Revealed: America's Project Echelon is bugging
Asia's phone traffic
It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood thriller. An alliance
of intelligence agencies from the West is intercepting the international and domestic
communications of Asian countries, notably China, Japan and Indonesia. This project
isn’t just focused on thwarting terrorists and drug traffickers. As Grahame Lynch
reports, a number of parties, including the European Parliament, are con-
cerned that this secret project is massively abusing its powers - to the extent of
feeding information to American commercial interests. This article reveals what
they’re spying on and how they’re doing it
For 51 years, a secret alliance of five signals
intelligence agencies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United
Kingdom has been intercepting and analyzing messages carried via Asian telecommunications
networks.
The so-called Echelon project, formed under the 1948 UKUSA
agreement, was unknown until the 1990s, largely as a result of its Cold War focus on
gaining intelligence on Russia.
Echelon was historically intended as a partnership between
the five major Anglo-Celtic countries, driven primarily by the US National Security Agency
and the UK Government Communications Headquarters, backed up by the efforts of Canada's
Communications Security Establishment, Australia's Defense Signals Directorate and New
Zealand's General Communications Bureau.
However, with the end of the Cold War, Echelon's focus
became less clear, leading to dissension from security operatives from less-powerful
partners such as New Zealand and Canada. They began to reveal details to the media about
the project's operations, culminating in a series of investigative books and articles.
This steady stream of leaks culminated in the first
official information about Echelon (also called Project P-415) in a report last month from
the European Parliament on the threat this project presents to European strategic
interests. This report, authored by Scottish intelligence analyst Duncan Campbell,
represents the first detailed study of the available evidence for Echelon.
Indeed, none of the five partner governments had
acknowledged Echelon's existence until March this year, when the Australian government
admitted the involvement of its Defense Signals Directorate in the project.
What has been revealed is an extensive network of
communications intelligence activities, centered around the interception of voice, fax,
email and telex traffic, primarily carried via insecure media such as Intelsat satellites
and public microwave transmissions.
Twenty years ago, most of the world's international
telecommunications was carried via HF radio and a handful of satellites, making such
interception relatively easy. But the proliferation of new telecom transmission media in
recent years has made the task of interception much more onerous. The European
Parliament's Interception Capabilities report ("the IC report") estimates that
some US$15 billion is now spent annually on communications intelligence across the world -
with Echelon consuming the biggest share.
The reason that details have leaked out about Echelon is
because of its apparent new focus - to provide commercial information about foreign
private sector activities to American companies. Some current and former operatives in
Australia, New Zealand and Canada now believe that American use of Echelon intelligence is
now undermining their own national and diplomatic interests.
Asian violations
The secretive nature of intelligence activities means it is difficult to confirm any of
Echelon's activities. But over the past 11 years, a handful of investigative journalists,
sporadic items of mainstream journalism and official indiscretions have revealed its
activities in Asia.
For example:
Probably the most extraordinary revelation was in 1996,
when Australian intelligence officials leaked information to an Australian media outlet
that they had placed bugs in the Chinese Embassy in Canberra on behalf of the US National
Security Agency. The reason for their indiscretion? They believed the Americans were using
the intelligence to advantage American companies against Australian companies in Chinese
wheat deals.
Interestingly, the same Chinese embassy had been the center
of controversy in the late 1980s when it was first built. Australian parliamentarians
claimed that its new site was one of the three best locations in Canberra to monitor
Australia's own internal defense microwave communications.
Such counter-intelligence is not unknown. Journalist Pratap
Chattergee has reported that Japanese agents aimed an infrared beam at a window in the
Australian embassy in Jakarta to eavesdrop on conversations inside.
Australia & NZ used to spy on Asia
In this region, Echelon conducts most of its interception activities from satellite bases
in Australia and New Zealand. The major station is located at Pine Gap in the Australian
outback. Other stations are located at Geraldton on the West Australian coast, Shoal Bay
in the Australian Northern Territory and Waihopai in New Zealand.
Until the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the British
maintained a massive China listening facility at Chung Hom Kok in the city. Although this
was apparently dismantled prior to 1997, Hong Kong's government has, curiously, continued
to participate in a little-known group called the International Law Enforcement
Telecommunications Seminar, which specifies interception requirements for telecom
standards bodies on behalf of UKUSA members and some Western European nations. Monitoring
of China is now primarily conducted from Australia.
According to various accounts, the New Zealand station is
used to intercept traffic carried by the two Intelsat satellites above the Pacific Ocean.
They carry Pacific region traffic as well as Asian-American traffic. Australian activities
are more focused on Asia - especially traffic carried by the Indonesian Palapa and Indian
satellites.
Dedicated American intelligence satellites are also used to
monitor terrestrial microwave transmissions. Long-distance microwave links are
characterized by the use of relay - each receiving station picks up only a portion of the
signal, leaving the remainder to beam beyond the horizon and into space. The American
satellites can intercept these signals from up to 80 degrees of longitude distance.
Another technique which can be used is direct taps on
undersea cables. In 1982, the Soviet Union discovered that a tap had been put on an
undersea cable near Murmansk by an American submarine especially outfitted for this
purpose, the USS Parche.
The IC report suggests that subsequent taps may have been
placed on undersea cables in the Middle East, South America and eastern Asia. The USS
Parche remains operative to this day and continues to receive regular commendations from
the US administration.
The increasing use of optical technologies has yet to
thwart this method of interception, for taps can be placed on opto-electronic repeaters.
Efforts to intercept actual fiber optic communications have apparently not succeeded.
How it's done
Even where networks are successfully tapped or intercepted there remains one major problem
- transmissions are multiplexed and therefore must be deciphered for analysis. The IC
report reports that "dozens of US defense contractors, mainly located in Silicon
Valley (California) or in the Maryland ÔBeltway’ area near Washington, manufacture
sophisticated signals intelligence equipment for the NSA".
The pre-requisite of all such equipment is that it be
"TEMPEST screened". This shields the emission of electromagnetic radiation which
can act as a giveaway that such equipment is in use.
According to the report, the first step of interception is
to engage in "wideband extraction". A broad array of equipment is available for
this purpose, including transponder survey equipment, radio analyzers, carrier analysis
systems, demodulators, decoders and demultiplexers.
One US supplier examined in detail by the report, Applied
Signal Technology, manufactures a range of equipment that can analyze almost any
commercial communications link.
For example, its "transponder characterization
system" can record, play back and analyze data at rates at up to 2.488 Gbps. Its
voice channel demultiplexer can scan up to 56,700 communications channels, extracting
3,000 voice channels. It also manufactures equipment which can categorize data
communications, decipher and recreate fax transmissions, collect and analyze commercial
paging transmissions and even intercept videoconferencing transmissions. The report even
claims that equipment for intercepting supposedly secure GSM transmissions is available in
the US.
Amazingly, equipment which once took up entire rows of
racks has now been miniaturized to the size of a suitcase, laptop, or even a credit card.
After data is collected, the second major step of
interception is actual analysis.
The simplest form of analysis is from signaling
information, such as the telephone numbers of the originator and destination. Intelligence
can be gleaned on commercial and personal associations by analyzing traffic patterns and
signaling data. This remains the most common source of communications intelligence.
However, a more complex and secretive form of analysis is
that of actual content, particularly of faxes and emails.
Over the past decade, evidence has emerged that the Echelon
project maintains a vast computer system that processes intercepted data in a manner
similar to a high-powered Web search engine.
According to the testimony of various intelligence sources,
intercepted traffic is filtered through "dictionaries" of keywords maintained by
each of the five Echelon countries. Where an intercepted message contains a dictionary
entry, it is automatically forwarded to the country that has nominated the keyword.
A former NSA director, William Studeman, made an apparent
reference to how this system works in 1992: "One intelligence collection system alone
can generate a million inputs per half hour. Filters throw away all but 6,500 inputs, only
1,000 inputs meet forwarding criteria; 10 inputs are normally selected by analysts and
only one report is produced. These are routine statistics for a number of intelligence
collection and analysis systems which collect technical intelligence."
Most of the published evidence suggests that there are two
forms of communication which remain relatively impervious to keyword-based interception
techniques: the actual content of voice calls and, interestingly, handwritten faxes.
Although commonplace in Hollywood movies, technology which
can scan thousands of voice calls for mentions of keywords is still some time off. The
challenge of accents, languages and idiomatic speech is still too hard for today's
standard of voice-recognition technology.
Likewise, optical character recognition technology is good
at scanning reams of machine-generated typefaces, but fails badly when it comes to
individual handwriting.
Of course, national security agencies with legal powers to
tap into individual lines do not have this problem.
A former Canadian intelligence officer, Mike Frost, wrote
in his 1990 book Spyworld that he had been ordered in 1975 to intercept the phone
conversations of Margaret Trudeau, wife of then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in order to
establish whether she smoked marijuana!
In this region, the US State Department says that
Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Taiwan all maintain extensive phone-tapping
operations on their own populations. Taiwan is singled out for special mention - its law
enforcement agencies receive over 100,000 authorizations annually to tap the island's 8
million phones.
The threat of encryption
The continual increases in computing processing power should theoretically provide a boon
for intelligence agencies seeking to expand their interception capabilities.
But this trend is accompanied by another trend that thwarts
such intelligence efforts - the commercial proliferation of security and encryption
systems.
The IC report quotes head of staff of the US House of
Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence, John Millis, stating that "signals
intelligence is in a crisis... over the last 50 years, technology has been a friend of the
National Security Agency, but in the last four or five years, technology has moved from
being the friend to being the enemy of signals intelligence."
He continued "Encryption is here and it's going to
grow very rapidly. That is bad news for signals intelligence. It is going to take a huge
amount of money invested in new technologies to get access and to be able to break out the
information that we still need to get from signals intelligence."
Security agencies have, of course, attempted to stem the
tide of encryption. The first step was the promotion of the Clipper chip, which would
provide encrypted communications with one proviso - the US government would hold the keys.
This effort failed, but subsequent efforts have slowed the
spread of encryption systems. For example, US export rules have forced major Internet
software makers to release communications applications with weakened encryption
algorithms. For example, Lotus Notes uses a 64-bit security key, 24 bits of which are
registered with the US government. This apparently allows the US government to decipher
encrypted messages in a "matter of seconds". In the case of Microsoft and
Netscape 128-bit systems, some 88 bits are registered with the US government. Already,
both the European Commission in Luxembourg and the Swedish government have identified
transgressions of their "secure" email systems.
Similarly, the GSM MoU restricted the proliferation of its
most powerful security algorithm to mobile operators in friendly Western countries in the
mid-1990s, giving Asian operators a less-powerful version. These restrictions have now
been dropped.
But restrictions don't stop the development of more
powerful encryption systems elsewhere - a prospect which the National Security Agency
apparently finds troubling.
During the Cold War, the NSA had a novel solution to this
dilemma. It apparently negotiated a secret arrangement to access the codes used by the
world's leading post-war encryption supplier, Swiss company Crypto. This company supplied
some 130 international agencies with code, trading on its Swiss location as a neutral
country. The NSA, and its UKUSA partners, exploited this arrangement to secretly spy on
the world's governments.
Asia: a nest of spies?
Echelon isn't the only major signals intelligence project in Asia. In the shady world of
covert intelligence, alliances ebb and flow.
For example, the US government and the Chinese government
reportedly maintain joint listening facilities in Xinjiang, western China. Their purpose
is to spy on Russia. A 1988 article in The New Statesman suggested that Chinese PLA staff
had been especially flown to a Californian facility for the purposes of signals
intelligence technology training.
Russia is also reported to maintain signals reception
facilities in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, and France is believed to operate similar facilities
in New Caledonia, to the northeast of Australia.
Japan and China also operate satellite earth station
facilities in the Pacific nation of Kiribati (which may be used for intelligence
activities), while the US is also believed to gather some signals intelligence from
facilities in Japan.
What makes the Echelon project most interesting is the way
it has been transformed from a Western intelligence front into a economic intelligence
unit that apparently serves US interests to the periodic detriment of America's own
allies.
At this stage, the European Parliament's investigations
have been restricted to just two committee reports, amid allegations that actual debate
has been gagged. In the United States, most discussion about Echelon remains confined to
alternative media and libertarian groups - the US government continues to deny the
existence of Echelon.
But the steady trickle of evidence from Australia, Canada
and New Zealand hints at the full extent of Echelon - a massive multi-billion dollar
project designed to eavesdrop on the traffic of telecommunications networks, including
those of Asia's, for the apparent commercial benefit of American business.
CSE Communications Security Establishment,
Canada's signals intelligence agency
DSD Defense Signals Directorate,
Australia's signals intelligence agency
Echelon An international computer and
communications network maintained by the five UKUSA signatories which intercepts and
analyzes international voice, fax and email transmissions. Existence first revealed in
1980s, but not officially acknowledged by a UKUSA partner until March this year. USA has
not conceded its existence
European Parliament Elected wing of the
European community. At the urging of a UK Labor member, its Scientific and Tecnological
Options Assessment unit has commissioned and published two reports on "Technologies
Used For Political Control"
GSB General Communications Bureau, New
Zealand's signals intelligence agency
GCHQ The Government Communication
Headquarters, Britain's signals intelligence agency
ILETS International Law Enforcement
Telecommunications Seminar, a group of 20 Western countries which specifies interception
requirements for telecom standards and systems. Its 1998 activities include specifying
interception techniques for Iridium. Its existence was first revealed in 1996, although it
has been meeting since at least 1993
NSA National Security Agency, the US
signals intelligence agency
UKUSA agreement An agreement formed in
1948 between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK to share signals
intelligence