Its alleged purpose was to intercept and analyze vast amounts of electronic communications worldwide ? phone calls, faxes, emails, and internet traffic. First revealed in the late 1980s and 1990s, ECHELON sparked international controversy.
Concerns centered on potential privacy violations for citizens, lack of democratic oversight, and accusations of its use for economic espionage. The "echelon.txt" concept thus embodies the collective reports and debates that brought this clandestine surveillance apparatus into public consciousness, highlighting the critical balance between national security and civil liberties in the digital era.
European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of
Technology's Uses
By Bruno Giussani
[New York Times] (2.24.98) A massive telecommunications
interception network operates within Europe and, according
to a new study circulating on the Internet, "targets the
telephone, fax and e-mail messages of private citizens,
politicians, trade unionists and companies alike."
The report says that the network has the ability to tap into
almost all international telecommunications as well as parts
of domestic phone traffic - and is apparently operated by
intelligence agencies without any mechanism of democratic
control.
The network, dubbed Echelon, [1] is described in a new study by
the European Parliament titled "An Appraisal of Technologies
of Political Control." The 112-page document, dated January 6,
1998, is considered an internal working paper and, therefore,
has not been posted on the parliament's own Web server.
While paper copies of the report have been made public, in
the last three weeks, it has begun to be reproduced on the
Internet by civil liberties advocates and is now available
>from several Web sites.
The report was written by Steve Wright, an analyst with the
Omega Foundation, a British human rights organization, on
behalf of a research unit of the European Parliament known
as STOA (Scientific and Technological Options Assessment).
[The European Parliament is the legislative body of the
European Union (EU), an economic and political alliance of
15 countries.]
According to the report, in the last few years many governments
have spent huge sums on the development of new technologies
- from surveillance systems to paralyzing weapons - for their
police and security forces.
While the adoption of these technologies may have legitimate
law enforcement functions and may be relatively harmless when
accompanied by strong regulation and accountability mechanisms,
"without such democratic controls they provide powerful tools of
oppression," the report states. Outmatched by the speed and
complexity of technological innovation, the fear is that these
controls have been quickly weakening in recent years.
The rapid and unchecked proliferation of surveillance
devices among both the private and public sector presents
today "a serious threat to civil liberties in Europe" and
could have "awesome implications," the document stresses.
Drawing from sources as diverse as academia, intelligence
agencies and non-governmental organizations, the STOA study
offers a rare description and evaluation of the technologies
of political control - what it calls weaponry aimed "as much
at hearts and minds as at body."
This includes electronic surveillance systems; data gathering,
processing and filtering devices; biometric and other human
identity recognition tools; so-called "less-lethal" weapons
for crowd control; new prison control systems, and torture
and execution techniques.
One core trend identified by Wright has been "towards a
militarisation of the police and a paramilitarisation of
military forces in Europe," meaning that the technologies
used by police and the army converge and become "more or
less indistinguishable."
This "parallels a political shift in targeting," the report
adds. Instead of investigating crime (which is a reactive
activity) law enforcement agencies are now increasingly
"tracking certain social classes and races of people living
in the red-lined areas before any crime is committed" -
a form of pre-emptive policing dubbed "data-veillance" and
based on military models of gathering huge amounts of
low-grade intelligence and digging out deviant patterns.
The term data-veillance covers an impressive range of methods
and devices, including vision technology; bugging and interception
techniques; satellite tracking; through-clothing human scanning;
automatic fingerprinting; human recognition systems that can
recognize genes, odor and retina patterns, and biometric systems.
Electronic surveillance technology, the systems that can
monitor the movements of individuals and their communications,
"is one of the areas where outdated regulations have not kept
pace with an accelerating pattern of abuses" by law enforcement
agencies and private companies, Wright says in the report.
The report paints a frightening picture of an Orwellian world.
For example, it states that Britain has set up the first DNA
databank, and at least one political party is suggesting
"to DNA-profile the nation from birth." Face-recognition
systems "are perhaps five years off." Parabolic and laser
microphones can detect distant conversation, even behind
closed windows. Stroboscopic cameras can individually
photograph all the participants in a march.
Among the more futuristic scenarios portrayed in the study,
robots called neural network bugs, built like small cockroaches,
can crawl to the best location for surveillance. Researchers
are now working on controlling and manipulating real cockroaches
by implanting microprocessors and electrodes in their bodies.
"The insects can be fitted with micro-cameras and sensors
to reach the places other bugs can't reach," Wright says.
Cameras used for traffic monitoring can easily be adapted to
security surveillance. "Democratic accountability is the only
criterion which distinguishes a modern traffic control system
>from an advanced dissident capture technology," Wright states,
adding that several companies have been exporting traffic
control devices to Lhasa in Tibet recently.
"Lhasa does not as yet have any traffic control problem,"
he adds.
The most explosive section of the report discusses the
Echelon system.
As Wright describes it, this global surveillance machine
"stretches around the world to form a targeting system on
all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of
the world's satellite phone calls, Internet traffic, e-mail,
faxes and telexes," according to the report. Unlike many of
the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war,
Echelon "is designed primarily for non-military targets:
governments, organisations and businesses in virtually
every country."
Wright says the system works by indiscriminately intercepting
industrial quantities of communications and then siphoning out
what could be valuable, using artificial intelligence aids and
keywords searches. [2] Dictionaries of keywords, phrases and
people are defined by each of the five countries participating
in network: the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and
Australia, yet the main actor appears to be the United States
"Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications
are routinely intercepted by the NSA," the report charges,
acknowledging that while there is much information gathered
about potential terrorists through such methods, there is a
lot of economic intelligence that gets caught, as well.
Wright also reports that in 1995 the EU states signed a
memorandum of understanding (which remains classified)
to set up a new international telephone tapping network.
The document apparently reflects concerns among European
intelligence agencies that modern scrambling and coding
technology could prevent them from tapping private
communications. The EU governments agreed to cooperate
closely on this issue with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
"yet early minutes of these meetings suggest that Wright's
report says.
Under the agreement, he says, "Network and service providers
in the EU will be obliged to install 'tappable' systems and
to place under surveillance any person or group when served
with an interception order."
These plans have "never been subject to proper parliamentary
discussion [in Europe]," Wright stresses. He suggests that
the time has now arrived to bring much of this technology back
within the reach of democratic supervision and accountability.
The basic assumption behind the deployment of these technologies
of political control is that they enhance policing capacities
and allow a faster response time and a greater
cost-effectiveness in fighting crime.
In addition, some people feel that only those with something
to hide need to fear the enlarged data-gathering capacities
of police computers.
Yet the bookkeeping and paternalistic approach of the
phenomenon cannot be satisfying in democratic societies.
There is a pressing need to determine the extent to which
these new technologies are about political and social
control rather than citizen protection, the report says.
"Explicit and publicly available criteria should be agreed
upon for deciding who should be targeted for surveillance and
who should not, how such data is stored, processed and shared,"
Wright writes.
"The European parliament should reject proposals from the
United States for making private messages via the Internet
accessible to U.S. intelligence agencies," he adds. Nor should
it agree on new encryption controls without considering "the
civil and human rights of European citizens and the commercial
rights of companies to operate without unwarranted surveillance
by intelligence agencies operating in conjunction with multinational
competitors" - an obvious reference to American agencies,
which are often perceived as sharing collateral economic
intelligence with U.S. companies.
A copy of this report can be found at:
http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm
[1] http://www.dis.org/erehwon/echelon.html
[2] http://www.dis.org/erehwon/spookwords.html
Cheers!
William Knowles
==
The information standard is more draconian than the gold
standard, because the government has lost control of the
marketplace. -- Walter Wriston
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/