U.S. EAVESDROPPING ON WHOLE WORLD Sherwood Ross, Sun
Nov 7
more
ECHELON
is a term associated with a global network ECHELON, Sun Nov 7
13:04
Americans
Must Never Forget Our History Lt. Gen.
(Ret.) W.G. Boykin, Sun Nov 7 13:23
Sherwood Ross wrote:
U.S. EAVESDROPPING ON WHOLE WORLD
THROUGH ECHELON SPY INTERCEPTS
By Sherwood Ross
The United States
with four of its allies are operating a network of massive, highly
automated interception stations codenamed ECHELON that is
eavesdropping on the entire world, a distinguished Washington
journalist reports.
Like a mammoth
vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency(NSA) sucks it
all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax,
telex...satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic,
microwave links, voice, text images (that are) captured by satellites
continuously orbiting the earth and then processed by high-powered
computers, writes William Blum in his book Rogue State(Common Courage Press).
Calling
it the greatest invasion of privacy ever, Blum says the ceaseless,
illegal spy system sucks up perhaps billions of messages daily,
including those of prime ministers, the Secretary-General of the UN,
the pope, embassies, Amnesty International, Christian Aid, and
transnational corporations and that if God has a phone, it's being
monitored. As for messages sent via underwater cable, U.S. submarines
have been attaching tapping pods to them for decades.
Launched
in the 1970s to spy on Soviet satellite communications, the NSA and its
junior partners in Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand operate
this network of massive, highly automated interception stations
covering the globe. In multiple ways, each of the countries involved
is breaking its own laws, those of other countries, and international
law, Blum writes, noting that the absence of court-issued warrants
permitting surveillance of specific individuals is but one example.
Apart
from targeted individuals and institutions, ECHELON works by gobbling
up huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify
and extract those messages of interest. Every intercepted
message---all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the
birthday greetings---is searched for keywords, which could be anything
the searchers think might be of interest, Blum writes. Messages
selected from the mass are then listened to by humans.
Blum
also said that during the countdown to its invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the U.S. listened in on the conversations of UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, "and all the members of the
UN Security Council...when they were deliberating about what action to
take in Iraq."
ECHELON
is operated without official acknowledgment of its existence, let
alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to
whether it serves a decent purpose, Blum writes. For example, when
Members of Parliament have raised questions about the NSA and its
sprawling, 560-acre base in Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, the
government has consistently refused to supply any information and
members of the U.S. Congress have not even raised questions. When the
European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee challenged the
operation in the 1990s, Blum said, it denounced Britain's role as a
double-agent, spying on its own European partners.
Since
the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has continued to expand ECHELON in
Europe in part because of heightened interest in commercial
espionage---to uncover industrial information that would provide
American corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals, Blum
points out. When ine German firm, the wind generator-maker Enercon,
applied for a patent on what it thought was a secret invention, its
U.S. rival Kenetech disclosed it had already patented a near-identical
development. During the ensuing court battle, an NSA employee appeared
in silhouette on German TV to reveal how he had stolen Enercon's
secrets by tapping its telephone and computer link lines and passing
the data on to ECHELON, Blum writes.
Again,
in 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, of
Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative contracts to U.S. rivals
aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA, Blum writes,
and the same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives
during negotiations with the U.S. in 1995 over auto parts trade. One
German official worried the U.S. through its massive radar and
communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich, was picking up
secret information. He was right to worry as the complex was, in fact,
an NSA intercept station, Blum says.
Reporter Blum resigned his post at the
U.S. State Department because of his opposition to the Viet Nam war and
co-founded the Washington Free Press. In 1999, he received a Project
Censored award for exemplary journalism for a story about how
