ECHELON : "Somebody's Listening . . . " By Duncan Campbell

Somebody's listening . . . and they don't give a damn about
personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a
top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a
billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell
on how spying entered the 21st century . . .

By Duncan Campbell

New Statesman, August 12, 1988

In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they
wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy,
fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high
technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States
on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic
spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to
most of us most of the time

American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon
to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their
global electronic surveillance system. According to
information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the
surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and
analyse civilian communications into the 21st century.
Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will
be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the
intelligence agencies of many other countries will be
closely involved with the new network, including those from
Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly,
the People's Republic of China.

New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be
built around the world, and a chain of new satellites
launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham,
may keep abreast of the burgeoning international
telecommunications traffic.

The largest overseas station in the Project P415 network is
the US satellite and communications base at Menwith Hill.
near Harrogate in Yorkshire. It is run undercover by the NSA
and taps into all Britain's main national and international
communications networks (New Statesman, 7 August 1980).
Although high technology stations such as Menwith Hill are
primarily intended to monitor international communications,
according to US experts their capability can be, and has
been, turned inwards on domestic traffic. Menwith Hill, in
particular, has been accused by a former employee of gross
corruption and the monitoring of domestic calls.

The vast international global eavesdropping network has
existed since shortly after the second world war, when the
US, Britain, Canada, Australia and NewZealand signed a
secret agreement on signals intelligence, or "sigint". It
was anticipated, correctly, that electronic monitoring of
communications signals would continue to be the largest and
most important form of post-war secret intelligence, as it
had been through the war.

Although it is impossible for analysts to listen to all but
a small fraction of the billions of telephone calls, and
other signals which might contain "significant" information,
a network of monitoring stations in Britain and elsewhere is
able to tap all international and some domestic
communications circuits, and sift out messages which sound
interesting. Computers automatically analyse every telex
message or data signal, and can also identify calls to, say,
a target telephone number in London, no matter from which
country they originate.

A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA (UK-USA), assigns
parts of the globe to each participating agency. GCHQ at
Cheltenham is the co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa
and the Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains).

The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union and most of the
Americas. Australia--where another station in the NSA
listening network is located in the outback--co-ordinates
the electronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and South
East Asia.

With 15,000 staff and a budget of over £500 million a year
(even without the planned new Zircon spy satellite), GCHQ is
by far the largest part of British intelligence. Successive
UK governments have placed high value on its eavesdropping
capabilities, whether against Russian military signals or
the easier commercial and private civilian targets.

Both the new and existing surveillance systems are highly
computerised. They rely on near total interception of
international commercial and satellite communications in
order to locate the telephone or other messages of target
individuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, revealed that the system had been used to target the
telephone calls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. The fact
that Thurmond, a southern Republican and usually a staunch
supporter of the Reagan administration, is said to have been
a target has raised fears that the NSA has restored
domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes. These were
originally exposed and criticised during the Watergate
investigations, and their closure ordered by President
Carter.

After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later told the Plain
Dealer that he did not believe the allegation. But Thurmond,
a right-wing Republican, may have been unwilling to rock the
boat. Staff members of the Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence said that staff were "digging into it" despite
the "stratospheric security classification" of all the
systems involved.

The Congressional officials were first told of the Thurmond
interception by a former employee of the Lockheed Space and
Missiles Corporation, Margaret Newsham, who now lives in
Sunnyvale, California. Newsham had originally given separate
testimony and filed a lawsuit concerning corruption and
mis-spending on other US government "black" projects. She
has worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which
manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and
interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed.
Citing a special Executive Order signed by President Reagan.
she told me last month that she could not and would not
discuss classified information with journalists. But
according to Washington sources (and the report in the Plain
Dealer, she informed a US Congressman that the Thurmond
interception took place at Menwith Hill, and that she
personally heard the call and was able to pass on details.

Since then, investigators have subpoenaed other witnesses
and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of
the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and
blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political
figures would not occur by accident. but was designed into
the system from the start.

While working at Menwith Hill, Newsham is reported to have
said that she was able to listen through earphones to
telephone calls being monitored at the base. Other
conversations that she heard were in Russian. After leaving
Menwith Hill, she continued to have access to full details
of Menwith Hill operations from a position as software
manager for more than a dozen VAX computers at Menwith which
operate the ECHELON system.

Newsham refused last month to discuss classified details of
her career, except with cleared Congressional officials. But
it has been publicly acknowledged that she worked on a large
range of so-called "black" US intelligence programmes, whose
funds are concealed inside the costs of other defence
projects. She was fired from Lockheed four years ago after
complaining about the corruption, and sexual harassment.

Lockheed claimed she had been a pook [as written]
timekeeper, and has denied her charges of corruption on
"black" projects. But the many charges she is reported to
have made--such as the use of top secret computers for
football pools, or to sell a wide range of merchandise from
their offices, and deliberate and massive overcharging and
waste by the company--are but small beer in a continuing and
wider scandal about defence procurement. Newsham's testimony
about overcharging by contractors is now the subject of a
major congressional inquiry.

From US sources not connected with Margaret Newsham, we have
obtained for the first time a list of the major classified
projects in operation at Menwith Hill. The base currently
has over 1,200 staff, more than two thirds of them
Americans. Other than the ECHELON computer network, the main
projects at Menwith Hill are code-named SILKWORTH,
MOONPENNY, SIRE, RUNWAY and STEEPLEBUSH. The station also
receives information from a satellite called BIG BIRD.

Project SILKWORTH is, according to signals intelligence
specialists, the code-name for long-range radio monitoring
from Menwith Hill. MOONPENNY is a system for monitoring
satellite communications; RUNWAY is thought to be the
control network for an eavesdropping satellite called
VORTEX, now in orbit over the Soviet Union The base earlier
controlled a similar series of satellites called CHALET. The
new STEEPLEBUSH control centre appears connected with the
latest and biggest of the overhead listening satellites.
These are code-named MAGNUM, according to US intelligence
sources.

BIG BIRD, which is not usually connected with Menwith Hill,
is a low-orbiting photographic reconnaissance satellite. But
investigators have worked out, from details of the
clearances necessary to know about BIG BIRD, that this
satellite--and indeed, many other satellites, variously
disguised as "weather satellites"--also carry listening
equipment. One such sigint package is said to have been
aboard the doomed space shuttle Challenger, despite its
ostensibly civilian purpose.

Recently published US Department of Defense 1989 budget
information has confirmed that the Menwith Hill spy base
will be the subject of a major $26 million expansion
programme. Information given to Congress in February listed
details of plans for a four-year expansion of the main
operation building and other facilities at Menwith Hill.
Although the testimony referred only to a "classified
location", the base can be identified because of references
to STEEPLEBUSH. According to this testimony, the new
STEEPLEBUSH II project will cost $15 million between now and
1993. The expansion is required to avoid overcrowding and
"to support expanding classified missions".

During the Watergate affair. it was revealed that NSA, in
collaboration with GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the
international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam war
leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr Benjamin Spock. Another
target was former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
Then in the late 1970s, it was revealed that President
Carter had ordered NSA to stop obtaining "back door"
intelligence about US political figures through swapping
intelligence data with GCHQ Cheltenham.

Among important stations being developed in the new P415
network, sources indicated, are Bude in Cornwall, mainly run
by GCHQ, Bad Aibling in Germany, and two sites in the
People's Republic of China (which are used only for
monitoring the USSR). The western intelligence agencies have
not yet resolved the question of how to replace the recently
upgraded British intelligence listening station at Chung Hom
Kok in Hong Kong (which at the moment listens to China
itself) when the colony is handed back to China next decade.

In Australia three months ago, New Zealand Defence Minister
Bob Tizard revealed that two Australasian interception
stations planned for the early 1990s will be targeted on new
communications satellites launched by third world countries
such as India and Indonesia. The new satellite spy bases are
at Geraldton in northern Australia and Blenheim, New
Zealand. The similar British spy base at Morwenstow, near
Bude, Cornwall, has been continuously expanded throughout
the 1980s, including the provision of massive US analysis
computers.

If Margaret Newsham's testimony is confirmed by the ongoing
Congressional investigation, then the NSA has been behaving
illegally under US law--unless it can prove either that
Thurmond's call was intercepted completely accidentally, or
that the highly patriotic Senator is actually a foreign spy
or terrorist. Moreover NSA's international phone tapping
operations from Menwith Hill and at Morwenstow, Cornwall,
can only be legal in Britain if special warrants have been
issued by the Secretary of State to specify that American
intelligence agents are persons to whom information from
intercepts must or should be given. This can not be
established, since the government has always refused to
publish any details of the targets or recipients of specific
interception warrants.

When the Menwith Hill base was first set up there was no
British law controlling phone tapping, or making
unauthorised interception (such as by foreign intelligence
agencies) illegal. Now there is, and telecommunications
interception by the Americans from British territory would
clearly be illegal without the appropriate warrant.

When the new Interception of Communications Act was passed
in 1985, however, it was obviously designed to make special
provision for operations like ECHELON or Project P415 to
trawl all international communications to and from Britain.
A special section of the Act, Section 3(2), allows warrants
to be issued to intercept any general type of international
messages to or from Britain if this is "in the interests of
national security" or "for the purpose of safeguarding the
economic well-being of the United Kingdom". Such warrants
also allow GCHQ to tap any or all other communications on
the same cablesor satellites that may have to be picked up
in order to select out the messages they want. So whether or
not a British government warrant can legally allow American
agents to intercept private British communications, there is
no doubt that British law as well as British bases have been
designed to encourage rather than inhibit the booming
industry in international telecommunications surveillance.

Both British and American domestic communications are also
being targeted and intercepted by the ECHELON network, the
US investigators have been told. The agencies are alleged to
have collaborated not only on targeting and interception,
but also on the monitoring of domestic UK communications.

Special teams from GCHQ Cheltenham have been flown in
secretly in the last few years to a computer centre in
Silicon Valley near San Francisco for training on the
special computer systems that carry out both domestic and
international interception.

The centre near San Francisco has also been used to train
staff from the "Technical Department" of the People's
Liberation Army General Staff, which is the Chinese version
of GCHQ. The Department operates two ultra-secret joint
US-Chinese listening stations in the Xinjiang Uighur
Autonomous Region, close to the Soviet Siberian border.
Allegedly, such surveillance systems are only used to target
Soviet or Warsaw Pact communications signals, and those
suspected of involvement in espionage and terrorism. But
those involved in ECHELON have stressed to Congress that
there are no formal controls over who may be targeted. And I
have been told that junior intelligence staff can feed
target names into the system at all levels, without any
check on their authority to do so. Witnesses giving evidence
to the Congressional inquiry have discussed whether the
Democratic presidential contender Jesse Jackson was
targeted; one source implied that he had been. Even test
engineers from manufacturing companies are able to listen in
on private citizens' communications, the inquiry was told.

But because of the special Executive Order signed by
President Reagan, US intelligence operatives who know about
such politically sensitive operations face jail sentences if
they speak out--despite the constitutional American
protection of freedom of speech and of the press. And in
Britain, as we know, the government is in the process of
tightening the Official Secrets Act to make the publication
of any information from intelligence officials automatically
a crime, even if the information had already been published,
or had appeared overseas first.

Somebody's listening . . . and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell on how spying entered the 21st century . . .

Somebody's listening . . . and they don't give a damn about
personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a
top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a
billion calls a year in the UK alone. Inside Duncan Campbell
on how spying entered the 21st century . . .