This excellent Boulder Weekly article puts the ‘Nicky Hagar on Echelon’ excerpts into context, and shows how the programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 are related to the original Echelon program.
(bring up the article in a new window)
In 1996, New Zealand based journalist Nicky Hager shocked the world with his exposé on a global surveillance system known as ECHELON. Hager wrote a book about his findings, which were controversial enough that elements within the British government wanted to ban the book from being sold in the U.K. In the U.S., a summary of Hager’s ECHELON revelations was published in the award-winning Covert Action Quarterly in its winter 1996/1997 edition. That same story went on to be named as one of Project Censored’s 25 most important underreported stories of the year in 1998.
Hager’s investigation took him years to complete and ultimately allowed him to interview more than 50 people who had worked in the intelligence community under a secret program known as the UKUSA agreement. According to Hager, the UKUSA agreement was created in 1948 and was a secret Cold War era intelligence alliance between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The organization spied on every country around the world that it considered a threat.
The main players in the organization were the NSA; the UK’s spy agency equivalent, the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ); New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB); and the intelligence services of Canada and Australia.
In the 1980s, the NSA introduced a new program to the UKUSA agreement that had amazing capabilities. The program was called ECHELON.
In Covert Action Quarterly, Hager described the ECHELON system as being ripe for abuse because it operated virtually without any restraints, a sobering assessment, considering Hager’s description of the system’s capabilities.
Hager discovered that ECHELON was intercepting email, faxes, telex messages and telephone calls. In a later update to his article he noted that the NSA had achieved an “ominous capability for large-scale automated telephone monitoring.”
What made ECHELON so effective at gathering mass amounts of indiscriminate data was its ability to pull in virtually every form of communication that moved through the world’s global network of communications satellites and microwave towers.
ECHELON had the perfect system — until technology once again changed. By 2000, fewer and fewer of the world’s messages the NSA wanted to collect and store (much as it claims to be doing today in the programs leaked by Snowden) were moving through the air via satellites. By early 2000, it was estimated that only about 5 percent of Europe’s phone and email messages were being carried by satellite, and much of the developed world used the old technology even less than that. And the problem for the NSA’s ECHELON program would only get worse. By 2006, 98 percent of all international messages — phone, email or others — were traveling underground by fiber optics. This was true of nearly all of the phone and email messages in the U.S. as well.
The NSA needed a new system if it was going to continue to eavesdrop and collect data. The following concept, while admittedly speculative, may well explain what was happening in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks.
Technology dictated that as the year 2000 arrived, ECHELON needed a major makeover if it was going to continue to be capable of monitoring most of the world’s communications as it had been doing. In light of this fact, and the timing, it could be that the largest outsourcing project in U.S. history, the 2001 NSA Groundbreaker program, which was launched prior to 9/11, was the agency’s answer to continuing ECHELON surveillance into the new century.
It is clear that the NSA has been collecting massive amounts of indiscriminate information on people, including U.S. citizens, for many years, dating back to before the 9/11 attacks. Does the NSA use its mass collection of data to fight terrorism? No doubt it does. But the question should be, what else does it use its data for, and what was it using it for before terrorism became the perfect rationale or excuse for such activities?
According to Hager’s sources within the system, ECHELON data was used for many purposes, including corporate espionage on the part of the NSA. Hager’s reporting noted that many governments around the world have been frustrated with the U.S. because of what they view as unfair economic use of intelligence data. Hager has cited several specific examples in his writings. In 1995, the Baltimore Sun reported that European aerospace company Airbus lost a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Saudi Arabian government because the NSA leaked information that Airbus had bribed the officials making the decision, so that the U.S. company Boeing would have a better shot at the contract.
So why should Americans trust the NSA to never abuse its power with regards to Snowden’s recently leaked mass surveillance programs on U.S. citizens? The answer is anything but clear, considering that the NSA has been collecting such information on many of us for far longer than it is now admitting, and that is has already abused its powers to spy on nongovernmental organizations and to commit corporate espionage, despite the fact that both of these practices are illegal.
Should we now trust the NSA not to illegally monitor environmental activists or Tea Party adherents or labor organizations? How can we trust an agency or a government that is still trying to claim that it didn’t get into the domestic phone call monitoring game until after 9/11, a claim that simply isn’t supported by the evidence?
The answer is we can’t. We need to get rid of that word “terrorism” that is clogging our ears, so we can hear the truth.