Criminal charges filed against 'Echelon'

[Henk Elegeert]

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Voor de liefhebbers!!! :-)

Criminal charges filed against 'Echelon'

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/nb/nb4.htm

"
From: Newsbytes News Network

By Steve Gold

A Member of the European Parliament (MEP)
from Berlin has filed criminal complaints in
Germany against the international Echelon
computer surveillance network.

Unlike the recently vilified Carnivore Internet
monitoring system installed on most U.S. Internet
Service Provider (ISP) servers, the Echelon
system is shrouded in secrecy.

Thought to have been created in the 1940s by the
U.S. and UK governments, the system is now
known to monitor most voice and data traffic
circulating in most West countries.

Reports suggest that it can legally do this by side-stepping national
anti-surveillance legislation by requiring, for example, the U.S.
government's
National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor UK comms traffic, and,
similarly, using the UK's security agencies to monitor U.S. comms
traffic.

In her complaint, Ilka Schrvder, a Green Party Member of the European
Parliament (MEP) cited "unknown suspects especially from the U.S. And
Great Britain, as well as possibly the German Federal Government, for
operating and tolerating the Echelon network."

According to German media reports, Schrvder filed the complaints Monday
with the German Federal chief public prosecutor, as well as public
prosecutors' offices in Berlin and, perhaps significantly, in
Traunstein. The
Traunstein office covers the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, where a
monitoring station is generally reported as being operated by the NSA.

Schrvder, who serves as a substitute member of the European Parliament
committee which is investigating Echelon, referred to a report
commissioned
by the committee, which confirmed that Echelon is monitoring private and
business telephone calls, faxes, and e-mail messages in Europe,
including in
Germany.

This is not the first time that Echelon has come into the legal firing
line. Back
in February, reports suggested that the French government was
considering
lawsuits on privacy grounds, alleging that the international Echelon
super-spy
network monitored French companies, diplomats and ministers.

The Echelon network has been talked about in security circles for
several
years, but its existence was most recently confirmed in November 1999,
when the BBC reported that an Australian government official had
confirmed the network actually existed.

At the time, the BBC reported that Bill Blick, Australia's inspector
general
of intelligence, confirmed that his country's Defence Signals
Directorate
forms part of the Echelon network.

"As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications
floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as the DSD collect
those communications in the interests of their national security," Blick
told
the BBC.

Asked if information is then passed on to the U.S. or the UK, Blick
replied
that "in certain circumstances" it was.

The BBC report followed hard on the heels of an attempt on Oct. 22,
1999,
to swamp the Echelon network with subversive e-mails.

In that incident, Internet users from around the world launched an e-
mail
campaign against the NSA in an attempt to flood the agency's alleged
computer surveillance system.

Reports of the time suggested that the protesters were upset at NSA's
apparent scanning of e-mails in an attempt to identify potential
terrorists. In
the United States, a recent CBS-TV report on the show 60 Minutes
reported that the system may have been used to spy on the phone
conversations of the late Princess Diana, at a time when she was
spearheading an effort to ban landmines worldwide.

Echelon's existence has been discussed in security circles for almost a
decade, but its existence was only brought to public attention in early
1997
by Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), a quarterly intelligence newsletter,
which revealed details of the global telecommunications surveillance
system.

According to the newsletter, Echelon is a top secret alliance involving
the
NSA's telecoms surveillance system and other government networks that
allows the bulk of the civilized world's telephone calls to be digitized
and
analyzed using intelligent text searching technology.

CAQ said that Echelon monitors virtually all phone calls in the U.S. And
Europe, including the UK, effectively making a mockery of the UK's
Interception of Communications Act.

The newsletter added that Echelon is used to keyword search e-mail, fax,
telex and all types of voice communications, including analog and
digital
cellular phone calls.

"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold
War,
Echelon is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments,
organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country.
It
potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes
within) countries anywhere in the world," the newsletter said.

The newsletter added that the existence of Echelon was inadvertently
revealed by the New Zealand government, which joined the Echelon
network in the 1960s.

The four other main members of Echelon are the U.S.' NSA, the UK's
GCHQ, Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and
Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD).

The newsletter said that Echelon started life as a UK-U.S. government
co-operative initiative in the Second World War. After the war, the
agreement was formalized in 1948, when the UK and the U.S. agreed to
tackle intelligence gathering against the USSR.

Central to Echelon are the Echelon dictionaries, which are compiled by
the
five main members' intelligence agencies. Each intelligence agency holds
copies of all of the other members' dictionaries, which contain details
of
keywords that the respective intelligence agency is interested in.

Each agency's computer system scans all available telecoms and data
traffic
in its region. Where another agency's keyword is found in the digital
data
stream, the relevant text or data is automatically forwarded to the
appropriate agency's computer system. This means, the newsletter said,
that
the originating agency's staff never get to see the relevant data — only
the
agency with the appropriate keyword receives the transmission.

CAQ claims that the relevant agencies' headquarters processing Echelon
data surveillance files are located in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham,
Canberra, and Wellington.
"

Henk Elegeert

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