cables, as AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein described to Wired Magazine in 2006, and now scoops-up petabyte scale communications flowing through the US internet backbone. The agency was able to accomplish this due to the existence of “an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances.”
“Among their jobs documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.”
Following up on July 10, the Post published a new PRISM slide from the 41-slide deck provided to the paper by Edward Snowden.
The slide revealed that “two types of collection” now occur. One is the PRISM program that collects information from technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. The second source is “a separate category labeled ‘Upstream,’ described as accessing ‘communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past’.”
Recently, Der Spiegel, reported that NSA averred the agency “does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do.” This is an outright falsehood exposed by former Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE) officer Mike Frost.
In a 1997 CovertAction Quarterly exposé, Frost recounted how “CSE operated alone or joined with NSA or GCHQ to: intercept communications in other countries from the confines of Canadian embassies around the world with the knowledge of the ambassador; aid politicians, political parties, or factions in an allied country to gain partisan advantage; spy on its allies; spy on its own citizens; and perform ‘favors’ that helped its allies evade domestic laws against spying.”
“Throughout it all,” Frost insisted, “I was trained and controlled by US intelligence which told us what to do and how to do it.”
Everyone else, Der Spiegel reports, is fair game. “For all other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not apply. ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners,’ the NSA boasts in an internal presentation.”
It should also be clear that targeting isn’t strictly limited to the governments and economic institutions of “3rd party foreign partners,” but extends to the private communications of their citizens. Der Spiegel, citing documents supplied by Snowden, reported that the agency “gathered metadata from some 15 million telephone conversations and 10 million Internet datasets.” The newsmagazine noted that “the Americans are collecting from up to half a billion communications a month in Germany,” describing the surveillance as “a complete structural acquisition of data.”
Despite hypocritical protests by European governments, on the contrary, Snowden disclosed that those “3rd party” partners are joined at the hip with their “Five Eyes” cousins.
In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Snowden was asked if “German authorities or German politicians [are] involved in the NSA surveillance system?”
“Yes, of course. We’re in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker’s girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country–and they hand them over to us. They don’t ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they’re violating global privacy.”
Disclosing new information on how UKUSA functions today, Snowden told the German newsmagazine: “In some cases, the so-called Five Eye Partners go beyond what NSA itself does. For instance, the UK’s General [sic] Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has a system called TEMPORA.”
“TEMPORA,” the whistleblower averred, “is the signals intelligence community’s first ‘full-take’ Internet buffer that doesn’t care about content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act. It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit.”
“Right now,” Snowden said, “the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that’s being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that’s not metadata. ‘Full-take’ means it doesn’t miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit’s capacity. If you send a single ICMP packet and it routes through the UK, we get it. If you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter’s medical records get processed at a London call center . . . well, you get the idea.”
We do; and thanks to Edward Snowden we now know that everyone is a target.
VI. Results of the Protest at Echelon Citizen Spy Base and Mind Control Centre – 4th July 2000.
Yet again the protest was a great success. Although it did not go exactly to our original plan, it transpired much better than expected. Graham Lewis and myself drove up to Menwith Hill from Glastonbury the previous night which took us about 7 hours. We met at Echelon’s main gate with Justin Smith who is also a survivor of Neuro- Electromagnetic Frequency Torture. He is presently being tortured by his perpetrators via the use of Neuro-Electromagnetic weapons and was understandably stressed and finding life difficult.
However, his immense courage guided him to the protest where he did an amazing job of taking film footage for Project Freedom’s forthcoming video documentary. Graham and myself had planned to do a sit-down protest in front of the main gate of Echelon Citizen Spy Base and Mind Control Centre, hopefully to disrupt the so-called ‘Independence Day’ celebrations that were being held within the base.
Again, we were planning an attempt to be arrested, to be able to speak our truth in a court of law about the Human Rights atrocities being perpetrated against innocent members of the public by the Intelligence agencies using Neuro-Electromagnetic Weapons. However, the events that manifested, were much better than expected.
There were about 50 people in total protesting at the U.S. National Security Agency Citizen Spy Base, the majority of whom were demonstrating against the Star Wars programme. Graham, Justin and myself were the only people there demonstrating against the intelligence agencies and the use of their Psychotronic weapons upon the public for Remote Mind Control Experimentation, Behavioural Manipulation and Murder.
Very shortly after we arrived at the protest Graham and I started to hand out Project Freedom flyers entitled ‘Covert Terrorism in the UK’ to the ‘Star Wars’ demonstrators and also to T.V. film crew journalists who were filming the demonstration It will be interesting to see if Project Freedom receives any response from these ‘journalists’. I personally made a point of handing out the flyers to a number of M.O.D. and local police who were ‘securing’ the area outside the base entrance in case of any ‘troublesome’ protesters.
We were fortunate enough to encounter a few open-minded officers who were genuinely interested enough to ask questions on the work of Project Freedom. Justin managed to capture on film some very important issues which were being discussed between myself and one particular officer who was very open-minded and took a genuine interest in the Human Rights atrocities being perpetrated by his hierarchy against the public. The main issues we discussed were about the core element within the Police and Military Intelligence agencies who are directly involved in attacking innocent members of society with their ‘silent weapons’, and the structuring and control of their paedophile rings.
We also discussed the fact that the mass majority of this network is totally unaware of their hierarchy’s horrendouly sick and perverted ‘core element’ due to the compartmentalised ‘need to know’ structure. Each ‘compartment’ being told only enough information to do the job designated to them and no more! If the majority of intelligence agents and others became aware of this ‘core element’, the system of manipulation and control over masses would ultimately crumble. This sick and perverted ‘core element’ have been hand picked by their psychopathic hierarchy for their terrorising, torturing, murdering and paedophile ‘qualities’.
It is only a matter of time before this ‘core element’ will be exposed to the public as well as to the rest of their compartmentalised and brainwashed associates.
As one of the MOD police officers was taking video footage of the protest, I took the opportunity to give a few minutes talk into the camera about the Human Rights atrocities commited by the intelligence services against the public via the use of their Neuro-Electromagnetic Mind Control Weapons. Again, a letter has been sent to the MOD police to obtain a copy of this footage, which is our legal right.
All in all the protest was a complete success and no Project Freedom members were ‘zapped’ by microwaves this time around to stop us from taking non-violent direct action. Direct microwave zapping was experienced by myself and a ‘would-be’ documentary film maker at our last Project Freedom Echelon Citizen Spy Base protest on March 4th 2000.
Footnote:
Many thanks to Graham and Justin for their courage in participating in the protest. Justin in particular, who has shown he is a true warrior of the heart to have participated in the protest under such difficult personal circumstances. A special thanks also to the genuine and open-minded police officers willing to listen and to discuss the Human Rights atrocities being perpetrated against the public by their hierarchy.
Love and Peace, George Farquhar.
Video footage to follow.
Protest Flyers:
WANTED! PUBLIC ENQUIRY INTO THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AGENDA BY COVERTLY ATTACKING SOCIETY USING REMOTE ELECTROMAGNETIC MIND CONTROL – WEAPONS
PEACEFUL PROTEST AT ECHELON – CITIZEN SPY BASE
MENWITH HILL – NORTH YORKSHIRE
12.00pm Tuesday 4th July 2000
A NUMBER OF EVENTS ARE PLANNED TO ENCOURAGE
MEDIA EXPOSURE ON THE DAY AND THEREFORE
PUBLIC AWARENESS OF THIS
HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE
A REPORT EXPOSING THE NAKED TRUTH ON THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES AND THEIR USE OF REMOTE ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPONS ON OUR
UNSUSPECTING SOCIETY HAS RECENTLY BEEN SENT TO EVERY MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
WARNING TO ECHELON PROTESTERS!!!
Propective protesters must be warned that there could be a dinstinct possibility that during the protest at NSA Echelon, we may become subjected to severe psychotronic attacks. The attacks could be similar to the well documented atrocities against the Greenham Common women in the UK and the NSA Echelon Pine Gap peace protesters in Australia, many who have now died from microwave frequency psychoctronic attacks.
The results of the attacks we could endure may cause short-term psychological and physiological problems or even long term conditions such as, severe brain and nervous system damage, fast acting cancers, severe burns and leukaemia etc, etc.
This protest is only for those who are willing to put their life on the line for the freedom of the human race.