DEVELOPMENTS IN SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY

New technologies which were originally conceived for the Defence and Intelligence sectors have after the cold war rapidly spread into the law enforcement and private sectors.

By the 1980's, new forms of electronic surveillance were emerging and many of these were directed towards automation of communications interception. This trend was fuelled in the US in the 1990's by accelerated government funding at the end of the cold war, with defence and intelligence agencies being refocussed with new missions to justify their budgets, transferring their technologies to certain law enforcement applications such as anti-drug and anti-terror operations.

According to David Banisar of Privacy International, "To counteract reductions in military contracts which began in the 1980's, computer and electronics companies are expanding into new markets - at home and abroad - with equipment originally developed for the military. Companies such as E Systems, Electronic Data Systems and Texas Instruments are selling advanced computer systems and surveillance equipment to state and local governments that use them for law enforcement, border control and Welfare administration. What the East German secret police could only dream of is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world."

In recent years the widespread practice of illegal and legal interception of communications and the planting of 'bugs' has been an issue in many European States. However, planting illegal bugs is yesterday's technology. Modern snoopers can buy specially adapted lap top computers, and simply tune in to all the mobile phones active in the area by cursoring down to their number. The machine will even search for numbers 'of interest' to see if they are active. However, these bugs and taps pale into insignificance next to the national and international state run interceptions networks.

 
NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS INTERCEPTIONS NETWORKS

The Interim Study set out in detail, the global surveillance systems which facilitate the mass supervision of all telecommunications including telephone, email and fax transmissions of private citizens, politicians, trade unionists and companies alike. There has been a political shift in targeting in recent years. Instead of investigating crime (which is reactive) law enforcement agencies are increasingly tracking certain social classes and races of people living in red-lined areas before crime is committed - a form of pre-emptive policing deemed data-veillance which is based on military models of gathering huge quantities of low grade intelligence.

Without encryption, modern communications systems are virtually transparent to the advanced interceptions equipment which can be used to listen in. The Interim Study also explained how mobile phones have inbuilt monitoring and tagging dimensions which can be accessed by police and intelligence agencies. For example the digital technology required to pinpoint mobile phone users for incoming calls, means that all mobile phone users in a country when activated, are mini-tracking devices, giving their owners whereabouts at any time and stored in the company's computer . For example Swiss Police have secretly tracked the whereabouts of mobile phone users from the computer of the service provider Swisscom, which according SonntagsZeitung had stored movements of more than a million subscribers down to a few hundred metres, and going back at least half a year.

However, of all the developments covered in the Interim Study, the section covering some of the constitutional and legal issues raised by the USA's National Security Agency's access and facility to intercept all European telecommunications caused the most concern. Whilst no-one denied the role of such networks in anti terrorist operations and countering illegal drug, money laudering and illicit arms deals, alarm was expressed about the scale of the foreign interceptions network identified in the Study and whether existing legislation, data protection and privacy safeguards in the Member States were sufficient to protect the confidentiality between EU citizens, corporations and those with third countries.

Since there has been a certain degree of confusion in subsequent press reports, it is worth clarifying some of the issues surrounding transatlantic electronic surveillance and providing a short history & update on developments since the Interim Study was published in January 1998. There are essentially two separate systems, namely:

(i) The UK/USA system comprising the activities of military intelligence agencies such as NSA-CIA in the USA subsuming GCHQ & MI6 in the UK operating a system known as ECHELON;

(ii) The EU-FBI system which is linkeding up various law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, police, customs, immigration and internal security;

In intelligence terms, these are two distinct "communities". It is worth looking briefly at the activities of both systems in turn, encompassing, Echelon, encryption; EU-FBI surveillance and new interfaces with for example access to internet providers and to databanks of other agencies.

 
NSA INTERCEPTION OF ALL EU TELECOMMUNICATIONS

The Interim Study said that within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by Satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK.

The system was first uncovered in the 1970s by a group of researchers in the UK (Campbell, 1981). A recent work by Nicky Hager, Secret Power, (Hager, 1996) provides the most comprehensive details todate of a project known as ECHELON. Hager interviewed more than 50 people concerned with intelligence to document a global surveillance system that stretches around the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, internet, email, faxes and telexes. These sites are based at Sugar Grove and Yakima, in the USA, at Waihopai in New Zealand, at Geraldton in Australia, Hong Kong, and Morwenstow in the UK.

The ECHELON system forms part of the UK/USA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like Memex to find key words. Five nations share the results with the US as the senior partner under the UK/USA agreement of 1948, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are very much acting as subordinate information servicers.

Each of the five centres supply "dictionaries" to the other four of keywords, phrases, people and places to "tag" and the tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country. Whilst there is much information gathered about potential terrorists, there is a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in the GATT negotiations. But Hager found that by far the main priorities of this system continued to be military and political intelligence applicable to their wider interests.

Hager quotes from "highly placed intelligence operatives" who spoke to the Observer in London. "We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charities, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request", the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes its called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to third world aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three organisations. With no system of accountability, it is difficult to discover what criteria determine who is not a target.

Indeed since the Interim Study was published, journalists have alleged that ECHELON has benefited US companies involved in arms deals, strengthened Washington's position in crucial World Trade organisation talks with Europe during a 1995 dispute with Japan over car part exports. According to the Financial Mail On Sunday, "key words identified by US experts include the names of inter-governmental trade organisations and business consortia bidding against US companies. The word 'block' is on the list to identify communications about offshore oil in area where the seabed has yet to be divided up into exploration blocks"..." It has also been suggested that in 1990 the US broke into secret negotiations and persuaded Indonesia that US giant AT & T be included in a multi-billion dollar telecoms deal that at one point was going entirely to Japan's NEC.

The Sunday Times (11. May 1998) reported that early on the radomes at Menwith Hill (NSA station F83) In North Yorkshire UK, were given the task of intercepting international leased carrrier (ILC) traffic - essentially, ordinary commercial communications. Its staff have grown from 400 in the 1980's to more than 1400 now with a further 370 staff from the Ministry of Defence. The Sunday Times also reported allegations that conversations between the German company Volkswagen and General Motors were intercepted and the French have complained that Thompson-CSF, the French electronics company, lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with a radar system because the Americans intercepted details of the negotions and passed them on to US company Raytheon, which subsequently won the contract. Another claim is that Airbus Industrie lost a contract worth $1 billion to Boeing and McDonnel Douglas because information was intercepted by American spying. Other newspapers such as Liberation (21. April 1998) and Il Mondo (20. March 1998, identify the network as an Anglo-Saxon Spy network because of the UK-USA axis.

According to Privacy International, the UK is likely to find its 'Special relationship' ties fall foul of its Maastricht obligations since Title V of Maastricht requires that "Member States shall inform and consult one another within the Council on any matter of foreign and security policy of general interest in order to ensure that their combined influence is exerted as effectivelly as possible by means of concerted and convergent action." Yet under the terms of the Special relationship, Britain cannot engage in open consultation with its other European partners. The situation is further complicated by counter allegations in the French magazine Le Point, that the French are systematically spying on American and other allied countries telephone and cable traffic via the Helios 1A Spy satellite (Times, June 17, 1998).

No proper Authority in the USA would allow a similar EU spy network to operate from American soil without strict limitations, if at all. Following full discussion on the implications of the operations of these networks, the European Parliament is advised to set up appropriate independent audit and oversight porocedures and that any effort to outlaw encryption by EU citizens should be denied until and unless such democratic and accountable systems are in place, if at all.

 
EU-FBI GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

Much of the documentation and research necessary to put into the public domain, the history, structure, role and function of the EU-FBI convention to legitimise global electronic surveillance, has been secured by Statewatch, the widely respected UK based civil liberties monitoring and research organisation.

In February 1997, Statewatch reported that the EU had secretly agreed to set up an international telephone tapping network via a secret network of committees established under the "third pillar" of the Mastricht Treaty covering co-operation on law and order. Key points of the plan are outlined in a memorandum of understanding, signed by EU states in 1995 (ENFOPOL 112 10037/95 25.10.95) which remains classified. According to a Guardian report (25.2.97) it reflects concern among European Intelligence agencies that modern technology will prevent them from tapping private communications. "EU countries," it says, "should agree on international interception standards set at a level that would ensure encoding or scrambled words can be broken down by government agencies." Official reports say that the EU governments agreed to co-operate closely with the FBI in Washington. Yet earlier minutes of these meetings suggest that the original initiative came from Washington.

According to Statewatch, network and service providers in the EU will be obliged to install "tappable" systems and to place under surveillance any person or group when served with an interception order.

These plans have never been referred to any European government for scrutiny, nor to the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament, despite the clear civil liberties issues raised by such an unaccountable system. The decision to go ahead was simply agreed in secret by "written procedure" through an exchange of telexes between the 15 EU governments. We are told by Statewatch the EU-FBI Global surveillance plan was now being developed "outside the third pillar." In practical terms this means that the plan is being developed by a group of twenty countries - the then 15 EU member countries plus the USA, Australia, Canada, Norway and New Zealand. This group of 20 is not accountable through the Council of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers or to the European Parliament or national parliaments. Nothing is said about finance of this system but a report produced by the German government estimates that the mobile phone part of the package alone will cost 4 billion D-marks.

Statewatch concludes that "It is the interface of the ECHELON system and its potential development on phone calls combined with the standardisation of tappable communications centres and equipment being sponsored by the EU and the USA which presents a truly global threat over which there are no legal or democratic controls" (Press release 25.2.97). In many respects what we are witnessing here are meetings of operatives of a new global military-intelligence state. It is very difficult for anyone to get a full picture of what is being decided at the executive meetings setting this 'Transatlantic agenda.'

© European Parliament 1998

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