Before PRISM there was ECHELON: the top secret surveillance program whose all-encompassing \u201cdictionaries\u201d (high-speed computers powered by complex algorithms) ingest and sort key words and text scooped-up by a global network of satellites, from undersea cables and land-based microwave towers.<\/p>\n
Past as Prologue<\/strong><\/p>\n Confronted by a dizzying array of code-named programs, the casual observer will assume the spymasters running these intrusive operations are all-knowing mandarins with their fingers on the pulse of global events.<\/p>\n Yet, if disastrous US policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing capitalist economic meltdown tell us anything, it is that the American superpower, in President Nixon\u2019s immortal words, really is \u201ca pitiful, helpless giant.\u201d<\/p>\n Coupled with Snowden\u2019s disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported here<\/a> and here<\/a>), revealed that the agency\u2014far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his \u201csecret and confidential\u201d black files\u2014has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.<\/p>\n While Tice\u2019s allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American policy\u2014elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations\u2014despite being deep-sixed by US media, they confirm previous reporting about the agency.<\/p>\n When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA\u2019s ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for New Statesman<\/a><\/em> revealed that a whistleblower, Margaret Newsham, a software designer employed by Lockheed at the giant agency listening post at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England, stepped forward and told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session, that NSA was using its formidable intercept capabilities \u201cto locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n Campbell\u2019s reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager\u2019s groundbreaking book, Secret Power<\/a><\/em>, the first detailed account of NSA\u2019s global surveillance system. A summary of Hager\u2019s findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared in CovertAction Quarterly<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em> alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that \u201cNSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes,\u201d said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.<\/p>\n Ironically enough, congressional efforts to mitigate abuses by the intelligence agencies exposed by the Church and Pike Committees in the 1970s, resulted in the 1978 creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. However, as The New York Times<\/a><\/em> reported July 7, that court \u201cin more than a dozen classified rulings . . . has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,\u201d a \u201cparallel Supreme Court\u201d whose rulings are beyond legal challenge.<\/p>\n In an 88-page report on ECHELON published in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC<\/a>) Newsham said that when she worked on the development of SILKWORTH at the secret US base, described as \u201ca system for processing information relayed from signals intelligence satellites,\u201d she told Campbell and other reporters, including CBS News\u2019 60 Minutes<\/a><\/em>, that \u201cshe witnessed and overheard\u201d one of Thurman\u2019s intercepted phone calls.<\/p>\n Like Thomas Drake, the senior NSA official prosecuted by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act, for information he provided The Baltimore Sun<\/a><\/em> over widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the agency\u2019s failed Trailblazer program, Newsham had testified before Congress and filed a lawsuit against Lockheed over charges of sexual harassment, \u201ccorruption and mis-spending on other US government \u2018black\u2019 projects.\u201d<\/p>\n A year earlier, in a 1999 on the record interview with the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet<\/a><\/em>, Newsham spoke to journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, telling them of her \u201cconstant fear\u201d that \u201ccertain elements\u201d within the US secret state would \u201ctry to silence her\u201d; a point not lost on Edward Snowden today.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a result,\u201d the newspaper reported, \u201cshe sleeps with a loaded pistol under her mattress, and her best friend is Mr. Gunther\u2014a 120-pound German shepherd that was trained to be a guard and attack dog by a good friend in the Nevada State Police.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo me,\u201d the whistleblower said, \u201cthere are only two issues at stake here: right or wrong. And the longer I worked on the clandestine surveillance projects, the more I could see that they were not only illegal, but also unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEven then,\u201d between 1974 and 1984 when she worked on ECHELON, it \u201cwas very big and sophisticated.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating,\u201d Newsham averred. \u201cSince our satellites could in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be today.\u201d<\/p>\n When queried about \u201cwhich part of the system is named Echelon,\u201d Newsham told the reporters: \u201cThe computer network itself. The software programs are known as SILKWORTH and SIRE, and one of the most important surveillance satellites is named VORTEX. It intercepts things like phone conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite evidence presented in her congressional testimony about these illegal operations, \u201cno substantive investigation took place, and no report was made to Congress,\u201d Campbell later wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cSince then,\u201d the British journalist averred, \u201cinvestigators have subpoenaed other witnesses and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start<\/em>.\u201d (emphasis added)<\/p>\n This would explain why members of Congress, the federal Judiciary and the Executive Branch itself, as Tice alleges, tread lightly when it comes to crossing NSA. However, as information continues to emerge about these privacy-killing programs it should also be clear that the agency\u2019s prime targets are not \u201cterrorists,\u201d judges or politicians, but the American people themselves.<\/p>\n In fact, as Snowden stated in a powerful message published by WikiLeaks<\/a>: \u201cIn the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised\u2014and it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n How did we get here? Is there a direct line from Cold War-era programs which targeted the Soviet Union and their allies, and which now, in the age of capitalist globalization, the epoch of planet-wide theft and plunder, now targets the entire world\u2019s population?<\/p>\n ECHELON\u2019s Roots: The UKUSA Agreement<\/strong><\/p>\n Lost in the historical mists surrounding the origins of the Cold War, the close collaboration amongst Britain and the United States as they waged war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, by war\u2019s end had morphed into a permanent intelligence-military alliance which predated the founding of NATO. With the defeat of the Axis powers, a new global division of labor was in the offing led by the undisputed superpower which emerged from the conflagration, the United States.<\/p>\n Self-appointed administrator over Europe\u2019s old colonial holdings across Africa, Asia and the Middle East (the US already viewed Latin America as its private export dumping ground and source for raw materials), the US used its unparalleled position to benefit the giant multinational American firms grown larger and more profitable than ever as a result of wartime economic mobilization managed by the state.<\/p>\n By 1946, the permanent war economy which later came to be known as the Military-Industrial Complex, a semi-command economy directed by corporate executives, based on military, but also on emerging high-tech industries bolstered by taxpayer-based government investments, was already firmly entrenched and formed the political-economic base on which the so-called \u201cAmerican Century\u201d was constructed.<\/p>\n While resource extraction and export market domination remained the primary goal of successive US administrations (best summarized by the slogan, \u201cthe business of government is business\u201d), advances in technology in general and telecommunications in particular, meant that the system\u2019s overlords required an intelligence apparatus that was always \u201con\u201d as it \u201ccaptured\u201d the flood of electronic signals coursing across the planet.<\/p>\n The secret British and US agencies responsible for cracking German, Japanese and Russian codes during the war found themselves in a quandary. Should they declare victory and go home or train their sights on the new (old) adversary\u2014their former ally, the Soviet Union\u2014but also on home grown and indigenous communist and socialist movements more generally?<\/p>\n In opting for the latter, the UK-US wartime partnership evolved into a broad agreement to share signals and communications intelligence (SIGINT and COMINT), a set-up which persists today.<\/p>\n In 1946, Britain and the United States signed the United Kingdom-United States of America Agreement (UKUSA), a multilateral treaty to share signals intelligence amongst the two nations and Britain\u2019s Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Known as the \u201cFive Eyes\u201d agreement, the treaty was such a closely-guarded secret that Australia\u2019s Prime Minister was kept in the dark until 1973!<\/p>\n In 2010, the British National Archives<\/a> released previously classified Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) files that provide an important historical overview of the agreement. Also in 2010, the National Security Agency followed suit and published formerly classified files<\/a> from their archives. Accompanying NSA\u2019s release was a 1955 amended version<\/a> of the treaty.<\/p>\n It\u2019s secretive nature is clearly spelled out: \u201cIt will be contrary to this Agreement to reveal its existence to any third party unless otherwise agreed by the two parties.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2005<\/a>, 2009<\/a> and 2013<\/a>, The National Security Archive<\/a> published a series of previously classified documents obtained from NSA under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed agency thinking on a range of subjects, from global surveillance to cyberwar.<\/p>\n What we have learned from these sources and reporting by Duncan Campbell and Nicky Hager, are that the five agencies feeding the surveillance behemoth, America\u2019s NSA, Britain\u2019s GCHQ, Canada\u2019s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Australia\u2019s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and New Zealand\u2019s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), are subdivided into first and second tier partners, with the US, as befitting a hyperpower, forming the \u201c1st party\u201d and the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand forming \u201c2nd party\u201d partners.<\/p>\n Under terms of UKUSA, intelligence \u201cproducts\u201d are defined as \u201c01. Collection of traffic. 02. Acquisition of communications documents and equipment. 03. Traffic analysis. 04. Cryptanalysis. 05. Decryption and translation. 06. Acquisition of information regarding communications organizations, procedures, practices and equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSuch exchange,\u201d NSA informed us, \u201cwill be unrestricted on all work undertaken except when specifically excluded from the agreement at the request of either party and with the agreement of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the intention of each party,\u201d we\u2019re told, \u201cto limit such exceptions to the absolute minimum and to exercise no restrictions other than those reported and mutually agreed upon.\u201d<\/p>\n This certainly leaves wide latitude for mischief as we learned with the Snowden disclosures.<\/p>\n Amid serious charges that \u201cFive Eyes\u201d were illegally seizing industrial and trade secrets from \u201c3rd party\u201d European partners such as France and Germany, detailed in the European Parliament\u2019s 2001 ECHELON report<\/a>, it should be clear by now that since its launch in 1968 when satellite communications became a practical reality, ECHELON has evolved into a global surveillance complex under US control.<\/p>\n The Global Surveillance System Today<\/strong><\/p>\n The echoes of those earlier secret programs reverberate in today\u2019s headlines.<\/p>\n Last month, The Guardian<\/a><\/em> reported that the \u201ccollection of traffic\u201d cited in UKUSA has been expanded to GCHQ\u2019s \u201cability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.\u201d<\/p>\n Then on July 6, The Washington Post<\/a><\/em> disclosed that NSA has tapped directly into those fiber optic cables, as AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein described to Wired Magazine<\/a><\/em> in 2006, and now scoops-up petabyte scale<\/em> communications flowing through the US internet backbone. The agency was able to accomplish this due to the existence of \u201can internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAmong their jobs documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.\u201d<\/p>\n Following up on July 10, the Post<\/a><\/em> published a new PRISM slide from the 41-slide deck provided to the paper by Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n The slide revealed that \u201ctwo types of collection\u201d now occur. One is the PRISM program that collects information from technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. The second source is \u201ca separate category labeled \u2018Upstream,\u2019 described as accessing \u2018communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently, Der Spiegel<\/a><\/em>, reported that NSA averred the agency \u201cdoes NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do.\u201d This is an outright falsehood exposed by former Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE) officer Mike Frost.<\/p>\n In a 1997 CovertAction Quarterly<\/em> expos\u00c3\u00a9, Frost recounted how \u201cCSE operated alone or joined with NSA or GCHQ to: intercept communications in other countries from the confines of Canadian embassies around the world with the knowledge of the ambassador; aid politicians, political parties, or factions in an allied country to gain partisan advantage; spy on its allies; spy on its own citizens; and perform \u2018favors\u2019 that helped its allies evade domestic laws against spying.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout it all,\u201d Frost insisted, \u201cI was trained and controlled by US intelligence which told us what to do and how to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone else, Der Spiegel<\/em> reports, is fair game. \u201cFor all other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not apply. \u2018We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners,\u2019 the NSA boasts in an internal presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n It should also be clear that targeting isn\u2019t strictly limited to the governments and economic institutions of \u201c3rd party foreign partners,\u201d but extends to the private communications of their citizens. Der Spiegel<\/em>, citing documents supplied by Snowden, reported that the agency \u201cgathered metadata from some 15 million telephone conversations and 10 million Internet datasets.\u201d The newsmagazine noted that \u201cthe Americans are collecting from up to half a billion communications a month in Germany,\u201d describing the surveillance as \u201ca complete structural acquisition of data.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite hypocritical protests by European governments, on the contrary, Snowden disclosed that those \u201c3rd party\u201d partners are joined at the hip with their \u201cFive Eyes\u201d cousins.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-zYXklk17qYU\/UdcbEKYL9SI\/AAAAAAAAAYw\/G74-xzDbjtc\/s400\/nsa.jpg\")
<\/a>In fact, the same programs used to surveil the population at large have also been turned inward by the National Security State against itself and targets military and political elites who long thought themselves immune from such close attention.<\/p>\n