Sejarah, Struktur, Fungsi dan Sistem Pengawasan Global yang dikenal dengan nama Echelon
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(Inside Echelon(The History, Structure and Function of the Global Surveillance System Known as Echelon)
by Duncan Campbell
Powerful though Dictionary methods and keyword search engines may be, however, they and their giant associated intelligence databases may soon be replaced by "topic analysis", a more powerful and intuitive technique, and one that NSA is developing strongly. Topic analysis enables Comint customers to ask their computers to "find me documents about subject X". X might be "Shakespeare in love" or "Arms to Iran".
In a standard US test used to evaluate topic analysis systems, one task the analysis program is given is to find information about "Airbus subsidies". The traditional approach involves supplying the computer with the key terms, other relevant data, and synonyms. In this example, the designations A-300 or A-320 might be synonymous with "Airbus". The disadvantage of this approach is that it may find irrelevant intelligence (for example, reports about export subsidies to goods flown on an Airbus) and miss relevant material (for example a financial analysis of a company in the consortium which does not mention the Airbus product by name). Topic analysis overcomes this and is better matched to human intelligence.
In 1991, a British television programme reported on the operations of one Dictionary computer at GCHQ’s London station in Palmer Street, Westminster (station UKC1000). The programme quoted GCHQ employees, who spoke off the record:
"Up on the fourth floor there, [GCHQ] has hired a group of carefully vetted British Telecom people. [Quoting the ex-GCHQ official:] 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."
Among the targets of this station were politicians, diplomats, businessmen, trades union leaders, non-government organizations like Amnesty International, and even the hierarchy of the Catholic church.
The Echelon system appears to have been in existence since the early 1970s, and to have gone through extensive evolution and development. The need for efficient processing systems to replace the human operators who performed watch list scans was first foreseen in the late 1960s, when NSA and GCHQ were planning the first large satellite interception sites. The first such station was built at Morwenstow, Cornwall, and utilized two large dish antennae to intercept communications crossing the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The second was built at Yakima, in the northwestern US state of lt;strong>Washington. Yakima intercepted satellite communications over the Pacific Ocean.
Also in the early 1970s, NSA and CIA discovered that sigint collection from space was far more effective and productive than had been foreseen, resulting in vast accumulations of magnetic tapes that quickly outstripped the available supply of Soviet linguists and analysts. By the end of the 1970s, one of the main sites processing communications intercepted from space was Menwith Hill, in central England. A document prepared there in 1981 12 identifies intelligence databases used at Menwith Hill as "Echelon 2". This suggests that the Echelon network was already into its second generation by 1981.
By the mid 1980s, communications handled by Dictionary computers around the world were heavily sifted, with a wide variety of specifications available for non-verbal traffic. Extensive further automation was planned in the mid 1980s under two top secret NSA Projects, P-377 and P-415. The implementation of these projects completed the automation of the "watch list" activity of previous decades. Computers replaced the analysts who compared reams of paper intercepts to names and topics on the watch list. In the late 1980s, staff from sigint agencies from countries including the UK, New Zealand and China attended training courses on the new Echelon computer systems.
Project P-415 made heavy use of NSA and GCHQ’s global internet to enable remote intelligence customers to task computers at each collection site, and then receive the results automatically. Selected incoming messages were compared to forwarding criteria held on the Dictionary. If a match was found, the raw intelligence was forwarded automatically to the designated recipients. According to New Zealand author Nicky Hager, 13 Dictionary computers are tasked with many thousands of different collection requirements, described as "numbers" (four digit codes).
Details of project P-415 and the plans for the massive global expansion of the Echelon system were revealed in 1988 by Margaret "Peg" Newsham. Ms Newsham a former computer systems manager, worked on classified projects for NSA contractors until the mid 1980s. From August 1978 onwards, she worked at the NSA’s Menwith Hill Station as a software coordinator. In this capacity, she helped managed a number of Sigint computer databases, including "Echelon 2". She and others also helped establish "Silkworth", a system for processing information relayed from signals intelligence satellites called Chalet, Vortex and Mercury. Her revelations led to the first ever report about Echelon, published in 1988. 14
In Sunnyvale, California, Peg Newsham worked for Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation. In that capacity, she worked on plans for the massive expansion of the Echelon network, a project identified internally as P-415. During her employment by Lockheed, she also become concerned about corruption, fraud and abuse within the organizations planning and operating electronic surveillance systems. She reported her concerns to the US Congress House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence early in 1988. She also told them how she had witnessed the interception of a telephone call made by a US Senator, Strom Thurmond, while working at Menwith Hill.
The full details of Echelon would probably never have come to serious public attention but for 6 further years of research by New Zealand writer Nicky Hager, who assiduously investigated the new Echelon station that started operating at Waihopai on the South Island of New Zealand in 1989. His 1996 book Secret Power 15 is based on extensive interviews with and help from members of the New Zealand signals intelligence organization. It remains the best informed and most detailed account of how Echelon works.
Early in 2000, information and documents leaked to a US researcher16 provided many details of how Echelon was developed for use worldwide. Under a 1982 NSA plan assigned to Lockheed Space and Missiles Systems, engineers and scientists worked on Project P-377 - also known as CARBOY II. This project called for the development of a standard kit of "ADPE" (automated data processing equipment) parts for equipping Echelon sites. The "commonality of automated data processing equipment (ADPE) in the Echelon system" included the following elements:
Local management subsystemRemote management subsystem
Radio frequency distribution
Communications handling subsystem
Telegraphy message processing subsystem
Frequency division multiplex telegraphy processing subsystem
Time division multiplex telegraphy processing subsystem
Voice processing subsystem
Voice collection module
Facsimile processing subsystem
[Voice] Tape Production Facility
The CARBOY II project also called for software systems to load and update the Dictionary databases. At this time, the hardware for the Dictionary processing subsystem was based on a cluster of DEC VAX mini-computers, together with special purpose units for processing and separating different types of satellite communications.
In 1998 and 1999, the intelligence specialist Dr Jeff Richelson of the National Security Archive 17 Washington, DC used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a series of modern official US Navy and Air Force documents which have confirmed the continued existence, scale and expansion of the Echelon system. The documents from the US Air Force and US Navy identify Echelon units at four sites and suggest that a fifth site also collects information from communications satellites as part of the Echelon system.
One of the sites is Sugar Grove, West Virgina US, about 250 miles south-west of Washington in a remote area of the Shenandoah Mountains. It is operated by the US Naval Security Group and the US Air Force Intelligence Agency. An upgraded sigint system called Timberline II was installed at Sugar Grove in the summer of 1990. At the same time, according to official US documents, an "Echelon training department" was established. With training complete, the task of the station in 1991 became "to maintain and operate an ECHELON site".18
The US Air Force has publicly identified the intelligence activity at Sugar Grove as "to direct satellite communications equipment [in support of] consumers of COMSAT information ... this is achieved by providing a trained cadre of collection system operators, analysts and managers". The 1998-99 USAF Air Intelligence Agency Almanac described the mission of the Sugar Grove unit as providing "enhanced intelligence support to air force operational commanders and other consumv>ers of COMSAT information." 19 In 1990, satellite photographs showed that there were 4 satellite antennae at Sugar Grove. By November 1998, ground inspection revealed that this had expanded to nine.
%0y the US Air Force identifies the US Naval Security Group Station at Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico as a COMSAT interception site. Its mission is "to D
Further information published bbecome the premier satellite communications processing and analysis field station". These and further documents concerning Echelon and COMSAT interception stations at Yakima, Sabana Seco (Puerto Rico), Misawa (Japan) and Guam have been published on the web.20
From 1984 onwards, Australia, Canada and New Zealand joined the US and the UK in operating Comsat (communications satellite) interception stations. Australia’s site at Kojarena, Geraldton near Perth in western Australia includes four interception dishes. The station’s top targets include Japanese diplomatic and commercial messages, communications of all types from and within North Korea, and data on Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons developments. A second Australian satcom intercept site, at Shoal Bay in the Northern Territories, mainly targets Australia’s northern neighbour, Indonesia. Australian sources say however that Shoal Bay is not part of the Echelon system, as Australia is unwilling to allow the US and Britain to obtain raw intercepts directly.
The New Zealand site, Waihopai now has two dishes targeted on Intelsat satellites covering the south Pacific. In 1996, shortly after "Secret Power" was published, a New Zealand TV station obtained images of the inside of the station’s operations centre. The pictures were obtained clandestinely by filming through partially curtained windows at night. The TV reporter was able to film close-ups of technical manuals held in the control centre. These were Intelsat technical manuals, providing confirmation that the station targeted these satellites. Strikingly, the station was seen to be virtually empty, operating fully automatically.
Before the introduction of Echelon, different countries and different stations knew what was being intercepted and to whom it was being sent. Now, all but a fraction of the messages selected by Dictionary computers at remote sites may be forwarded to overseas customers, normally NSA, without any local knowledge of the intelligence obtained.
Information from the Echelon network and other parts of the global surveillance system is used by the US and its allies for diplomatic, military and commercial purposes. In the post cold war years, the staff levels at both NSA and GCHQ have contracted, and many overseas listening posts have been closed or replaced by Remote Operations Facilities, controlled from a handful of major field stations. Although routinely denied, commercial and economic intelligence [http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/6662/1.html] is now a major target of international sigint activity. Under a 1993 policy colloquially known as "levelling the playing field", the United States government under President Clinton established new trade and economic committees and told the NSA and CIA to act in support of US businesses in seeking contracts abroad. In the UK, GCHQ’s enabling legislation from 1994 openly identifies one of its purposes as to promote "the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands".
Massive new storage and processing systems are being constructed to provide on-line processing of the internet and new international communications networks. By the early 1990s, both GCHQ and NSA employed "near line" storage systems capable of holding more than a terabyte of data 21 . In the near future, they are likely to deploy systems one thousand times larger. Key word spotting in the vast volumes of intercepted daily written communications - telex, e-mail, and data - is a routine task. "Word spotting" in spoken communications is not an effective tool, but individual speaker recognition techniques have been in use for up to 10 years. New methods which have been developed during the 1990s will become available to recognize the "topics" of phone calls, and may allow NSA and its collaborators to automate the processing of the content of telephone messages - a goal that has eluded them for 30 years.
Under the rubric of "information warfare", the sigint agencies also hope to overcome the ever more extensive use of encryption by direct interference with and attacks on targeted computers. These methods remain controversial, but include information stealing viruses, software audio, video, and data bugs, and pre-emptive tampering with software or hardware ("trapdoors").
In the information age, we need to re-learn a lesson now a century old. Despite the sophistication of 21st century technology, today’s e-mails are as open to the eyes of snoopers and intruders as were the first crude radio telegraph messages. Part of the reason for this is that, over many decades, NSA and its allies worked determinedly to limit and prevent the privacy of international telecommunications. Their goal was to keep communications unencrypted and, thus, open to easy access and processing by systems like Echelon. They knew that privacy and security, then as a century ago, lay in secret codes or encryption. Until such protections become effective and ubiquitous, Echelon or systems like it, will remain with us.
Sumber: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/echelon01.htm
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