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This is very, very scary. I was surprised to read that the NSA can even
break encryption using up to a 1000 bit key! That's incredible...
JW
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MAY 31, 1999 ISSUE
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
They're Listening to Your Calls
Echelon monitors phones, E-mail, and radio signals
You think the Internet brings grave new threats to privacy? Then you
probably don't know about Echelon. Run by the supersecret National Security
Agency, it's the granddaddy of all snooping operations.
Business and political leaders are waking up to the alarming potential of
this hush-hush system. A combination of spy satellites and sensitive
listening stations, it eavesdrops on just about every electronic
communication that crosses a national border--phone calls, faxes, telexes,
and E-mail--plus all radio signals, including short-wave, airline, and
maritime frequencies. Echelon's globe-straddling system also listens in on
most long-distance telecom traffic within countries. Ditto for local
cell-phone calls.
Indeed, if a phone call or message travels via satellite or microwave relay
during any part of its journey, it probably gets picked up by Echelon. So
the lion's share of all telecommunications traffic is bugged because even
undersea phone cables and fiber-optic terrestrial systems often have
microwave links somewhere in the loop. ''Americans should know that every
time they place an international call, the NSA is listening,'' says John E.
Pike, a military analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in
Washington. ''Just get used to the fact--Big Brother is listening.''
In Europe, Big Brother may soon get a second set of ears. The European
Parliament is working on a junior version of Echelon. A resolution outlining
the technical standards for tapping such new-tech systems as the Internet
was approved on May 7.
Encryption is no guarantee of privacy either. The NSA, which is bigger than
the Central Intelligence Agency and runs Echelon from its headquarters at
Ft. Mead, Md., has little trouble unscrambling messages encoded with most
commercial encryption software. With a little more time, NSA can probably
break ''crypto'' schemes with so-called Keys almost 1,000 bits long, says
Lisa S. Dean, vice-president for technology at the Free Congress Research &
Education Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. ''That's why
1,028 bits is used by most organizations that are concerned about
confidentiality.''
If it's any consolation, the vast bulk of all communications are never heard
or seen by people. Echelon's chief task is sifting through civilian telecom
traffic for clues about terrorist plots, drug-smuggling cartels, political
unrest, and other intelligence requested by the Pentagon, government
strategists, and law-enforcement agencies. Supercomputers screen the
so-called intercepts for key words related to such matters. If the computers
don't spot anything suspicious, the tapes get erased after a month or so.
LEAKS AND POACHERS. Still, like any technological tool, Echelon is subject
to political abuses--and there have been some. During the Reagan
Administration, Echelon intercepted phone calls by Michael Barnes, then a
Democratic Congressman from Maryland, to Nicaraguan officials, and
transcripts were leaked to the press. Echelon can also backfire: On two
occasions, Canadian spooks who collaborate with the NSA used Echelon to pick
up information on pending U.S.-China grain deals and steal the business with
lower prices.
Echelon has been operating with little fanfare for decades. It springs from
a secret pact signed in 1948 by the U.S., Australia, Britain, Canada, and
New Zealand--the countries running Echelon's main listening posts (map).
Then, last year, the system was hauled into the glare of public scrutiny by
a study prepared for the European Parliament by Omega Foundation, a British
market researcher. Europeans were enraged by its finding that ''within
Europe, all E-mail, telephone, and fax communications are routinely
intercepted'' by the NSA. ''Unlike many of the electronic spy systems
developed during the Cold War,'' the report noted, ''Echelon is designed for
primarily non-military targets: governments, organizations, and businesses
in virtually every country.''
In fact, the NSA's biggest base for electronic spying is at Menwith Hill in
England's Yorkshire Moors. It is operated jointly with Britain's Government
Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which is the equivalent of the NSA.
Dotting the sprawling site are at least 25 giant soccer-ball-like
structures, each hiding a high-tech antenna tuned to intercept a specific
telecom target.
The Omega revelations jolted many Europeans, despite earlier disclosures
such as Spyworld, a 1995 book by Mike Frost, a retired spook who was a
deputy director of Canada's NSA partner, the Communications Security
Establishment (CSE). In particular, leaders in continental Europe bristled
when newspaper accounts suggested that Echelon might be providing
competitive intelligence to Anglo-based companies. ''Absolutely not,''
declares Bobby Ray Inman, a retired Navy Admiral who headed the NSA in 1979
when the CIA proposed sharing intelligence with business. ''I won that
one,'' says Inman, by arguing that the multinational status of companies
would make it tough to pick beneficiaries. For instance, he says, ''Would
you give it to IBM in Paris but not Nissan in Tennessee?'' The NSA declined
to speak with BUSINESS WEEK, but it has reiterated that it doesn't share
intercepts with companies.
While economic intelligence has always been an Echelon priority, Inman says
the main targets are ''fair trade issues and trade violations--that sort of
thing.'' Canadian Frost adds that economic intelligence gained importance
''as the cold war started to wane,'' but there was a firm policy ''not to
share this information with the private sector.''
But to executives in non-English-speaking countries, Echelon smacks of an
Anglo conspiracy. Under the 1948 UKUSA Agreement, the NSA is head honcho,
with America's Anglo allies as ''second parties.'' Even though most NATO
countries and a few others, including Japan and Korea, have since joined the
UKUSA society, they are deemed ''third parties''--meaning they get to funnel
intelligence to the NSA but are rarely allowed to see anything from other
contributors. The NSA soothes any bruised feelings by providing gee-whiz
eavesdropping technology and a lot of money.
WIDE NET. That puts the NSA in the catbird seat. It alone sees all of the
so-called comint, or communications intelligence. Vast amounts flow
continually from the primary eavesdropping stations plus scores of smaller
listening posts in Germany, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Many of
these are operated by U.S. armed forces, so even the host country's
intelligence agency doesn't know what's collected. In addition, the NSA has
at least five ear-in-the-sky spy satellites that are so exquisitely
sensitive they can monitor signals on the ground from hundreds or even
thousands of miles up.
So much information gets sucked up that it would overwhelm human analysis.
So NSA relies on supercomputers and artificial intelligence. Advanced
speech-recognition and text-search programs sift through the traffic,
hunting for specific words and phrases. Each main snooping post has its own
list of key words, called the Dictionary, tailored to the intelligence tasks
in its geographic area. When the computers spot, say, a terrorist's
pseudonym or a slang term for narcotics, the message gets sent to a human
expert.
''If I'm talking to someone in Germany and we use enough Dictionary key
words, Echelon will certainly mark our conversation,'' says analyst Pike.
''Then NSA will try their best to identify the German. But they're required
by law to blank my name and substitute 'U.S. person.''' However, the NSA can
easily get around that protection of U.S. law by letting the CSE or the GCHQ
deal with the suspect conversation, since neither agency is bound by the
laws of America or Germany.
Some of the handwringing in Europe over the Omega report may have been for
show. The French secret service has been accused repeatedly by the FBI with
spying on U.S. companies. Bonn has its own miniversion of Echelon for
tapping international telecom traffic to and from Germany. And the scheme
being hatched by European justice ministers, which is designed to combat
terrorism and other serious crime, contains essentially no regulatory
checks--and has critics and privacy advocates up in arms.
To Pike, things are getting out of hand. Surveillance technology is becoming
so competent, he explains, that snooping systems soon may outstrip ''the
wildest dreams of George Orwell.'' It's enough to make anyone paranoid.
By Otis Port in New York, with Inka Resch in Paris
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