Since 1998, much has been written and spoken about the so-called Echelon system of international communications surveillance. Most of what has been written has been denied or ignored by US and European authorities. But much of what has been written has also been exaggerated or wrong. Amongst a sea of denials, obfuscations and errors, confusion has reigned. This review by Duncan Campbell, author of the European Parliament's 1999 "Interception Capabilities 2000" report 1 , is intended to help clear up the confusion, to say what Echelon is (and isn't), where it came from and what it does. Echelon, or systems like it, will be with us a long time to come.

Echelon is a system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and process international communications passing via communications satellites. It is one part of a global surveillance systems that is now over 50 years old. Other parts of the same system intercept messages from the Internet, from undersea cables, from radio transmissions, from secret equipment installed inside embassies, or use orbiting satellites to monitor signals anywhere on the earth's surface. The system includes stations run by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to those operated by the United States. Although some Australian and British stations do the same job as America's Echelon sites, they are not necessarily called "Echelon" stations. But they all form part of the same integrated global network using the same equipment and methods to extract information and intelligence illicitly from millions of messages every day, all over the world.

The first reports about Echelon in Europe 2 credited it with the capacity to intercept "within Europe, all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications". This has proven to be erroneous; neither Echelon nor the signals intelligence ("sigint") system of which it is part can do this. Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognize the content of every speech message or telephone call. But the American and British-run network can, with sister stations, access and process most of the worlds satellite communications, automatically analyzing and relaying it to customers who may be continents away.

The world's most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity. Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.

During the 20^th century, governments realized the importance of effective secret codes. But they were often far from successful. During the Second World War, huge allied code-breaking establishments in Britain and America analyzed and read hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese signals. What they did and how they did it remained a closely-guarded secret for decades afterwards. In the intervening period, the US and British sigint agencies, NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) constructed their worldwide listening network.

The system was established under a secret 1947 "UKUSA Agreement," which brought together the British and American systems, personnel and stations. To this was soon joined the networks of three British commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Later, other countries including Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey signed secret sigint agreements with the United States and became "third parties" participants in the UKUSA network.

Besides integrating their stations, each country appoints senior officials to work as liaison staff at the others' headquarters. The United States operates a Special US Liaison Office (SUSLO) in London and Cheltenham, while a SUKLO official from GCHQ has his own suite of offices inside NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, between Washington and Baltimore.

Under the UKUSA agreement, the five main English-speaking countries took responsibility for overseeing surveillance in different parts of the globe 3 . Britain's zone included Africa and Europe, east to the Ural Mountains of the former USSR; Canada covered northern latitudes and polar regions; Australia covered Oceania. The agreement prescribed common procedures, targets, equipment and methods that the sigint agencies would use. Among them were international regulations for sigint security 4 , which required that before anyone was admitted to knowledge of the arrangements for obtaining and handling sigint, they must first undertake a lifelong commitment to secrecy. Every individual joining a UKUSA sigint organization must be "indoctrinated" and, often "re-indoctrinated" each time they are admitted to knowledge of a specific project. They are told only what they "need to know", and that the need for total secrecy about their work "never ceases".

Everything produced in the sigint organizations is marked by hundreds of special code-words that "compartmentalize" knowledge of intercepted communications and the systems used to intercept them. The basic level, which is effectively a higher classification than "Top Secret" is "Top Secret Umbra". More highly classified documents are identified as "Umbra Gamma"; other code-words can be added to restrict circulation still further. Less sensitive information, such as analyses of telecommunications traffic, may be classified "Secret Spoke".

The scale and significance of the global surveillance system has been transformed since 1980. The arrival of low cost wideband international communications has created a wired world. But few people are aware that the first global wide area network (WAN) was not the internet, but the international network connecting sigint stations and processing centers. The network is connected over transoceanic cables and space links. Most of the capacity of the American and British military communications satellites, Milstar and Skynet, is devoted to relaying intelligence information. It was not until the mid 1990s that the public internet became larger than the secret internet that connects surveillance stations. Britain's sigint agency GCHQ now openly boasts on its web site [http://www.gchq.gov.uk] that it helps operate "one of the largest WANs [Wide Area Networks} in the world" and that "all GCHQ systems are linked together on the largest LAN in Europe ... connected to other sites around the world". The same pages also claim that "the immense size and sheer power of GCHQ's supercomputing architecture is difficult to imagine".

The UKUSA alliance's wide area network is engineered according to the same principles as the internet 5 , and provides access from all field interception stations to and from NSA's central computer system, known as Platform. Other parts of the system are known as Embroidery, Tideway and Oceanfront. The intelligence news network is Newsdealer. A TV conference system, highly encrypted like every other part of the network, is called Gigster. They are supported by applications known as Preppy and Droopy. NSA's e-mail system looks and feels like everybody else's e-mail, but is completely separate from the public network. Messages addressed to its secret internal internet address, which is simply "nsa", will not get through.

The delivery of NSA intelligence also now looks and feels like using the internet. Authorized users with appropriate permissions to access "Special Compartmented Intelligence" 6 use standard web browsers to look at the output of NSA's Operations Department from afar. The system, known as "Intelink", is run from the NSA's Fort Meade HQ. Completed in 1996, Intelink connects 13 different US intelligence agencies and some allied agencies with the aim of providing instant access to all types of intelligence information. Just like logging onto the world wide web, intelligence analysts and military personnel can view an atlas on Intelink's home page, and then click on any country they choose in order to access intelligence reports, video clips, satellite photos, databases and status reports.7

In the early post war years, and for the next quarter century, there was little sign of this automation or sophistication. In those years, most of the world's long distance communications - civil, military or diplomatic - passed by high frequency radio. NSA and its collaborators operated hundreds of remote interception sites, both surrounding the Soviet Union and China and scattered around the world. Inside windowless buildings, teams of intercept operators passed long shifts listening into silence, interspersed with sudden periods of frenetic activity. For the listening bases on the front line of the cold war, monitoring military radio messages during the cold war brought considerable stress. Operators at such bases often recall colleagues breaking down under the tension, perhaps fleeing into closets after believing that they had just intercepted a message marking the beginning of global thermonuclear war.

The Second World War left Britain's agency GCHQ with an extensive network of sigint outposts. Many were fixed in Britain, while others were scattered around the then Empire. From stations including Bermuda, Ascension, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Iraq, Singapore, and Hong Kong, radio operators tracked Soviet and, soon, Chinese political and military developments. These stations complemented a US network which by 1960 included thousands of continuously operated interception positions. The other members of the UKUSA %rating along the b3Cstrong>alliance, Australia, Canada and New Zealand contributed stations in the South Pacific and arctic regions.

After the signing of the UKUSA pact, a new chain of stations began opeoundaries of the western sphere of influence, monitoring the signals of Soviet ground and air forces. British sigint outposts were established in Germany and, secretly in Austria and Iran. US listening posts were set up in central and southern Germany and later in Turkey, Italy and Spain. reflecting them off the surface of the moon.

By the mid 1960s, many of these bases featured gigantic antenna systems that could monitor every HF (High FrequencyOne major US sigint base - Kagnew Station at Asmara in Eritrea - was taken over from the British in 1941 and grew to beco/em>) radio message, from all angles, while simultaneously obtaining bearings that could enable the position of a transmitter to be located. Both the US Navy and the US Air Force employed global networks of this kind. The US Air Force installed 500 meter wide arrays known as FLR-9 at sites including Chicksands, England, San Vito dei Normanni in Italy, Karamursel in Turkey, the Philippines, and at Misawa, Japan. Codenamed "Iron Horse", the first FLR-9 stations came into operation in 1964. The US Navy established similar bases in the US and at Rota, Spain, Bremerhaven, Germany, Edzell, Scotland, Guam, and later in Puerto Rico, targeted on Cuba.

When the United States went to war in Vietnam, Australian and New Zealand operators in Singapore, Australia and elsewhere worked directly in support of the war. Britain; as a neutral country was not supposed to be involved. In practice, however British operators at the GCHQ intercept station no UKC201 at Little Sai Wan, Hong Kong monitored and reported on the North Vietnamese air defense networks while US B52 bombers attacked Hanoi and other North Vietnamese targets.

Since the end of the cold war, the history of some cold war signals intelligence operations have been declassified. At the US National Cryptologic Museum, run by NSA at its headquarters, the agency now openly acknowledges many of its cold war listening operations. It also describes the controversial use of ships and aircraft to penetrate or provoke military defenses in operations that cost the lives of more than 100 of its staff. But another longstanding aspect of sigint operations remain unacknowledged. During the second world war as well as in the cold war and since, British and US intelligence agencies monitored the signals and broke the codes of allies and friends, as well as of civilians and commercial communications around the world. The diplomatic communications of every country were and are attacked.

The stations and methods were the same as for military targets. Within the intelligence agencies, the civilian target was known as "ILC". ILC stood for "International Leased Carrier", and referred to the private companies or telecommunications administrations operating or administrating long range undersea cables or radio stations. Some ILC circuits were rented to governments or large companies as permanent links. The majority were used for public telegraph, telex or telephone services.

Many details of the operation of the English-speaking sigint axis were revealed by two NSA defectors at a press conference held in Moscow on 6 September 1960. There, two NSA analysts, Bernon Mitchell and William Martin, told the world what NSA was doing:

We know from working at NSA [that] the United States reads the secret communications of more than forty nations, including its own allies ... NSA keeps in operation more than 2000 manual intercept positions ... Both enciphered and plain text communications are monitored from almost every nation in the world, including the nations on whose soil the intercept bases are located. New York Times, 7 September 1960.

The revelations were reported in full in the US, but their impact was soon buried by security recriminations and accusations. Martin and Mitchell revealed that NSA's operations division included two key groups. One group covered the Soviet Union and its allies. The second analysis division was known as ALLO, standing for "all other [countries]". This part of NSA's production organization was later renamed ROW, starting for "Rest of the World".

Thus, in 1965, while intercept operators at the NSA's Chicksands station in England focused on the radio messages of Warsaw Pact air forces, their colleagues 200 kilometers north at Kirknewton, Scotland were covering "ILC" traffic, including commercially run radio links between major European cities. These networks could carry anything from birthday telegrams to detailed economic or commercial information exchanged by companies, to encrypted diplomatic messages. In the intercept rooms, machines tuned to transmission channels continuously spewed out 8-ply paper to be read and marked up by intelligence analysts. Around the world, thousands of analysts worked on these mostly unencrypted communications using NSA 'watch lists' - weekly key word lists of people, companies, commodities of interest for the NSA watchers to single out from 'clear' traffic. Coded messages were passed on immediately. Among the regular names on the watch lists were the leaders of African guerrilla movements who were later to become their countries' leaders. In time, many prominent Americans were added to the list. The international communications of the actress Jane Fonda, Dr Benjamin Spock and hundreds of others were put under surveillance because of their opposition to the war in Vietnam. Back power leader Eldridge Cleaver and his colleagues were included because of their civil rights activities in the US.

A short distance to the north at Cupar, Scotland, another intercept station was operated by the British Post Office, and masqueraded as a long distance radio station. In fact, it was another GCHQ interception site, which collected European countries' communications, instead of sending them.

In time, these operations were integrated. In 1976, NSA set up a special new civilian unit at its Chicksands base to carry out diplomatic and civilian interception. The unit, called "DODJOCC" (Department of Defense Joint Operations Centre Chicksands) was targeted on non-US Diplomatic Communications, known as NDC. One specific target, known as FRD, stood for French diplomatic traffic. Italian diplomatic signals, known similarly as ITD, were collected and broken by NSA's counterpart agency GCHQ, at its Cheltenham centre.

Entering Chicksands' Building 600 through double security fences and a turnstile where green and purple clearance badges were checked, the visitor would first encounter a sigint in-joke - a copy of the International Telecommunications Convention pasted up on the wall. Article 22 of the Convention, which both the United Kingdom and the United States have ratified, promises that member states,

"agree to take all possible measures, compatible with the system of telecommunication used, with a view to ensuring the secrecy of international correspondence".

Besides intercepting ILC communications at radio stations, NSA, GCHQ and their counterparts also collected printed copies of all international telegrams from public and commercial operators in London, New York and other centres. They were then taken to sigint analysts and processed in the same way as foreign telegrams snatched from the air at sites like Chicksands and Kirknewton. Britain had done this since 1920, and the United States since 1945. The joint programme was known as Operation Shamrock, and continued until it was exposed by US Congressional intelligence investigations in the wake of the Watergate affair.

Lanjut: On 8 August 1975, NSA Director Lt General Lew Allen

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