| http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,43270,00.html
Euros Continue Echelon Probe By Declan McCullagh 3:30 p.m. April 24, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- A European Parliament committee studying U.S. surveillance technology Echelon is about to take a field trip to the National Security Agency. Members of the 33-person committee charged with investigating the U.S. government's surveillance apparatus are planning a series of meetings in the nation's capital next month in hopes of learning more about Echelon. In addition to a scheduled visit to the NSA's high-security campus in Fort Meade, Maryland, the group will meet with the House Intelligence Committee, which held a hearing on Echelon in April 2000. "The official purpose is to find out some more, which certainly will happen," says Andreas Dietl, an aide to committee member Ilka Schroeder. Last June, the European parliament created a temporary committee to investigate how extensive the Echelon system -- operated by the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand -- was, and whether it had been used to spy upon and give American firms an advantage in international business decisions. In November 2000, the Temporary Committee on the Echelon Interception System organized a series of meetings designed to learn the extent of Echelon's capabilities. Its report is scheduled to be finished by this June or July. Dietl said that, during most of the hearings, spies and other intelligence analysts presented an uncritical view of Echelon, and it was only in the "last few weeks" that critics were given an opportunity to testify. "I think we can be quite happy with what we found out," Dietl said. "At one point it looked like we would find nothing at all. We were disappointed with the special statute, which gives the members almost no power." Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., applauded the visit. "It's a very important step," said Rotenberg, who has a meeting scheduled with the committee members. "It's a proactive effort by government officials to address the problem of international surveillance." About a dozen members of the committee are expected to participate in the field trip, which will last from May 8 to 11. The European Parliament mandate that created the committee asks the group to consider whether Europeans' privacy rights are being violated, and "whether European industry is put at risk by the global interception of communications." The NSA's general counsel, Robert Deitz, said in 1999 that: "I wish to make clear that the agency does not violate the Constitution or the laws of the United States. NSA operates under the eyes of Congress, the executive branch and the judiciary, and an extensive oversight system regulates and limits its activities." The NSA, however, refused to provide certain documents to the House Intelligence Committee, resulting in an unusual public tiff. Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Florida) wrote in a committee report that NSA's rationale for withholding the legal memoranda was "unpersuasive and dubious." |
