People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their
private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence
leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
While the public is rightly angered by the illegal, unconstitutional
nature of NSA programs which seize and store data for retrospective
harvesting by intelligence and law enforcement officials, including the
content of phone calls, emails, geolocational information, bank records,
credit card purchases, travel itineraries, even medical records–in
secret, and with little in the way of effective oversight–the historical
context of how, and why, this vast spying apparatus came to be is often
given short shrift.
Revelations about NSA spying didn’t begin June 5, 2013 however, the day when
The Guardian published a top secret
FISA Court Order to Verizon, ordering the firm turn over the telephone records on millions of its customers “on an ongoing daily basis.”
Before PRISM there was ECHELON: the top secret surveillance program
whose all-encompassing “dictionaries” (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.
Past as Prologue
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.
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’s immortal words, really is “a
pitiful, helpless giant.”
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.
Coupled with Snowden’s disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported
here and
here),
revealed that the agency–far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI
spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his “secret and confidential” black
files–has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political
leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.
While Tice’s allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed
fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American
policy–elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to
private security corporations–despite being deep-sixed by US media, they
confirm previous reporting about the agency.
When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA’s ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for
New Statesman
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 “to locate the telephone
or other messages of target individuals.”
Campbell’s reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s groundbreaking book,
Secret Power,
the first detailed account of NSA’s global surveillance system. A
summary of Hager’s findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared
in
CovertAction Quarterly.
As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target
of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that “NSA
has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes,” said to
have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
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
reported July 7, that court “in 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,” a “parallel
Supreme Court” whose rulings are beyond legal challenge.
In an 88-page report on ECHELON published in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (
EPIC)
Newsham said that when she worked on the development of SILKWORTH at
the secret US base, described as “a system for processing information
relayed from signals intelligence satellites,” she told Campbell and
other reporters, including CBS News’
60 Minutes, that “she witnessed and overheard” one of Thurman’s intercepted phone calls.
Like Thomas Drake, the senior NSA official prosecuted by the Obama
administration under the 1917 Espionage Act, for information he provided
The Baltimore Sun
over widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the agency’s failed
Trailblazer program, Newsham had testified before Congress and filed a
lawsuit against Lockheed over charges of sexual harassment, “corruption
and mis-spending on other US government ‘black’ projects.”
A year earlier, in a 1999 on the record interview with the Danish newspaper
Ekstra Bladet,
Newsham spoke to journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, telling them
of her “constant fear” that “certain elements” within the US secret
state would “try to silence her”; a point not lost on Edward Snowden
today.
“As a result,” the newspaper reported, “she sleeps with a loaded
pistol under her mattress, and her best friend is Mr. Gunther–a
120-pound German shepherd that was trained to be a guard and attack dog
by a good friend in the Nevada State Police.”
“To me,” the whistleblower said, “there 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.”
“Even then,” between 1974 and 1984 when she worked on ECHELON, it “was very big and sophisticated.”
“As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his
phone conversation while he was communicating,” Newsham averred. “Since
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.”
When queried about “which part of the system is named Echelon,”
Newsham told the reporters: “The 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.”
Despite evidence presented in her congressional testimony about these
illegal operations, “no substantive investigation took place, and no
report was made to Congress,” Campbell later wrote.
“Since then,” the British journalist averred, “investigators 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.” (emphasis added)
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’s prime targets are not “terrorists,” judges or politicians, but
the American people themselves.
In fact, as Snowden stated in a powerful message published by
WikiLeaks:
“In 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–and it should be.”
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’s population?
ECHELON’s Roots: The UKUSA Agreement
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’s 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.
Self-appointed administrator over Europe’s 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.
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 “American Century” was constructed.
While resource extraction and export market domination remained the
primary goal of successive US administrations (best summarized by the
slogan, “the business of government is business”), advances in
technology in general and telecommunications in particular, meant that
the system’s overlords required an intelligence apparatus that was
always “on” as it “captured” the flood of electronic signals coursing
across the planet.
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–their former ally, the Soviet Union–but also
on home grown and indigenous communist and socialist movements more
generally?
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.
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’s Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Known as the “Five Eyes” agreement, the treaty was such a
closely-guarded secret that Australia’s Prime Minister was kept in the
dark until 1973!
In 2010, the British
National Archives
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 from their archives. Accompanying NSA’s release was a 1955
amended version of the treaty.
It’s secretive nature is clearly spelled out: “It will be contrary to
this Agreement to reveal its existence to any third party unless
otherwise agreed by the two parties.”
In
2005,
2009 and
2013,
The National Security Archive
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.
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’s NSA, Britain’s GCHQ, Canada’s
Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Australia’s Defence Signals
Directorate (DSD) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security
Bureau (GCSB), are subdivided into first and second tier partners, with
the US, as befitting a hyperpower, forming the “1st party” and the UK,
Australia, Canada and New Zealand forming “2nd party” partners.
Under terms of UKUSA, intelligence “products” are defined as “01.
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.”
“Such exchange,” NSA informed us, “will 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.”
“It is the intention of each party,” we’re told, “to limit such
exceptions to the absolute minimum and to exercise no restrictions other
than those reported and mutually agreed upon.”
This certainly leaves wide latitude for mischief as we learned with the Snowden disclosures.
Amid serious charges that “Five Eyes” were illegally seizing
industrial and trade secrets from “3rd party” European partners such as
France and Germany, detailed in the European Parliament’s 2001
ECHELON report,
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.
The Global Surveillance System Today
The echoes of those earlier secret programs reverberate in today’s headlines.
Last month,
The Guardian
reported that the “collection of traffic” cited in UKUSA has been
expanded to GCHQ’s “ability 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.”
Then on July 6,
The Washington Post disclosed that NSA has tapped directly into those fiber optic cables, as AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein described to
Wired Magazine in 2006, and now scoops-up
petabyte scale
communications flowing through the US internet backbone. The agency was
able to accomplish this due to the existence of “an internal corporate
cell of American citizens with government clearances.”
“Among their jobs documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.”
Following up on July 10, the
Post published a new PRISM slide from the 41-slide deck provided to the paper by Edward Snowden.
The slide revealed that “two types of collection” now occur. One is
the PRISM program that collects information from technology firms such
as Google, Apple and Microsoft. The second source is “a separate
category labeled ‘Upstream,’ described as accessing ‘communications on
fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past’.”
Recently,
Der Spiegel,
reported that NSA averred the agency “does NOT target its 2nd party
partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently
illegal for NSA to do.” This is an outright falsehood exposed by former
Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE) officer Mike Frost.
In a 1997
CovertAction Quarterly exposé, Frost recounted how
“CSE 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 ‘favors’ that helped its allies evade domestic laws against
spying.”
“Throughout it all,” Frost insisted, “I was trained and controlled by
US intelligence which told us what to do and how to do it.”
Everyone else,
Der Spiegel reports, is fair game. “For all
other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are
considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not
apply. ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party
foreign partners,’ the NSA boasts in an internal presentation.”
It should also be clear that targeting isn’t strictly limited to the
governments and economic institutions of “3rd party foreign partners,”
but extends to the private communications of their citizens.
Der Spiegel,
citing documents supplied by Snowden, reported that the agency
“gathered metadata from some 15 million telephone conversations and 10
million Internet datasets.” The newsmagazine noted that “the Americans
are collecting from up to half a billion communications a month in
Germany,” describing the surveillance as “a complete structural
acquisition of data.”
Despite hypocritical protests by European governments, on the
contrary, Snowden disclosed that those “3rd party” partners are joined
at the hip with their “Five Eyes” cousins.
In a recent interview with
Der Spiegel, Snowden was asked if “German authorities or German politicians [are] involved in the NSA surveillance system?”
“Yes, of course. We’re in bed together with the Germans the same as
with most other Western countries. For example, we tip them off when
someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example,
have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker’s girlfriend in a
totally unrelated third country–and they hand them over to us. They
don’t ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate
their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously
they’re violating global privacy.”
Disclosing new information on how UKUSA functions today, Snowden told
the German newsmagazine: “In some cases, the so-called Five Eye
Partners go beyond what NSA itself does. For instance, the UK’s General
[sic] Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has a system called TEMPORA.”
“TEMPORA,” the whistleblower averred, “is the signals intelligence
community’s first ‘full-take’ Internet buffer that doesn’t care about
content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act.
It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive
investigation without missing a single bit.”
“Right now,” Snowden said, “the buffer can hold three days of
traffic, but that’s being improved. Three days may not sound like much,
but remember that that’s not metadata. ‘Full-take’ means it doesn’t miss
anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit’s capacity. If you
send a single ICMP packet and it routes through the UK, we get it. If
you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to
serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter’s medical records
get processed at a London call center . . . well, you get the idea.”
We do; and thanks to Edward Snowden we now know that everyone is a target.
Posts
With a combined mileage of 52.8 U.S. mpg and an even higher highway mpg,
the Urban Cruiser SUV crossover by Toyota, which is a European version
of the Scion XD features front wheel drive for the ultimate mileage and
if you are willing to sacrifice and get the 4 wheel drive version, you
will suffer in life with a combined mileage of 48 mpg. Al Gore is not
happy with this one, so you can forget about it in the U.S.
With a highway mileage of 56 mpg per U.S. gallon, the Nissan Qashqai SUV
crossover would be sure to make any carbon tax junkie shiver with
dread. Fortunately the American version delivers only 26 highway mpg
(22 combined) so the local carbon tax tyrant can rest easy.
I would like to ask HOW ON EARTH the difference could be so huge.
True, the ultimate mileage is compliments of a diesel engine but that
cannot account for such a severe mileage cut. The American version has
got to be intentionally detuned to deliver horrific comparable mileage.
And that is not the end of it, on E85 fuel which is rapidly being
forced on the American people, the mileage drops to an amazingly low
18/23. 
With 78.5 imperial miles per gallon highway, the 1.6 blue motion TDI
Volkswagen Passat wagon is definitely forbidden in America, where in the
smaller American gallons it would deliver a carbon tax blood curdling
65.4 highway mpg. I never laughed at the 70 mpg carburetor even as a
kid. How would that do you on vacation? And even city fuel mileage
comes in at over 50 miles per U.S. gallon. Ever see National Lampoons
vacation? The car is THAT big. They are flat out banned in America,
and if you manage to get one into the states, you will be allowed 30
days to leave with it or it will be impounded and crushed. I looked
into this topic, and when it comes to cars like this they really are
banned even if purchased elsewhere and really will get taken by the
government if you do not get them out of the country on time. Take a
look at what
This
is the 261 MPG volkswagen I mentioned a few months ago. Yeah, that
station wagon delivering 65 U.S. MPG looks pretty good for an American
family, but 261 mpg is pretty tempting. Perhaps I'd spring for it, and
certainly if I managed to get one into Mexico it would not get crushed.
But don't even think about approaching the U.S. border with this one,
if 65 MPG from a large station wagon will get your car taken away by the
FED, this bad boy would land you in prison.
It ended up getting ridiculed for
I now feel stupid about even mentioning that 
