Anyone remember Echelon? NSA surveillance on Americans is probably older than you think
Now I praise that there is finally a discussion in the media about this, but NSA surveillance on communications (including Americans) looks to be pretty old. I mean way before the George W. Bush Administration.
Anyone remember Echelon?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1332199/Spy-network-reading-personal-emails.html
Spy network 'reading personal emails'
12:00AM BST 30 May 2001
COMPUTER users were urged to encrypt their emails yesterday in an attempt to protect themselves against an electronic spy network which does not officially exist.
The danger comes from the Anglo-American "Echelon" intelligence operation, according to a report by the European Parliament at the end of a year-long inquiry. The MEPs have been investigating allegations that the spy system is being used to gather sensitive industrial secrets from Europe and pass them to British or American rivals.
Their report says that in the process of industrial spying, Echelon is eavesdropping on millions of daily communications between ordinary people. It also warns the Government that Britain could be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights because of its participation in the spying operation. The United States flatly denies that Echelon exists.
But a Foreign Office spokesman said: "Interception of communications is a vital tool in countering the risks posed by a number of dangers to society. That includes terrorists, international drug dealers, criminals and those who would like to proliferate weapons of mass destruction. We have always made it clear that the civil rights of EU citizens are not jeopardised by legally endorsed interception as practised in the UK."
The Echelon operation is based at Fort Meade in Maryland, and at GCHQ in Cheltenham. It was set up in 1948 by the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and was active throughout the Cold War as a vast electronic eavesdropper, able to interpret information from telephones, faxes or computers - even tracking bank accounts.
From http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/ECHELON/echelon.html
"Rumors have abounded for several years of a massive system designed to intercept virtually all email and fax traffic in the world and subject it to automated analysis, despite laws in many nations (including this one) barring such activity. The laws were circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. It's illegal for the United States to spy on it's citizens. Likewise the same for Great Britain. But under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens and the two groups trade data. Technically, it may be legal, but the intent to evade the spirit of the laws protecting the citizens of those two nations is clear.
The system is called ECHELON, and had been rumored to be in development since 1947, the result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The purpose of the UKUSA agreement was to create a single vast global intelligence organization sharing common goals and a common agenda, spying on the world and sharing the data. The uniformity of operation is such that NSA operatives from Fort Meade could work from Menwith Hill to intercept local communications without either nation having to formally approve or disclose the interception.
More on the UKUSA Agreement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=civilliberties_213#civilliberties_213
"April, 1988: Senator Thurmond Monitored by Echelon
Former Lockheed software manager Margaret Newsham, who worked at the Menwith Hill facility of the NSA’s Echelon satellite surveillance operation in 1979, says she heard a real-time phone intercept of conversations involving senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC). She was shocked, she recalls, because she thought only foreign communications were being monitored. Newsham, who was fired from Lockheed after she filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging fraud and waste, tells the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Louis Stokes (D-OH), of the overheard conversations. In July, Capital Hill staffers will leak the story to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Thurmond says he doesn’t believe Newsham’s story, but his office admits that it has previously received reports that Thurmond had been a target of NSA surveillance. Thurmond will decline to press for an investigation, and the reason for the surveillance has never been revealed."
More on Margaret Newsham: http://www.mail-archive.com/kominform@lists.eunet.fi/msg00493.html (copy and paste the whole url)
And from December 16, 1997, from a London Telegraph article (original article unavailable) http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wbova/fn/gov/echelon2.htm
"A GLOBAL electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, email and telex communication around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report to be delivered this week.
The report - Assessing the Technologies of Political Control - was commissioned last year by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It contains details of a network of American-controlled intelligence stations on British soil and around the world, that "routinely and indiscriminately" monitors countless phone, fax and email messages."
...
"For more than a decade, former agents of US, British, Canadian and New Zealand national security agencies have claimed that the monitoring of electronic communications has become endemic throughout the world. Rumors have circulated that new technologies have been developed which have the capability to search most of the world's telex, fax and email networks for "key words". Phone calls, they claim, can be automatically analyzed for key words.
Former signals intelligence operatives have claimed that spy bases controlled by America have the ability to search nearly all data communications for key words. They claim that ECHELON automatically analyses most email messaging for "precursor" data which assists intelligence agencies to determine targets. According to former Canadian Security Establishment agent Mike Frost, a voice recognition system called Oratory has been used for some years to intercept diplomatic calls."
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