Echelon 'Proof' Discovered
by Chris Oakes
3:00 a.m. 26.Jan.2000 PST
References to a project Echelon have been found for the first time in declassified National Security Agency documents, says the researcher who found them.
After combing through declassified National Security Agency documents, Jeffrey Richelson, a researcher for the National Security Archives, has concluded that Echelon -- the purported name of the alleged international project for intercepting all forms of electronic communication -- does exist.
(The National Security Archive is an independent, non-governmental research institute and library at George Washington University, according to its Web site, and has no relation to the National Security Agency.)
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Echelon 'Confirmation': Not
"[The documents] provide government confirmation of the Echelon program," Richelson said.
At the same time, Richelson said the documents indicate that it may not have nearly the illicit scope and nature held by some of the more extreme conspiracy theories regarding Echelon.
"My research suggests that it's much more limited than the extreme cases make out," he said.
In fact, Richelson said he doubts the agency has overstepped any legal bounds in executing the Echelon program.
Intelligence watchdogs suspect that national agencies worldwide -- led by the NSA and others -- are intercepting and handing off private communications among citizens to each other.
Richelson found the telling information in a mountain of documents he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some he obtained as recently as the last six months. Others he's had for years. He published his findings on the Web for the first time last week.
One of the documents Richelson highlights for its specific reference to project Echelon pertains to the functions of naval security group activity in Sugar Grove, West Virginia.
Richelson said documents make clear that a program called Echelon is associated with the Sugar Grove installation.
Echelon has been described by privacy groups as a global surveillance network that intercepts all kinds of communications for redistribution among the primary partners in a decades-old U.K.-U.S. alliance that also includes Australia and New Zealand. But Richelson said that the vision is probably far bigger than the reality.
Echelon 'Proof' Discovered page 2
3:00 a.m. 26.Jan.2000 PST
continued
"Echelon is a more limited program," he wrote on his site.
Those limitations, he said, include restrictions imposed on collection activities by the UK-U.S. allies regarding the citizens of those countries.
"Thus, the [Naval instruction document] also specifies that one of the responsibilities of the commander of the Sugar Grove site is to 'ensure [that] the privacy of U.S. citizens are properly safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18."
The agency's public affairs office did not respond to email seeking comment on the findings. The office has consistently declined to comment on Echelon-related developments.
Last week, however, Michael Jacobs, deputy director for information systems security at the NSA, bristled at the notion that his agency would spy on U.S. citizens. Strict internal policies, he said, prevent the agency from doing such a thing.
"That is not our job," Jacobs said. "We take those restrictions very seriously."
Steven Aftergood, who edits the Secrecy & Government Bulletin Project on Government Secrecy Federation and has been following the Echelon story, accepts Richelson's findings and conclusions.
"Is this reference to activation of Echelon units a reference to what we have to come know and love as the Echelon network? I would say it appears so," Aftergood said. "That's what Richelson is asserting and I buy it."
So is it a big deal?
"It's interesting because I don't know of any other official government documents that make reference to Echelon by name," Aftergood said. "It's certainly interesting from that point of view."
But he, like Richelson himself, sees no smoking gun.
"I don't think this document in itself raises any significant questions. The fact that there is such a network with various stations around the globe ... that's entirely non-controversial," Aftergood said.
"It does not get into other aspects of the Echelon mythology such as its use for domestic surveillance, economic espionage, or other questionable activities. So from that perspective it doesn't create any new questions."
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ECHELON Websites:>
http://www.spyking.com/echelon.html
http://www.dfg-vk.de/links/book73c.htm
http://www.dfg-vk.de/links/book73c.htm
http://member.newsguy.com/~mayday/crypto/crypto1i.html
http://member.newsguy.com/~mayday/crypto/crypto1i.html
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/5396/echelon.html
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/5396/echelon.html
http://www.ncoic.com/echelon.htm
http://www.ncoic.com/echelon.htm
IN THE LATE 1980S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE US PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.
by Nicky Hager
from his book SECRET POWER
For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.
The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countriesanywhere in the world.
It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.
The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link.
Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
Six UKUSA station target Intelsat satellites
used to relay-and to intercept-most of the
world's e-mail,fax, and telex communications.
The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.
SOMEONE IS LISTENING
The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole.
The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.
The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from its own stations.
Under ECHELON, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand's satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies' keywords,on it.
Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched- whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.
The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats.
The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.
The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).
Each of the five stations' Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary.
These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the interception occurred.
New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA's Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring. Until New Zealand's integration into ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).
S ee also:
Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?
about the compromise of trusted ecryption hardware
Networking with Spooks
about control over the internet domain name system
Big Brother Goes Hi Tech
about loss of privacy in the information age
The Secret FISA Court:
Rubberstamping on Rights
about the loss of legal protections from covert surveillance.
"Everything You Know,...is Wrong"!
------------------
Time02112@mailcity.com
http://pages.bolt.com/other/time02112
[This message has been edited by TIME02112 (edited March 13, 2000).]
