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by Nicky Hager
SS: PRONUNCIATION: es es.
NOUN: An elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party that served as
Hitler's personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the
occupied countries. ETYMOLOGY: German, abbr. for Schutzstaffel : Schutz,
defense + Staffel,
echelon.
For 40 years, New Zealand's largest
intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)
the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been
helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific
region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its
highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late
1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been
too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and
documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more
than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields
agreed to be interviewed.
The activities they described made
it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide
systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by
far the most important is ECHELON.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, the
ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and
telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications
networks. 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.
It is, of course, not a new idea
that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public
telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the
New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying
is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many
details such as the codenames.
The ECHELON system is not designed
to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the
system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of
communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of
interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception
facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major
components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor
communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and
others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities,
providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large
proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the
ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages
intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include
all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned.
Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically
searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is
on the list.
The thousands of simultaneous
messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after
hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in
telecommunications haystacks.
SOMEONE IS LISTENING: The computers
in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON
Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for
keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was
designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations
to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are
bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement.
The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security
Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD)
in Australia.
The alliance, which grew from
cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions,
was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily
against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest
intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the
world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these
communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades
before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did
intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually
processed and analyzed the intercept from its own stations.
Under ECHELON, a particular
station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen
keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New
Zealand's satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South
Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA,
GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary
encounters a message containing one of the agencies' keywords, it
automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the
agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the
intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign
agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the
NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on
their soil.
The first component of the ECHELON
network are stations specifically targeted on the international
telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies
of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world,
stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of
thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA
stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by
the Intelsats.
The British GCHQ station is located
at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall.
Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward
Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon,
the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers
southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers
Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America.
Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of
Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes
point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.
The job of intercepting Pacific
Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New
Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global
interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia
supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both
Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).
Each of the five stations'
Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the
network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country
between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY
Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These
codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message,
before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to
recognize at which station the interception occurred.
New Zealand intelligence staff has
been closely involved with the NSA's Yakima station since 1981, when NSA
pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy
communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible
for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same
segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring.
Until New Zealand's integration into ECHELON with the opening of the
Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was
intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in
Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format
intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).
"COMMUNICATION" THROUGH SATELLITES:
The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite
communications not carried by Intelsat. In addition to the UKUSA
stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more
stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications
satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal
Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian
satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to
intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa
in northern Japan.
A group of facilities that tap
directly into land-based telecommunications systems is the final element
of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method
of transmitting large quantities of public, business, and government
communications is a combination of water cables under the oceans and
microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across seabeds between
countries, account for much of the world's international communications.
After they come out of the water and join land-based microwave networks
they are very vulnerable to interception. The microwave networks are made
up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop
(always in line of sight) across the countryside. These networks shunt
large quantities of communications across a country. Interception of them
gives access to international undersea communications (once they surface)
and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are
also an obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic
communications.
Because the facilities required to
intercept radio and satellite communications use large aerials and dishes
that are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well
documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication
networks is a building situated along the microwave route or a hidden
cable running underground from the legitimate network into some anonymous
building, possibly far removed. Although it sounds technically very
difficult, microwave interception from space by United States spy
satellites also occurs.4 The worldwide network of facilities to intercept
these communications is largely undocumented, and because New Zealand's
GCSB does not participate in this type of interception, my inside sources
could not help either.
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A MICROWAVE: A
1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-authored by one of
its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of
foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 1. It described UKUSA
"embassy collection" operations, where sophisticated receivers and
processors are secretly transported to their countries' overseas embassies
in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in foreign
capitals.
Since most countries' microwave
networks converge on the capital city, embassy buildings can be an ideal
site. Protected by diplomatic privilege, they allow interception in the
heart of the target country. *6 The Canadian embassy collection was
requested by the NSA to fill gaps in the American and British embassy
collection operations, which were still occurring in many capitals around
the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990. Separate sources in Australia
have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy collection. On the
territory of UKUSA nations, the interception of land-based
telecommunications appears to be done at special secret intelligence
facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well placed to
intercept the large amounts of the world's communications that cross their
territories.
The only public reference to the
Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to one of these
facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British
GCHQ official spoke anonymously to Granada Television's World in Action
about the agency's abuses of power. He told the program about an anonymous
red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every
telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding them into
powerful computers with a program known as "Dictionary." The operation, he
explained, is staffed by carefully vetted British Telecom people: "It's
nothing to do with national security. It's because it's not legal to take
every single telex. And they take everything: the embassies, all the
business deals, even the birthday greetings, they take everything. They
feed it into the Dictionary." What the documentary did not reveal is that
Dictionary is not just a British system; it is UKUSA-wide.
""You have an American dictionary here. That's probably
the most important book of all. More important perhaps than the Bible. The
dictionary is something that gives us definitions. This is what the
society is missing. We are missing definitions. Right. I could open this
book and I could -- boom! 'IOU: a promise to pay a debt, especially a
signed paper stating the amount owed and often bearing the letters IOU.''"
-- "K Street," directed by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney
Similarly, British researcher Duncan
Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station in Britain taps
directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually
been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated
tower connected underground into the station.
The NSA Menwith Hill station, with
22 satellite terminals and more than 4.9 acres of buildings, is
undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in the UKUSA network. Located in
northern England, several thousand kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it
was awarded the NSA's "Station of the Year" prize for 1991 after its role
in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists in the interception of microwave
communications in another way as well, by serving as a ground station for
US electronic spy satellites. These intercept microwave trunk lines and
short range communications such as military radios and walkie talkies.
Other ground stations where the satellites' information is fed into the
global network are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near Alice Springs in central
Australia and the Bad Aibling station in Germany. Among them, the various
stations and operations making up the ECHELON network tap into all the
main components of the world's telecommunications networks. All of them,
including a separate network of stations that intercepts long distance
radio communications, have their own Dictionary computers connected into
ECHELON.
In the early 1990s, opponents of the
Menwith Hill station obtained large quantities of internal documents from
the facility. Among the papers was a reference to an NSA computer system
called Platform. The integration of all the UKUSA station computers into
ECHELON probably occurred with the introduction of this system in the
early 1980s. James Bamford wrote at that time about a new worldwide NSA
computer network codenamed Platform "which will tie together 52 separate
computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or `host
environment,' for the massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort
Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT
organization, GCHQ."
LOOKING IN THE DICTIONARY: The
Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA
communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency
headquarters. This is where all the intercepted messages selected by the
Dictionaries end up. Each morning the specially "indoctrinated" signals
intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham, Canberra, and
Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary
system. After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory
that lists the different categories of intercept available in the data
bases, each with a four-digit code. For instance, 1911 might be Japanese
diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian CSE), 3848
might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might
be any messages about distribution of encryption technology.
They select their subject category,
get a "search result" showing how many messages have been caught in the
ECHELON net on that subject, and then the day's work begins. Analysts
scroll through screen after screen of intercepted faxes, e-mail messages,
etc. and, whenever a message appears worth reporting on, they select it
from the rest to work on. If it is not in English, it is translated and
then written into the standard format of intelligence reports produced
anywhere within the UKUSA network either in entirety as a "report," or as
a summary or "gist."
INFORMATION CONTROL: A highly
organized system has been developed to control what is being searched for
by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the heart of
ECHELON operations and works as follows.
The individual station's Dictionary
computers do not simply have a long list of keywords to search for. And
they do not send all the information into some huge database that
participating agencies can dip into as they wish. It is much more
controlled.
The search lists are organized into
the same categories, referred to by the four digit numbers. Each agency
decides its own categories according to its responsibilities for producing
intelligence for the network. For GCSB, this means South Pacific
governments, Japanese diplomatic, Russian Antarctic activities, and so on.
The agency then works out about 10
to 50 keywords for selection in each category. The keywords include such
things as names of people, ships, organizations, country names, and
subject names. They also include the known telex and fax numbers and
Internet addresses of any individuals, businesses, organizations, and
government offices that are targets. These are generally written as part
of the message text and so are easily recognized by the Dictionary
computers.
The agencies also specify
combinations of keywords to help sift out communications of interest. For
example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words
"Santiago" and "aid," or cables containing the word "Santiago" but not
"consul" (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications). It is
these sets of words and numbers (and combinations), under a particular
category, that get placed in the Dictionary computers. (Staff in the five
agencies called Dictionary Managers enter and update the keyword search
lists for each agency.)
The whole system, devised by the NSA,
has been adopted completely by the other agencies. The Dictionary
computers search through all the incoming messages and, whenever they
encounter one with any of the agencies' keywords, they select it. At the
same time, the computer automatically notes technical details such as the
time and place of interception on the piece of intercept so that analysts
reading it, in whichever agency it is going to, know where it came from,
and what it is. Finally, the computer writes the four-digit code (for the
category with the keywords in that message) at the bottom of the message's
text. This is important. It means that when all the intercepted messages
end up together in the database at one of the agency headquarters, the
messages on a particular subject can be located again. Later, when the
analyst using the Dictionary system selects the four-digit code for the
category he or she wants, the computer simply searches through all the
messages in the database for the ones which have been tagged with that
number.
This system is very effective for
controlling which agencies can get what from the global network because
each agency only gets the intelligence out of the ECHELON system from its
own numbers. It does not have any access to the raw intelligence coming
out of the system to the other agencies. For example, although most of the
GCSB's intelligence production is primarily to serve the UKUSA alliance,
New Zealand does not have access to the whole ECHELON network. The access
it does have is strictly controlled. A New Zealand intelligence officer
explained: "The agencies can all apply for numbers on each other's
Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with are the Americans. ... [There are]
more hoops to jump through, unless it is in their interest, in which case
they'll do it for you."
There is only one agency which, by
virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have access to the
full potential of the ECHELON system the agency that set it up. What is
the system used for? Anyone listening to official "discussion" of
intelligence could be forgiven for thinking that, since the end of the
Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA intelligence machine are
terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic intelligence. The idea that
economic intelligence has become very important, in particular, has been
carefully cultivated by intelligence agencies intent on preserving their
post-Cold War budgets. It has become an article of faith in much
discussion of intelligence. However, I have found no evidence that these
are now the primary concerns of organizations such as NSA.
QUICKER INTELLIGENCE, SAME MISSION:
A different story emerges after examining very detailed information I have
been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA
allies and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence
reports New Zealand receives from its four allies each week. There is
quite a lot of intelligence collected about potential terrorists, and
there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive
monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations. But by
far, the main priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be
political and military intelligence to assist the larger allies to pursue
their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the particular
governments are concerned about can become a target.
With capabilities so secret and so
powerful, almost anything goes. For example, in June 1992, a group of
current "highly placed intelligence operatives" from the British GCHQ
spoke to the London Observer: "We feel we can no longer remain silent
regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence
within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as examples GCHQ
interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty
International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: "At any time
GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target
request," the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is
known as Mantis. With telexes it is called Mayfly. By keying in a code
relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex
"fixes" on the three organizations. "It is then possible to key in a
trigger word which enables us to home in on the telex communications
whenever that word appears," he said. "And we can read a pre-determined
number of characters either side of the keyword." Without actually naming
it, this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary
system works. Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this
is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON means that the interception
of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any
station where the GCHQ had requested that the four-digit code covering
Third World aid be placed.
Note that these GCHQ officers
mentioned that the system was being used for telephone calls. In New
Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept written communications: fax,
e-mail, and telex. The reason, according to intelligence staff, is that
the agency does not have the staff to analyze large quantities of
telephone conversations.
Mike Frost's expos of Canadian
"embassy collection" operations described the NSA computers they used,
called Oratory, that can "listen" to telephone calls and recognize when
keywords are spoken. Just as we can recognize words spoken in all the
different tones and accents we encounter, so too, according to Frost, can
these computers. Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically
extracted from the masses of other calls and recorded digitally on
magnetic tapes for analysts back at agency headquarters. However, high
volume voice recognition computers will be technically difficult to
perfect, and my New Zealand-based sources could not confirm that this
capability exists. But, if or when it is perfected, the implications would
be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA agencies could use machines to
search through all the international telephone calls in the world, in the
same way that they do written messages. If this equipment exists for use
in embassy collection, it will presumably be used in all the stations
throughout the ECHELON network. It is yet to be confirmed how extensively
telephone communications are being targeted by the ECHELON stations for
the other agencies.
The easiest pickings for the ECHELON
system are the individuals, organizations, and governments that do not use
encryption. In New Zealand's area, for example, it has proved especially
useful against already vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use
any coding, even for government communications (all these communications
of New Zealand's neighbors are supplied, unscreened, to its UKUSA allies).
As a result of the revelations in my book, there is currently a project
under way in the Pacific to promote and supply publicly available
encryption software to vulnerable organizations such as democracy
movements in countries with repressive governments. This is one practical
way of curbing illegitimate uses of the ECHELON capabilities.
One final comment. All the
newspapers, commentators, and "well placed sources" told the public that
New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence in the mid-1980s. That was
entirely untrue. The intelligence supply to New Zealand did not stop, and
instead, the decade since has been a period of increased integration of
New Zealand into the US system. Virtually everything the equipment,
manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and so on, used in the GCSB
continues to be imported entirely from the larger allies (in practice,
usually the NSA). As with the Australian and Canadian agencies, most of
the priorities continue to come from the US, too.
The main thing that protects these
agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book arrived in the
book shops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the
intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister's department trying to
decide if they could prevent it from being distributed. They eventually
concluded, sensibly, that the political costs were too high. It is
understandable that they were so agitated.
Throughout my research, I have faced
official denials or governments refusing to comment on publicity about
intelligence activities. Given the pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and
stonewalling, it is always hard for the public to judge what is fact, what
is speculation, and what is paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand's
role in the NSA-led alliance, my aim was to provide so much detail about
the operations, the technical systems, the daily work of individual staff
members, and even the rooms in which they work inside intelligence
facilities that readers could feel confident that they were getting close
to the truth. I hope the information leaked by intelligence staff in New
Zealand about UKUSA and its systems such as ECHELON will help lead to
change.
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