by Jeffrey Richelson
not new. It's no wonder that when a January 1998 report to the European
Parliament, An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, claimed that
"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 . . . to Fort Meade in
Maryland," it triggered a political controversy that continues to this day.
The study also asserted that the key to the eavesdropping operation was a
system code-named "Echelon," designed to indiscriminately intercept the
non-military communications of governments, private organizations, and
businesses on behalf of the United States and its primary partners in the
decades-old UKUSA signals inte! lligence alliance--Britain, Australia, Canada,
and New Zealand. Items of intelligence value are selected by computer
identification of keywords provided by the UKUSA nations. In response to
extensive press coverage across Europe, the European Parliament commissioned
a second report that focused exclusively on Echelon and communications
intelligence. Sweden's foreign minister promised to investigate whether
Swedish companies were harmed by U.S. spying. Last October, activists on both
sides of the Atlantic participated in "Jam Echelon Day" by sending a high
volume of communications containing words, such as "terrorism," which they
expected to be on the keyword list, in hopes of overloading the system. The
Australian and New Zealand public have also taken an interest. And in the
United States, the conservative Free Congress Foundation issued a report on
the topic titled Echelon: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network. T! he
American Civil Liberties Union maintains an "Echelon Watch" section on its
web site, at www.aclu.org/ echelonwatch. The controversy has even reached
into the halls of Congress, where Cong. Porter Goss of Florida, the
Republican chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
requested that the National Security Agency (NSA provide internal documents
that would help reassure the committee that U.S. signals intelligence
activities are not violating the privacy rights of Americans. Meanwhile, at
the instigation of Republican Cong. Bob Barr of Georgia, hearings are
scheduled for the current session of Congress to explore that issue. The
fear, press coverage, and rhetoric surrounding Echelon begs the question:
could this be a case where life is imitating art? A number of recent films (
Sneakers, Enemy of the State, Mercury Rising, The Shadow Conspiracy) depict
the NSA as an organization that ignores legal r! estraints in pursuit of its
vision of national security (and career advancement for key personnel). It is
possible that some of the reporting and oratory concerning Echelon may be as
over-the-top as these films, in which NSA officials also casually authorize
murder, even of small children.
The Echelon network That the UKUSA alliance, particularly as a result of U.S.
efforts, operates an electronic eavesdropping network with global reach
should come as no surprise. The National Reconnaissance Office maintains a
constellation of geosynchronous, elliptically orbiting, and low-earth
orbiting satellites that intercept communications, missile telemetry, and
radar emanations. Civilian and military personnel run satellite ground
stations in Britain, Germany, Australia, and Colorado which control the
satellites and receive the intercepted signals. The Air Combat Command and
the navy fly a variety of planes equipped to scoop up communications and
other electronic signals. Nor has the end of the Cold War led to the
termination of ship-based signals intelligence collection or submarine
reconnaissance operations--including operations to tap undersea cables.
Ground intercept sites also continue to be part of the eaves! dropping network.
While the United States closed down a number of stations in the aftermath of
the Cold War--particularly those that intercepted high-frequency military
communications--ground sites still form an important part of the UKUSA
network. One particular set of ground stations is devoted to the interception
of satellite communications--or the "COMSAT intercept mission." According to
much of the press coverage, Echelon is the code word for the UKUSA "global
surveillance network." But it is not, nor is there any code word for the
overall U.S. or UKUSA "SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) apparatus. Rather, the
U.S. system is known as the United States Sigint System (USSS). Echelon is,
however, very real. Its existence was first revealed by British investigative
reporter Duncan Campbell in an August 12, 1988 New Statesman article. In
1996, New Zealand peace activist Nicky Hager provided a detailed description
of the pr! ogram in his book, Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the
International Spy Network, an extraordinary examination of New Zealand's
SIGINT agency and its place in the UKUSA alliance. Virtually all reporting,
including the original report to the European Parliament, is derived from
these works. Unfortunately, much of the reporting does not accurately reflect
what Campbell and Hager wrote. The Echelon system that Hager describes links
together computers, known as "dictionaries," at UKUSA ground stations. Those
computers contain, for each of the cooperating agencies, a list of keywords
whose appearance in any intercepted message makes the message an item of
interest to the agency. The computers automatically search through millions
of intercepted messages for the ones containing the pre-programmed keywords
and then ship the selected messages off to the computers of the requesting
agency. Before Echelon appeared in the 1970s, ! the agencies shared
intelligence, but they usually processed and analyzed the intercepted
communications. As a result, most exchanges involved finished reports rather
than raw intercepts. Echelon, on the other hand, is an integrated network
that allows the agencies to specify which intercepts are of interest and to
receive them automatically via computer. A key question, then, is which UKUSA
ground stations are part of the Echelon network? COMSAT intercept sites are
clearly part of that network. Almost 20 years ago, author James Bamford
revealed in The Puzzle Palace that NSA-operated antennas at Sugar Grove, West
Virginia, and Yakima, Washington, targeted the signals to and from INTELSAT
communications satellites. Just 60 miles from Sugar Grove, at Etam, West
Virginia, telephone calls, telegrams, and telexes arriving from or destined
for 134 countries passed through an array of satellite dishes. The NSA
operation at th! e obscure Yakima Firing Range, Bamford reported, was
conveniently located 100 miles south of a similar station in north-central
Washington.
Today, Sugar Grove hosts both navy and air force SIGINT units that operate
four satellite antennas targeted on the communications flowing in and out of
the Etam ground station. The mission of the air force unit was described in
the 1998-99 Air Intelligence Agency Almanac as providing "enhanced
intelligence support to air force operational commanders and other consumers
of COMSAT information." That Sugar Grove is part of the Echelon program is
clear from declassified Naval Security Group Command regulation C5450.48A,
which notes that one of the duties of Sugar Grove's commander is to "maintain
and operate an Echelon site." The air force unit at Sugar Grove is a
detachment of the Air Intelligence Agency's 544th Intelligence Group; Yakima
and Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico (another COMSAT intercept site), host
detachments from the 544th IG,evidence that they are also part of the Echelon
network. More evidence is provided by the! official History of the Air
Intelligence Agency (AIA) for 1994, which contains a section titled
"Activation of Echelon Units." That section noted that, in 1994, the AIA,
NSA, and the navy's SIGINT agency "drafted agreements to increase AIA
participation in the growing [deleted, but apparently 'civilian
communications'] mission" and that AIA was to establish detachments of the
544th Intelligence Group to accomplish that objective. The other partners to
the UKUSA agreement do not have the resources or incentive to maintain an
array of SIGINT systems similar to those of the United States. But they can
and do operate COMSAT intercept sites. Even tiny New Zealand has a modern
intercept facility on its east coast at Waihopai. Hager reports that the
station, operational since 1989, consists of a services building, two
satellite dishes under large radomes, and an operations building. If there
was any doubt about what was goin! g on at the facility, it was dispelled when
a television reporter entered the station and filmed close-ups of INTELSAT
technical manuals held in the control center, as Duncan Campbell wrote in his
1999 report to the European Parliament, Interception Capabilities 2000.
Meanwhile, Australia operates a more extensive intercept facility at
Geraldton in western Australia. When Geraldton opened in 1993 it had four
intercept dishes targeted on INTELSATs orbiting above the Indian Ocean and
Pacific. Among the keywords in the Geraldton dictionary are ones related to
North Korea's economic, diplomatic, and military situation, Japanese trade
ministry plans, and developments in Pakistani nuclear weapons technology.
Another Australian intercept site, at Shoal Bay on the northern-central
coast, began operating in late 1979, with two dishes targeted on Indonesian
communications satellites. Shoal Bay is not, however, part of the Echelon
States and Britain.1 The other UKUSA partners also target communications
satellites. A Canadian Communications Security Establishment site at Leitrim
appears to intercept the signals from communications satellites over Latin
America. Britain's Government Communications Headquarters operates a major
COMSAT intercept site at Morwenstow, near Bude, Cornwall.2 While Echelon's
dictionary computers are also present at the ground stations for U.S. SIGINT
satellites, the stations do not appear to be tied into the Echelon network.
According to Campbell, they sort through intercepted material in the same way
that the Echelon dictionaries do, but their intercepts are not made available
to U.S. partners. Nor do any cable tapping operations appear to feed into
Echelon. Chinks in the armor That "Echelon" is not synonymous with the entire
UKUSA eavesdropping effo! rt does not mean that the questions raised about it
are not valid. An intercept operation that scoops up a good deal of the
world's communications satellite traffic, automatically processes it in
search of whatever intelligence any UKUSA nation wished, and then sends it on
its way, would be unsettling. At least for the immediate future the reality
seems to be somewhat less frightening. The UKUSA SIGINT agencies certainly do
not intercept every signal that passes through the airwaves. And, because of
the volume of communications, the expense of collection systems, and the
limits of their computer resources, NSA and its allies have always had to
prioritize targets and selectively task collection systems. Campbell notes in
Interception Capabilities that it is possible to identify certain satellite
signals, whether television or communications, as of no intelligence
interest, and that "these signals will not progress further w! ithin the
system." There is also a significant limit imposed on the ability to monitor
voice communications, resulting from the failure of extensive U.S. Efforts to
produce "word spotting" software that would allow computer transcription of
intercepted conversations. In 1993, former NSA director Bobby Inman admitted
that "I have wasted more U.S. taxpayer dollars trying to do that [word
spotting in speech] than anything else in my intelligence career." Nor has
the capability been developed in the intervening years, according to
Campbell's report. Thus, while faxes, telexes, e-mail, and computer traffic
are subject to automatic processing and analysis, phone calls are
not--although the phones of the parties involved in a call can be
automatically identified and voice-prints can be used to identify who is
speaking. Congressional intelligence oversight committees have recently
lambasted NSA for its failure to adequately modernize! its operations. Last
year, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) stated
that as result of NSA's failure to address process and management problems,
"The committee believes that NSA is in serious trouble." Later that year,
Cong. Sanford Bishop Jr., a Democrat from Georgia, said that although NSA is
facing "tremendous challenges coping with the explosive development of
commercial communications and computer technology . . . [the agency] has not
demonstrated much prowess in coping with the challenge." A year earlier, on
October 5, 1998, HPSCI Staff Director John Millis told the Central
Intelligence Retirees Association, "Signals intelligence is in a crisis. . .
. In the past four or five years technology has moved from being the friend
to being the enemy of SIGINT." Millis went on to suggest that the United
States "shouldn't be spending one more dollar than we do to try and intercept
communications . . . ! from space." That judgment is reinforced by a number of
articles, the most prominent one by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in
the December 6, 1999 New Yorker, which have painted a picture of NSA as an
organization facing serious challenges. At least three developments have
reduced NSA's ability to collect and process communications. One is the
expanding use of fiber-optic cables. Any signal sent through the air can be
snatched out of the air, but signals transmitted on fiber optic cannot.
Tapping them has also apparently proven a major challenge in ways that
tapping conventional cables has not, according to Campbell's report. A second
problem is the quantum leap in the sophistication of encryption software. A
September 16, 1999 cabinet-level report to President Clinton noted that "for
the strongest form of encryption, only the intended recipient can unscramble
the message and read the original plain text, unless so! meone else has gained
access to the corresponding decoding software and decryption key." The
explosion in communications volume, because of the widespread use of cell
phones, faxes, and the Internet, is also a problem. As communications
increase, the percentage of messages containing valuable intelligence drops,
and finding that information becomes more and more difficult. Hersh reports
that daily satellite telephone calls in the Arab world, many of which are
encrypted, number in the millions. Checks and balances Even if it becomes
widely accepted that Echelon is not a technological Big Brother, individuals
across the political spectrum are likely to remain concerned about violations
of individual privacy. The NSA and its allies clearly do intercept an
enormous volume of data. And a breakthrough in word-spotting or other
technologies that would allow upgrades to Echelon certainly cannot be ruled
out. In addition, many ! have not forgotten NSA's role in monitoring the
activities of dissidents during the Vietnam War, which Bob Woodward disclosed
in the October 13, 1975 Washington Post. And Hager revealed that in the past
Britain's Government Communication Headquarters gathered communications
intelligence on Amnesty International, apparently through the Echelon
network. The recent controversy over Echelon has led both Australian and
Canadian authorities to issue unprecedented statements--acknowledging for the
first time their participation in the UKUSA alliance and stating that
precautions are being taken to safeguard the privacy of their own citizens as
well as those of the other UKUSA nations. In a letter to the Australian news
program Sunday Nine, Martin Brady, director of the Defense Signals
Directorate, revealed the existence of a classified directive, "Rules on
SIGINT and Australian Persons." The directive, with certain exceptio! ns,
prohibits the deliberate interception of communications between Australians
in Australia, the dissemination of information on Australians gained
accidentally during the course of routine collection on foreign
communications, and the reporting or recording of the names of Australians
mentioned in foreign communications. In his 1997-98 report, the commissioner
of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment reported that policies
existed which required his employees "to conduct their operational activities
in strict recognition of . . . the rights, privacy, and freedoms of
Canadians." He also noted the existence of a reciprocal agreement whose
purpose was to ensure that UKUSA nations did not "circumvent their own
legislation" by targeting the communications of each other's citizens by
request. "They do not do indirectly what would be unlawful for them to do
directly," the commissioner wrote. The guidelines under which! NSA operates
require that if it incidentally obtains a communication from or to a U.S.
citizen or organization in the United States for which there is no warrant or
court order, the agency can retain the message but must remove the name of
the citizen or company. There are several exceptions--for example, the name
can be retained if NSA officials believe it is "necessary to understand
foreign intelligence information or assess its importance" or if the
intercept indicates that the individual "may be an agent of a foreign power."
Such guidance is the subject of U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18,
"Limitations and Procedures in Signals Intelligence Operations of the
USSS"--one of a number of classified directives issued by the Director of NSA
that guide the operation of U.S. Signals intelligence activities. A redacted
version from 1980 notes that the purpose of the 50-page directive is to
"ensure that the SIGINT mission of! the National Security Agency . . . is
conducted in a manner that guarantees proper safeguards to the rights and
privacy of U.S. persons." Four sections of the October 20, 1980 directive,
portions of which were blacked out when the document was released in response
to a Freedom of Information Act request, concern the guidelines on the
collection, processing, storage, and dissemination of the communications of
U.S. citizens. Two challenges Evidence that these guidelines do reach down to
the collectors can be found in the 1991 navy regulation concerning Sugar
Grove. The commander of the site, in addition to being instructed to operate
an Echelon site and to "[gather], process, and report intelligence," is
ordered to "ensure the privacy of U.S. Citizens are [sic] properly
safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18." But many, including
Congs. Goss and Barr, want more reassurance than is provided by these
documents! . Goss requested, on behalf of the HPSCI, all legal opinions and
guidance provided by NSA's legal office to NSA's operations staff and
others--which could demonstrate how the agency is applying the laws that
restrict their collection of information about American citizens. NSA argued
that some of the documents could not be provided due to "government
attorney-client privilege." Discussions between the two parties are
continuing. Further, the November 5, 1999 conference report on the
intelligence authorization act directed the director of NSA, the director of
Central Intelligence, and the attorney general to prepare a report, in
classified and unclassified forms, providing a detailed analysis of the legal
standards employed by the intelligence community in signals intelligence
operations. The report is to cover standards for the acquisition of SIGINT
about Americans as a result of U.S. Signals intelligence operations as well
! as those of U.S. allies. In recent years, NSA has reduced some of the secrecy
surrounding the agency and U.S. SIGINT operations. But it faces two
challenges--providing needed intelligence in the face of new technological
challenges and convincing both critics and friends that it will do so without
infringing on basic freedoms. To do the latter it may have to open up even
more. Jeffrey Richelson is a senior fellow with the National Security
Archive, Washington, D.C. Some documents pertaining to Echelon can be found
at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv.
http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/2000/ma00/ma00richelson.html
