Echelon: Surveying Surveillance

By Will Rodger

Inter@ctive Week, November 16, 1998

Imagine someone told you your government had a massive
surveillance system that could monitor every fax, every
phone call, every e-mail, every communication that crossed
wires or the airwaves in the country. Imagine, further, that
five wealthy, English-speaking nations had banded together
to monitor communications traffic in every nation on earth.

The seemingly preposterous idea of what has become known as
Echelon has been gaining currency of late, most recently
propelling the European Parliament to investigate what,
exactly, the system is. And as scrutiny of official
surveillance technologies rises in tech-mad Washington, talk
is already circulating that Congress could soon do the same
- sparking, in effect, a reprise of the storied Church
hearings of the early 1970s that led to the serious overhaul
of the way that the CIA and the National Security Agency do
business.

"Most of what has been written about the system has taken
place outside the U.S.," says Patrick Poole, deputy director
of the Center for Technology Policy at the conservative Free
Congress Foundation and author of a policy paper on the
matter now making the rounds. "If Congress really takes a
look at this, they will think it's much more than an
intelligence issue - it's a constitutional issue."

To understand the furor behind Echelon, first consider the
nature of the players allegedly involved and the choke
points they may control.

At the top of the pyramid is the National Security Agency,
easily the most technically sophisticated of all known
federal agencies.

Located some 20 miles north of Washington, D.C., the agency
sits on several hundred acres devoted solely to the making
and breaking of secret codes and their transmission across
the ether. Though the federal government concedes the
top-secret agency employs more than 20,000 people under the
U.S. Department of Defense umbrella, unofficial estimates
place total employment at more than twice that, once
thousands of Armed Forces personnel are included in the
total.

All are dedicated to some aspect of computer and
telecommunications security and electronic eavesdropping.
None will so much as confirm Echelon even exists.

According to published reports from Australia, New Zealand
and the U.K., those three countries joined with Canada and
the U.S. to construct a worldwide network of surveillance
teams under terms of the UKUSA treaty signed in 1948.
Stories of the network - allegedly in place at least since
the early 1980s - have won credence from groups as diverse
as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for
Democracy and Technology and Privacy International, as well
as the Free Congress Foundation.

Here's how the massive system works: Though their monopolies
are slowly fading, a handful of Western nations, including
the U.S. and Great Britain, have controlled most of the
world's satellite communications traffic since the
technology emerged in the 1960s.

The U.S.-based Comsat, Intelsat and Inmarsat organizations,
in fact, shared nearly all international satellite traffic
until this decade.

Intelligence agencies have taken advantage of the
governmental ties to analyze traffic to and from the
satellites, scanning telephone calls, faxes and other
communications as needed. According to one 1985 account,
"The Ties That Bind," by Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson,
the U.S. NSA monitors traffic to and from the Americas with
the help of thousands of computers assembled in massive
bunkers beneath Fort George Meade, Md.

In previous years, Cold War concerns topped the list of
motivations; now, critics say, the agencies conduct massive
campaigns as part of larger industrial espionage campaigns.

A trespassing trial of protesters last year in Menwith Hill,
England, included testimony that trunk lines capable of
carrying several hundred thousand calls simultaneously were
once routed through Menwith Hill. That testimony, delivered
by British Telecommunications PLC officials, was cut short
after a British magistrate ordered the company's head of
emergency planning to cease testifying on the matter lest he
compromise national security.

In most years, allegations like these would likely be
ignored by Congress. But a steady drumbeat of protest over
issues such as encryption, telephone wiretap upgrades for
the FBI and, more recently, anti-hacker programs by the
administration have placed civil libertarians of the left
and right on full alert on Capitol Hill.

What's more, elected officials increasingly are finding the
intellectual and political courage to take on issues that
only four years ago would have seemed too complex to tackle.

Many Republicans, finally, are eager for a club with which
to damage the high-tech mystique of the Clinton-Gore team.
Given all those factors, staffers within the office of
presidential hopeful Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., and Rep. Bob
Barr, R-Ga., say they are studying the Free Congress paper.