From EE Times October 21, 1996 Issue: 924 Section: Design -- Computers & Communications Required reading By Loring Wirbel What was I thinking? It's been more than six months since I wasted column space with a good intelligence community rant. It's not as though nothing much has been happening. The New York Times and other media outlets have laid out the Cellular Telephone Industry Association's significant complaints against the Digital Telephony Act, portions of which will allow the FBI and National Security Agency to determine location of roaming telephone or IP addresses in a network. And we here at EE Times have been filling you in on the NSA's questionable involvement in an Internet backbone program called Project Monet. Truth be told, it's hard to keep sending up warning flares about the vast expansion of intelligence agencies' reach in an election year as hopeless as this one. President Clinton, of course, called for "wiretaps, many more wiretaps" during his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, and tried to sneak in a quadrupling of the Digital Telephony Act tapping slush fund during the waning days of Congress's budget negotiations. Everyone from Wired to The Progressive is now suggesting that President Nixon actually was more liberal than Clinton along the civil-liberties axis. And Bob Dole? The Republican Party quashed the efforts by budget hawks like John Kasich to carefully analyze NSA and National Reconnaissance Office budgets. The Repub gospel now is to give the Defense Department everything it asks for, and then some. Cryptography buffs have been waiting for relief in the form of the third edition of James Bamford's classic The Puzzle Palace, on the workings of the NSA. The new edition is supposed to contain material from co-author Wayne Madsen detailing NSA presence at Internet switching centers, and cipherpunks have been disappointed that the book didn't meet its June release date. Rumor has it that squabbles between the two authors and the publisher may push the book out well into 1997. But fear not, if you're willing to go chasing afar for good fireside reading! Researcher Nicky Hager in New Zealand has just published an amazing tome, Secret Power, that might do more damage to the NSA than Bamford's work. Hager is a bold activist, working with producers of the New Zealand version of "20/20" to go inside the secret signals base at Waihopai and take unprecedented video footage of the inside of the radomes, which are alleged to spy on international civilian Intelsat traffic. Hager isn't just a crank, however. His work on New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau is incredibly well-researched. Respected defense analyst Jeff Richelson wrote the foreword and British journalist Duncan Campbell claims in the Observer that the book has created quite a stir inside NSA headquarters. The most damning information details a global computer network, run by NSA on behalf of all the U.K./U.S. Treaty allies, called the Echelon/ Dictionary network. Echelon allows NSA to snare traffic intercepted by any ally into a unified database, without the ally having the slightest idea of what NSA is taking. And Hager is certain that civilian telex and Internet traffic is a prime target of the system. Don't look for a U.S. distributor for Secret Power-everyone here is afraid to touch it. His publisher doesn't even list a phone or e-mail. But if we all write to Craig Potton Publishers, Box 555, Nelson, New Zealand, perhaps we can free up enough copies of the book to scare the U.S. signal-intelligence community into having a minimum modicum of respect for civil liberties. But then again, I doubt it.