INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONIC ESPIONAGE
Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS)
The Economic Espionage Act 1996
(Il Mondo 20/27 Mar 98) Le Canard Enchaine 22 Apr 98) (World Press Review July 1998)
Central Intelligence Agency: FOIA Electronic Reading Room
This site provides "an overview of access to CIA information, including electronic access to previously released documents." Features specific documents such as a report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and special collections such as "the 'Family Jewels,' [which] consists of ... responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive ... asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency's charter."
THE MONDAY REVIEW 1/2
A Free Weekly News Digest of Intellectual Affairs
June 15, 1998 - Issue #7
As the dominant political force on the world scene, the US is the natural assumed villain in various international paranoid fantasies involving conspiracies, cabals, plots, and financial manipulations. But there are occasions when it is not easy to distinguish such fantasies from reality, and this is of consequence, since often the perception of American insidious activity by the populations of countries can become a significant element in international affairs. The "centrist" Italian newsmagazine *Il Mondo* recently published an apparent expose of a supposed nefarious alliance called UKUSA, whose members are the five English-speaking countries, US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the purpose of the alliance ostensibly to conduct electronic espionage through a network known as "Echelon", the network using "highly sophisticated spy satellites, interception bases on the ground, and super-computers capable of analyzing vast quantities of intercepted messages, phone conversations, faxes, and electronic mail messages." The author, Claudio Gatti, writes: "The target of this satellite-cum- electronic Big Brother is the entire world's telecommunications."
Evidently, earlier this year, a department of the European Parliament's General Research Directorate released a report detailing these activities of UKUSA. According to this report, "the Echelon system is directed primarily against civilian objectives: governments, organizations, and companies from practically every country in the world." The UKUSA signal intelligence security agreement originated in 1948 in connection with the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and this current accusation is that this agreement is now being used as the basis for industrial espionage by the five English-speaking nations involved. Certainly, there is never much that is clear to outsiders concerning state espionage, but it is probably true that given that the five named countries have the technical capability to monitor most international electronic information traffic, it is probably also true that the burden of making any sensible use of the traffic monitored is overwhelming -- supercomputers or no supercomputers. Intelligence agencies know this; ordinary people confronted with conspiracy theories usually do not know it. Commenting on this supposed Anglo intelligence conspiracy that has now been widely reported in the European press, Louis-Marie Horeau of the French satirical weekly *Le Canard Enchaine* says: "Until a computer understands that the balance of the world can be threatened by the proximity of the words 'Bill', 'fly', and 'Paula', it should be possible to chat in peace for a while."
P.L Duffy Resource Centre. Trinity College, Western Australia ECHELON Computing and Information Technology Assignment and Social, ethical, moral and legal impacts of Information Technology
5/11/99 Echelon: Interception Capabilities 2000
The IC2000 report on communications interception and ECHELON was approved as a working document by the Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel of the European Parliament (STOA) at their meeting in Strasbourg on 6 May 1999.
Key findings of the IC2000 report:
- Comprehensive systems exist to access, intercept and process every important modern form of communications, with few exceptions (section 2, technical annexe);
- The report provides original new documentary and other evidence about the ECHELON system and its role in the interception of communication satellites (section 3). In excess of 120 satellite based systems are currently in simultaneous operation collecting intelligence (section 2). Submarines are routinely used to access and intercept undersea communications systems.
- There is wide-ranging evidence indicating that major governments are routinely utilising communications intelligence to provide commercial advantage to companies and trade.
- Although "word spotting" search systems to automatically select telephone calls of intelligence interest are not thought to be effective, speaker recognition systems in effect, "voiceprints" have been developed and are deployed to recognise the speech of targeted individuals making international telephone calls;
- Recent diplomatic initiatives by the United States government seeking European agreement to the "key escrow" system of cryptography masked intelligence collection requirements, forming part of a long-term program which has undermined and continues to undermine the communications privacy European companies and citizens;
- Interception for legally authorised domestic interception and interception for clandestine intelligence purposes must be sharply distinguished. A clear boundary between law enforcement and "national security" interception activity is essential to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
- Providing the measures called for in the 1998 Parliamentary resolution on "Transatlantic relations/ECHELON measures may be facilitated by developing an in-depth understanding of present and future Comint capabilities. Protective measures may best be focused on defeating hostile Comint activity by denying access or, where this is impractical or impossible, preventing processing of message content and associated traffic information by general use of cryptography.
- In relation to the manner in which Internet browsers and other software is deliberately weakened for use by other than US citizens, consideration could be given to a countermeasure whereby, if systems with disabled cryptographic systems are sold outside the United States, they should be required to conform to an "open standard" such that third parties and other nations may provide additional applications which restore the level of security to at least that enjoyed by domestic US customers.
- It should be possible to define and enforce a shared interest in implementing measures to defeat future external Sigint activities directed against European states, citizens and commercial activities.
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London Telegraph.
Tuesday 16 December 1997 Issue 936
Spies like US
A European Commission report warns that the United States has developed an extensive network spying on European citizens and we should all be worried. Simon Davies reports Cooking up a charter for snooping 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" monitor countless phone, fax and email messages. It states: "Within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transfering all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK." The report confirms for the first time the existence of the secretive ECHELON system. Until now, evidence of such astounding technology has been patchy and anecdotal. But the report - to be discussed on Thursday by the committee of the office of Science and Technology Assessment in Luxembourg - confirms that the citizens of Britain and other European states are subject to an intensity of surveillance far in excess of that imagined by most parliaments. Its findings are certain to excite the concern of MEPs. "The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system (Cooking up a charter for snooping) but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. "The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words". According to the report, ECHELON uses a number of national dictionaries containing key words of interest to each country. 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. Rumours 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 analysed 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. The driving force behind the report is Glyn Ford, Labour MEP for Greater Manchester East. He believes that the report is crucial to the future of civil liberties in Europe. "In the civil liberties committee we spend a great deal of time debating issues such as free movement, immigration and drugs. Technology always sits at the centre of these discussions. There are times in history when technology helps democratise, and times when it helps centralise. This is a time of centralisation. The justice and home affairs pillar of Europe has become more powerful without a corresponding strengthening of civil liberties." The report recommends a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance being used at Menwith Hill and other centres. It bluntly advises: "The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network (Internet) accessible to US intelligence agencies." The report also urges a fundamental review of the involvement of the American NSA (National Security Agency) in Europe, suggesting that their activities be either scaled down, or become more open and accountable. Such concerns have been privately expressed by governments and MEPs since the Cold War, but surveillance has continued to expand. US intelligence activity in Britain has enjoyed a steady growth throughout the past two decades. The principal motivation for this rush of development is the US interest in commercial espionage. In the Fifties, during the development of the "special relationship" between America and Britain, one US institution was singled out for special attention. The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organisation, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies. Until a few years ago, it existence was a secret and its charter and any mention of its duties are still classified. However, it does have a Web site (www.nsa.gov:8080) in which it describes itself as being responsible for the signals intelligence and communications security activities of the US government. One of its bases, Menwith Hill, was to become the biggest spy station in the world. Its ears - known as radomes - are capable of listening in to vast chunks of the communications spectrum throughout Europe and the old Soviet Union. In its first decade the base sucked data from cables and microwave links running through a nearby Post Office tower, but the communications revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties gave the base a capability that even its architects could scarcely have been able to imagine. With the creation of Intelsat and digital telecommunications, Menwith and other stations developed the capability to eavesdrop on an extensive scale on fax, telex and voice messages. Then, with the development of the Internet, electronic mail and electronic commerce, the listening posts were able to increase their monitoring capability to eavesdrop on an unprecedented spectrum of personal and business communications. This activity has been all but ignored by the UK Parliament. When Labour MPs raised questions about the activities of the NSA, the Government invoked secrecy rules. It has been the same for 40 years. Glyn Ford hopes that his report may be the first step in a long road to more openness. "Some democratically elected body should surely have a right to know at some level. At the moment that's nowhere".
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QUOTE FROM COVERT ACTION QUARTERLY
EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM by Nicky Hager
IN THE LATE 1980's, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE US PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.
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Richard Thieme Interviews Former CIA Analyst David McMichael [Source 2006]
David MacMichael is a former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian. He was a senior estimates officer with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA's National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. He resigned from the CIA rather than falsify reports for political reasons and testified at the World Court on the illegalities of Iran-Contra. MacMichael started The Association of National Security Alumni, an organization to expose and curtail covert actions, and is a steering committee member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He and Richard Thieme, an author and speaker, recently met at an Intelligence Ethics Conference that gathered nearly two hundred professionals from a broad spectrum of perspectives to discuss the impact of a career in intelligence on the moral and ethical life of the intelligence professional.
Google's Gmail
Keyword scanning scrambles black helicopters
Google's plans to run targeted advertising with the mail that you see through its new Gmail service represents a potential break for government agencies that want to use autobots to monitor the contents of electronic communications travelling across networks. Even though the configuration of the Gmail service minimises the intrusion into privacy, it represents a disturbing conceptual paradigm - the idea that computer analysis of communications is not a search. This is a dangerous legal precedent which both law enforcement and intelligence agencies will undoubtedly seize upon and extend, to the detriment of our privacy. The Gmail advertising concept is simple. When you log into the Gmail to retrieve and view your email, the service automatically scans the contents of the email and displays a relevant ad on the screen for you to see. Although it has been said that neither Google nor the advertiser "knows" the text or essence of the email
18. cgi-bin/nb18/0055 Mark Rasch: Google's Gmail - spook heaven?
both the ads themselves and the text of the messages into which they were inserted be relevant, and therefore discoverable? I can't imagine why not. If a computer programmed by people learns the contents of a communication, and takes action based on what it learns, it invades privacy. But perhaps the most ominous thing about the proposed Gmail service is the often-heard argument that it poses no privacy risk because only computers are scanning the email. I would argue that it makes no difference to our privacy whether the contents of communications are read by people or by computers programmed by people. My ISP offers spam filtering, spyware blocking and other filtering of email (with my consent) based at least partially on the content of these messages. Similarly, I can consent to automated searches of my mail to translate it into another language or do
19. cgi-bin/nb18/0055 Mark Rasch: Google's Gmail - spook heaven?
Don't Be Echelon The government has already ventured a few steps down that road. In August 1995 the Naval Command and Control Ocean Surveillance Center detected computer attacks coming through Harvard University. Because Harvard's privacy policy did not give them the right to monitor the traffic, federal prosecutors obtained a court ordered wiretap for all traffic going through Harvard's computer systems to look for packets that met certain criteria. Literally millions of electronic communications from innocent users of Harvard's system were analysed by a en read pursuant to the court order. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts explained, "We intercepted only those communications which fit the pattern. Even when communications contained the identifying pattern of the intruder, we limited our initial examination ... to further protect the privacy of innocent communications." Thus, the government believed that the "interception" did not occur when the computer analysed the packets, read their contents, and flagged them for human viewing. Rather, the government believed that only human reading impacted a legitimate privacy interest. The U.S. Attorney went on to state, "This is a case of cyber-sleuthing, a glimpse of what computer crime fighting will look like in the coming years. We have made enormous strides in developing the investigative tools to track down individuals who misuse these vital computer networks." Then-Attorney General Reno added that the process of having computers analyse the intercepted messages was an
20. cgi-bin/nb18/0055 Mark Rasch: Google's Gmail - spook heaven?
But imagine if the government were to put an Echelon-style content filter on routers and ISPs, where it examines billions of communications and "flags" only a small fraction (based upon, say, indicia of terrorist activity). Even if the filters are perfect and point the finger only completely guilty people, this activity still invades the privacy rights of the billions of innocent individuals whose communications pass the filter. Simply put, if a computer programmed by people learns the contents of a communication, and takes action based on what it learns, it invades privacy. Google may also argue that its computers do not learn the contents of the message while in transmission but only contemporaneously with the recipient, making wiretap law inapplicable. That argument, while technically accurate, is somewhat fallacious. If taken to its logical extreme, electronic communications are never intercepted in
