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ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement: [1] Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes. [2] [3] [4]
Created in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, the ECHELON project became formally established in 1971. [5] [6] By the end of the 20th century, it had greatly expanded. [7]
The UKUSA intelligence community was assessed by the European Parliament (EP) in 2000 to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states:
Operated by the United States | |||
---|---|---|---|
Country | Location | Operator(s) | Codename |
![]() | Brasília, Federal District | SCS | |
![]() | Bad Aibling, Bavaria | GARLICK [10] | |
![]() | New Delhi | SCS | |
![]() | Misawa, Tōhoku region | LADYLOVE [13] | |
![]() | Bangkok (?) | LEMONWOOD [14] | |
![]() | Menwith Hill, Harrogate | MOONPENNY [14] | |
![]() | Sugar Grove, West Virginia | TIMBERLINE [17] | |
Yakima, Washington | JACKKNIFE [14] | ||
Sábana Seca, Puerto Rico | CORALINE [14] | ||
Operated Jointly with the United States (2nd party) | |||
Country | Location | Contributor(s) | Codename |
![]() | Geraldton, WA | STELLAR [12] | |
Darwin, NT | SHOAL BAY [12] | ||
![]() | Waihopai Station | IRONSAND [12] | |
![]() | Bude, Cornwall | CARBOY [17] | |
![]() | Ayios Nikolaos Station | SOUNDER [21] | |
![]() | Nairobi | SCAPEL [14] | |
![]() | Seeb, Muscat | SNICK [14] |
Former NSA analyst Perry Fellwock, under the pseudonym Winslow Peck, first blew the whistle on ECHELON to Ramparts in 1972, [22] when he revealed the existence of a global network of listening posts and told of his experiences working there. He also revealed the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel in 1972, the widespread involvement of CIA and NSA personnel in drugs and human smuggling, and CIA operatives leading Nationalist Chinese (Taiwan) commandos in burning villages inside PRC borders. [23]
In 1982, investigative journalist and author James Bamford wrote The Puzzle Palace , an in-depth history of the NSA and its practices, which notably leaked the existence of the eavesdropping operation Project SHAMROCK. Project SHAMROCK ran from 1945 to 1975, after which it evolved into ECHELON. [24] [25]
In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a Lockheed employee under NSA contract, disclosed the ECHELON surveillance system to members of Congress. Newsham told a member of the US Congress that the telephone calls of Strom Thurmond, a Republican US senator, were being collected by the NSA. Congressional investigators determined that "targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start." [26]
Also in 1988, an article titled "Somebody's Listening", written by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman , described the signals intelligence gathering activities of a program code-named "ECHELON". [26] Bamford described the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg. [27]
A detailed description of ECHELON was provided by the New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network . [28] Two years later, Hager's book was cited by the European Parliament in a report titled "An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control" (PE 168.184). [29]
In March 1999, for the first time in history, the Australian government admitted that news reports about the top secret UKUSA Agreement were true. [30] Martin Brady, the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD, now known as Australian Signals Directorate, or ASD) told the Australian broadcasting channel Nine Network that the DSD "does co-operate with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship." [31]
In 2000, James Woolsey, the former Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed that US intelligence uses interception systems and keyword searches to monitor European businesses. [32]
Lawmakers in the United States feared that the ECHELON system could be used to monitor US citizens. [33] According to The New York Times , the ECHELON system has been "shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove." [33] Critics said the ECHELON system emerged from the Cold War as a "Big Brother without a cause". [34]
The program's capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001. [7] In July 2000, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was established by the European parliament to investigate the surveillance network. [36] It was chaired by the Portuguese politician Carlos Coelho, who was in charge of supervising investigations throughout 2000 and 2001.
In May 2001, as the committee finalised its report on the ECHELON system, a delegation travelled to Washington, D.C. to attend meetings with US officials from the following agencies and departments:
All meetings were cancelled by the US government and the committee was forced to end its trip prematurely. [37] According to a BBC correspondent in May 2001, "The US Government still refuses to admit that Echelon even exists." [5]
In July 2001, the Committee released its final report. [38] The EP report concluded that it seemed likely that ECHELON is a method of sorting captured signal traffic, rather than a comprehensive analysis tool. [7] On 5 September 2001, the European parliament voted to accept the report. [39]
The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. [7] The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic), and microwave links. [7]
Two internal NSA newsletters from January 2011 and July 2012, published as part of Edward Snowden's leaks by the website The Intercept on 3 August 2015, for the first time confirmed that NSA used the code word ECHELON and provided some details about the scope of the program: ECHELON was part of an umbrella program with the code name FROSTING, which was established by the NSA in 1966 to collect and process data from communications satellites. FROSTING had two sub-programs: [40]
The European Parliament's Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System stated, "It seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail". [7] The US intelligence community uses many code names (see, for example, CIA cryptonym).
Former NSA employee Margaret Newsham said that she worked on the configuration and installation of software that makes up the ECHELON system while employed at Lockheed Martin, from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California, in the United States, and in Menwith Hill, England, in the UK. [41] At that time, according to Newsham, the code name ECHELON was NSA's term for the computer network itself. Lockheed called it P415. The software programs were called SILKWORTH and SIRE. A satellite named VORTEX intercepted communications. An image available on the internet of a fragment apparently torn from a job description shows Echelon listed along with several other code names. [42] [43]
Britain's The Guardian newspaper summarized the capabilities of the ECHELON system as follows:
A global network of electronic spy stations that can eavesdrop on telephones, faxes and computers. It can even track bank accounts. This information is stored in Echelon computers, which can keep millions of records on individuals. Officially, however, Echelon doesn't exist. [44]
Documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the ECHELON system's collection of satellite data is also referred to as FORNSAT - an abbreviation for "Foreign Satellite Collection". [45] [46]
First revealed by the European Parliament report (p. 54 ff) [7] and confirmed later by the Edward Snowden disclosures the following ground stations presently have, or have had, a role in intercepting transmissions from Satellite and other means of communication: [7]
The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic. [7] During World War II and through the 1950s, high-frequency ("short-wave") radio was widely used for military and diplomatic communication [58] and could be intercepted at great distances. [7] The rise of geostationary communications satellites in the 1960s presented new possibilities for intercepting international communications. [59] In 1964, plans for the establishment of the ECHELON network took off after dozens of countries agreed to establish the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), which would own and operate a global constellation of communications satellites. [30]
In 1966, the first Intelsat satellite was launched into orbit. From 1970 to 1971, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of Britain began to operate a secret signal station at Morwenstow, near Bude in Cornwall, England. The station intercepted satellite communications over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Soon afterwards, the US National Security Agency (NSA) built a second signal station at Yakima, near Seattle, for the interception of satellite communications over the Pacific Ocean. [30] In 1981, GCHQ and the NSA started the construction of the first global wide area network (WAN). Soon after Australia, Canada, and New Zealand joined the ECHELON system. [30] The report to the European Parliament of 2001 states: "If UKUSA states operate listening stations in the relevant regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all telephone, fax, and data traffic transmitted via such satellites." [7]
Most reports on ECHELON focus on satellite interception. Testimony before the European Parliament indicated that separate but similar UKUSA systems are in place to monitor communication through undersea cables, microwave transmissions, and other lines. [60] The report to the European Parliament points out that interception of private communications by foreign intelligence services is not necessarily limited to the US or British foreign intelligence services. [7] The role of satellites in point-to-point voice and data communications has largely been supplanted by fiber optics. In 2006, 99% of the world's long-distance voice and data traffic was carried over optical-fiber. [61] The proportion of international communications accounted for by satellite links is said to have decreased substantially to an amount between 0.4% and 5% in Central Europe. [7] Even in less-developed parts of the world, communications satellites are used largely for point-to-multipoint applications, such as video. [62] Thus, the majority of communications can no longer be intercepted by earth stations; they can only be collected by tapping cables and intercepting line-of-sight microwave signals, which is possible only to a limited extent. [7]
British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager said in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes. [60] Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon [7] [63] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie. [64]
In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the US intelligence agencies. [7]
American author James Bamford provides an alternative view, highlighting that legislation prohibits the use of intercepted communications for commercial purposes, although he does not elaborate on how intercepted communications are used as part of an all-source intelligence process. [65]
In its report, the committee of the European Parliament stated categorically that the Echelon network was being used to intercept not only military communications, but also private and business ones. In its epigraph to the report, the parliamentary committee quoted Juvenal, "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes." ("But who will watch the watchers"). [7] James Bamford, in The Guardian in May 2001, warned that if Echelon were to continue unchecked, it could become a "cyber secret police, without courts, juries, or the right to a defence". [66]
Alleged examples of espionage conducted by the members of the "Five Eyes" include:
The first United States satellite ground station for the ECHELON collection program was built in 1971 at a military firing and training center near Yakima, Washington. The facility, which was codenamed JACKKNIFE, was an investment of ca. 21.3 million dollars and had around 90 people. Satellite traffic was intercepted by a 30-meter single-dish antenna. The station became fully operational on 4 October 1974. It was connected with NSA headquarters at Fort Meade by a 75-baud secure Teletype orderwire channel. [40]
In 1999 the Australian Senate Joint Standing Committee on Treaties was told by Professor Desmond Ball that the Pine Gap facility was used as a ground station for a satellite-based interception network. The satellites were said to be large radio dishes between 20 and 100 meters in diameter in geostationary orbits. The original purpose of the network was to monitor the telemetry from 1970s Soviet weapons, air defence and other radars' capabilities, satellites' ground stations' transmissions and ground-based microwave communications. [78]
In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later claimed that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech. [79] However, later German media reports contradicted this story, as it was revealed that the American patent in question was actually filed three years before the alleged wiretapping was said to have taken place. [80] As German intelligence services are forbidden from engaging in industrial or economic espionage, German companies have complained that this leaves them defenceless against industrial espionage from the United States or Russia. According to Wolfgang Hoffmann, a former manager at Bayer, German intelligence services know which companies are being targeted by US intelligence agencies, but refuse to inform the companies involved. [81]
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) (National Security Agency) Archived 16 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine "It wasn't until 1971 that the UKUSA allies began ECHELON
The second extract notes that AIA's participation in a classified activity "had been limited to LADYLOVE operations at Misawa AB [Air Base], Japan."
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(help)A map from the wealth of classified documents obtained by Snowden on the so-called "Fornsat" activities of the technical intelligence cooperation program -- informally known as the Five Eyes -- shows that the system of global satellite surveillance remained in operation.
FORNSAT simply means "foreign satellite collection," which refers to NSA tapping into satellites that process data used by other countries.
Both Waihopai and the Tangimoana radio listening post near Palmerston North have been identified as key players in the United States-led Echelon spy programme.
More than 1,000 people are said to have worked here around the clock, every day of the year. They were part of the global ECHELON surveillance network.
The Teufelsberg mission is still shrouded in secrecy, but it's generally agreed that the station was part of the ECHELON network that listened in to the Eastern Bloc.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primarily based at "The Doughnut" in the suburbs of Cheltenham, GCHQ is the responsibility of the country's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, but it is not a part of the Foreign Office and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), is the federal statutory agency in the Australian Government responsible for foreign signals intelligence, support to military operations, cyber warfare, and information security. ASD is part of the Australian Intelligence Community. ASD's role within UKUSA Agreement is to monitor signals intelligence ("SIGINT") in South and East Asia. The ASD also houses the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
Royal Air Force Menwith Hill is a Royal Air Force station near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, which provides communications and intelligence support services to the United Kingdom and the United States. The site contains an extensive satellite ground station and is a communications intercept and missile warning site. It has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world.
The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as the Five Eyes. In classification markings this is abbreviated as FVEY, with the individual countries being abbreviated as AUS, CAN, NZL, GBR, and USA, respectively.
A radio listening station is a facility used for military reconnaissance, especially telecommunications reconnaissance by "intercepting" radio transmitter communications. In contrast to the original eavesdropping on an acoustic speech conversation, radio eavesdropping stations are used to eavesdrop on the information transmitted wirelessly using radio technology. For this purpose, highly sensitive radio receivers and suitable receiving antennas are used.
GCHQ Bude, also known as GCHQ Composite Signals Organisation Station Morwenstow, abbreviated to GCHQ CSO Morwenstow, is a UK Government satellite ground station and eavesdropping centre located on the north Cornwall coast at Cleave Camp, between the small villages of Morwenstow and Coombe. It is operated by the British signals intelligence service, officially known as the Government Communications Headquarters, commonly abbreviated GCHQ. It is located on part of the site of the former World War II airfield, RAF Cleave.
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are party to the multilateral UK-USA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence. Informally, "Five Eyes" can refer to the group of intelligence agencies of these countries. The term "Five Eyes" originated as shorthand for a "AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY" (AUSCANNZUKUS) releasability caveat.
Signals intelligence by alliances, nations and industries comprises signals intelligence (SIGINT) gathering activities by national and non-national entities; these entities are commonly responsible for communications security (COMSEC) as well.
XKeyscore is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.
Perry Fellwock is a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst and whistleblower who revealed the existence of the NSA and its worldwide covert surveillance network in an interview, using the pseudonym Winslow Peck, with Ramparts in 1971. At the time that Fellwock blew the whistle on ECHELON, the NSA was a nearly unknown organization and among the most secretive of the US intelligence agencies. Fellwock revealed that it had a significantly larger budget than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Fellwock was motivated by Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers. Today, Fellwock has been acknowledged as the first NSA whistleblower.
The practice of mass surveillance in the United States dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through the United States. After the First and Second World Wars, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of the United States' rival at the time, the Soviet Union. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.
During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s, when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, whose close cooperation eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON", in 1971.
Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
STATEROOM is the code name of a highly secretive signals intelligence collection program involving the interception of international radio, telecommunications and Internet traffic. It is operated out of the diplomatic missions of the signatories to the UKUSA Agreement and the members of the ECHELON network including Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
Global surveillance refers to the practice of globalized mass surveillance on entire populations across national borders. Although its existence was first revealed in the 1970s and led legislators to attempt to curb domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), it did not receive sustained public attention until the existence of ECHELON was revealed in the 1980s and confirmed in the 1990s. In 2013 it gained substantial worldwide media attention due to the global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden.
The Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was a Committee of the European Parliament that was set up in 2000 to investigate the global surveillance network ECHELON. The committee issued its final report in 2001.
This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in 2013. The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from the former American National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.