July 16, 2000
Cloak, Dagger, Echelon
By TOM ZELLER
HAT else but the shadow of Big Brother could provoke equal anger from the
American Civil Liberties Union, thousands of Internet enthusiasts and the
French government? And what else but the elusive magic of digital
communications could make that shadow so mysterious?
The specter is Echelon, the not-so-supersecret surveillance
cooperative that grew out of a cold-war agreement between Britain and the
United States to share intelligence data, and that now includes Canada,
Australia and New Zealand. The European Union has been sufficiently
unnerved by Echelon to commission two reports on its capabilities. And
earlier this month a French prosecutor began a preliminary investigation
into whether the surveillance network is engaged in economic espionage.
Here at home, Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, has been
pressing the National Security Agency to demonstrate that Echelon does not
spy on ordinary Americans.
But what is Echelon exactly? Most of what is known comes from
recycled reports in the news media, but enough evidence has surfaced,
including documents released by the N.S.A. under the Freedom of Information
Act, that the existence of Echelon is rarely questioned.
At its core, Echelon is a network of ground stations with dishes
aimed at the dozen or so satellites that now shepherd much of the world's
television, fax, Internet and voice data. High-capacity computers allow
millions of signals per hour to be intercepted and scanned for keywords of
interest to each country's intelligence community.
That agencies like the N.S.A. are mining the spill-off from those
satellites should come as no surprise, according to John Pike, a policy
analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. ''You've got heaping
piles of information just sitting up there, all for the price of a
satellite dish.''
Questions about how that information is used, and whether or not
laws are being violated, are driving the current debate, which is itself
clouded by hyperbolic estimates of Echelon's capabilities. A British Web
site, for example, seeks to expose Echelon as a source of ''psychotronic
attacks'' and ''mind control experimentation.'' Several other sites claim
that Echelon is capable of collecting and processing every e-mail message,
every phone call and every fax on the planet.
''I would be very skeptical that the N.S.A. could or even would try
to process every bit of data out there,'' said Dr. Jeffery Richelson, a
senior fellow at the National Security Archives. ''It makes sense to
question how information they do gather is used, but the hysterical idea
that the N.S.A. really cares about the e-mail conversations of everyday
citizens is bottom-line nonsense. What everyone is worried about doesn't
really exist.''
''Of course,'' he added, ''50 years from now it could.''