CDR: ECHELON under European criminal indictment!

[George at Orwellian.Org]

AH HA HA HA HA

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/nb/nb4.htm
10/17/00- Updated 05:39 PM ET

Criminal charges filed against 'Echelon'

From: Newsbytes News Network

By Steve Gold

A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Berlin has filed criminal 
complaints in Germany against the international Echelon computer 
surveillance network.

Unlike the recently vilified Carnivore Internet monitoring system 
installed on most U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers, the 
Echelon system is shrouded in secrecy.

Thought to have been created in the 1940s by the U.S. and UK 
governments, the system is now known to monitor most voice and data 
traffic circulating in most West countries.

Reports suggest that it can legally do this by side-stepping national 
anti-surveillance legislation by requiring, for example, the U.S. 
government's National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor UK comms traffic, 
and, similarly, using the UK's security agencies to monitor U.S. comms 
traffic.

In her complaint, Ilka Schrvder, a Green Party Member of the European 
Parliament (MEP) cited "unknown suspects especially from the U.S. And 
Great Britain, as well as possibly the German Federal Government, for 
operating and tolerating the Echelon network."

According to German media reports, Schrvder filed the complaints Monday 
with the German Federal chief public prosecutor, as well as public 
prosecutors' offices in Berlin and, perhaps significantly, in 
Traunstein. The Traunstein office covers the Bavarian town of Bad 
Aibling, where a monitoring station is generally reported as being 
operated by the NSA.

Schrvder, who serves as a substitute member of the European Parliament 
committee which is investigating Echelon, referred to a report 
commissioned by the committee, which confirmed that Echelon is 
monitoring private and business telephone calls, faxes, and e-mail 
messages in Europe, including in Germany.

This is not the first time that Echelon has come into the legal firing 
line. Back in February, reports suggested that the French government 
was considering lawsuits on privacy grounds, alleging that the 
international Echelon super-spy network monitored French companies, 
diplomats and ministers.

The Echelon network has been talked about in security circles for 
several years, but its existence was most recently confirmed in November 
1999, when the BBC reported that an Australian government official 
had confirmed the network actually existed.

At the time, the BBC reported that Bill Blick, Australia's inspector 
general of intelligence, confirmed that his country's Defence Signals 
Directorate forms part of the Echelon network.

"As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications 
floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as the DSD collect 
those communications in the interests of their national security," 
Blick told the BBC.

Asked if information is then passed on to the U.S. or the UK, Blick 
replied that "in certain circumstances" it was.

The BBC report followed hard on the heels of an attempt on Oct. 22, 
1999, to swamp the Echelon network with subversive e-mails.

In that incident, Internet users from around the world launched an 
e- mail campaign against the NSA in an attempt to flood the agency's 
alleged computer surveillance system.

Reports of the time suggested that the protesters were upset at NSA's 
apparent scanning of e-mails in an attempt to identify potential 
terrorists. In the United States, a recent CBS-TV report on the show 
60 Minutes reported that the system may have been used to spy on the 
phone conversations of the late Princess Diana, at a time when she 
was spearheading an effort to ban landmines worldwide.

Echelon's existence has been discussed in security circles for almost 
a decade, but its existence was only brought to public attention in 
early 1997 by Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), a quarterly intelligence 
newsletter, which revealed details of the global telecommunications 
surveillance system.

According to the newsletter, Echelon is a top secret alliance involving 
the NSA's telecoms surveillance system and other government networks 
that allows the bulk of the civilized world's telephone calls to be 
digitized and analyzed using intelligent text searching technology.

CAQ said that Echelon monitors virtually all phone calls in the U.S. 
And Europe, including the UK, effectively making a mockery of the UK's 
Interception of Communications Act.

The newsletter added that Echelon is used to keyword search e-mail, 
fax, telex and all types of voice communications, including analog 
and digital cellular phone calls.

"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold 
War, Echelon is designed primarily for non-military targets: 
governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually 
every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between 
(and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world," the newsletter 
said.

The newsletter added that the existence of Echelon was inadvertently 
revealed by the New Zealand government, which joined the Echelon network 
in the 1960s.

The four other main members of Echelon are the U.S.' NSA, the UK's 
GCHQ, Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and 
Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD).

The newsletter said that Echelon started life as a UK-U.S. government 
co-operative initiative in the Second World War. After the war, the 
agreement was formalized in 1948, when the UK and the U.S. agreed to 
tackle intelligence gathering against the USSR.

Central to Echelon are the Echelon dictionaries, which are compiled 
by the five main members' intelligence agencies. Each intelligence 
agency holds copies of all of the other members' dictionaries, which 
contain details of keywords that the respective intelligence agency 
is interested in.

Each agency's computer system scans all available telecoms and data 
traffic in its region. Where another agency's keyword is found in the 
digital data stream, the relevant text or data is automatically 
forwarded to the appropriate agency's computer system. This means, 
the newsletter said, that the originating agency's staff never get 
to see the relevant data - only the agency with the appropriate keyword 
receives the transmission.

CAQ claims that the relevant agencies' headquarters processing Echelon 
data surveillance files are located in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham, 
Canberra, and Wellington.

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Also see: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2641902,00.html

The above two items were found in Usenet.