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ECHELON

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This article is about the spy network; for other uses see Echelon (disambiguation).
Antenna 4 (through the wire) in former Echelon intelligence gathering station at Silvermine, Cape Peninsula, South Africa.

ECHELON is a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network run by the UKUSA Community. [1] ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes and e-mails nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts. [2] ECHELON is estimated to intercept up to 3 billion communications every day.

History

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

In May 2001, the European Parliament produced a report on ECHELON [3] which, amongst other things, recommended that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy. In the UK, the government introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which gives authorities the power to demand that citizens hand over their encryption keys, without a judge-approved warrant. In April 2004, the European Union decided to spend 11 million EUR developing secure communication based on quantum cryptography — the SECOQC project — a system that would theoretically be unbreakable by ECHELON or any other espionage system.

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

Before the September 11, 2001 attacks and the legislation which followed it, US intelligence agencies were generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US and other western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilites spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data (perhaps even automatically through the ECHELON system without human intervention).

The proposed US-only "Total Information Awareness" program relied on technology similar to ECHELON, and was to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the "taps" already compiled by ECHELON. It was cancelled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.

It has been alleged that in 2002 the Bush Administration extended the ECHELON program to domestic surveillance. This controversy was the subject of the New York Times eavesdropping exposé of December, 2005. [4] [5] [6] [7]. Evidence exists to suggest that ECHELON was already being used for domestic eavesdropping during the Clinton administration [8], although testimony by then-CIA director George Tenet indicates that the use of ECHELON during the Clinton administration was authorized by the FISA Court, as required by law [9].

Organization

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

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

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

The U.S. National Security Agency, with headquarters at Fort Meade just outside Washington, DC, has a global staff of 38,000 and a budget estimated at more than US$3.6-billion. The UK equivalent organisation is the Government Communications Headquarters GCHQ based near Cheltenham. Further, smaller organisations exist to provide communications technology and expertise (e.g. Her Majesty's Government Communication Centre HMGCC).

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

UKUSA member nations Australia and New Zealand have already confirmed that ECHELON exists (though not specifying any details of its capabilities or operations), and the Netherlands (which isn't an ECHELON participant) have also confirmed the spynet's existence (through a parliamentary hearing). Furthermore, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has admitted using the system to uncover information about foreign companies using bribes to win contracts. The information was passed on to US companies and foreign governments were pressed to stop the bribes. Media coverage of a couple of such events tended to give the impression that ECHELON was being used to give the trade secrets of foreign companies to US companies. European aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract [10].

Limits

The limits of a large system such as ECHELON are defined by its very size. Though the system intercepts 3 billion communications daily, clients must know which intercepted communications to monitor before they can realize an intelligence advantage. For example, in the months before the September 11 attacks on the United States, signal intelligence produced by ECHELON developed considerable "chatter", or snippets of dialogue, that suggested some sort of attack was imminent. Analysts were unable to pin down the details of the attack, though, because operatives planning the attack relied largely on non-electronic communications. Even overt signals, such as a dramatic increase in trading activity of stock options on companies that were to be damaged in the attacks, failed to alert analysts, apparently because they did not know where within the daily deluge of electronic messages to look, much less how to connect the dots pointing to a specific attack.

Hardware

An article by Chris Mellor claims that ECHELON is built by Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Zeta Associates. Margaret Newsham claims that she designed the software for the system at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, under the code name P415. The two main programs are called SILKWORTH and SIRE.

Ground stations

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

The largest and best-attested ground stations

Various other ground stations

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

Former ground stations

See also

Further reading

  • Hager, Nicky; Secret Power, New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network; Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, NZ; ISBN 0908802358; 1996
  • Keefe, Patrick Radden Chatter: dispatches from the secret world of global eavesdropping; Random House Publishing, New York, NY; ISBN 1400060346; 2005

Sources

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Category:Echelon.
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