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     overview

This page considers the ECHELON intelligence network.

It covers -

• introduction - what is Echelon and why is it of interest?
• antecedents - from postal surveillance to UKUSA in the Cold War
• operation - the shape of Echelon
• the matrix - Echelon as a focus of anxieties about the New World Order of pervasive surveillance and control
• studies - works about the network, technical challenges, political frameworks and fear

It is complemented by a note on the Wassenaar Arrangement, an international agreement that restricts high-level cryptographic tools and products.

     introduction

ECHELON is of interest as -

• something that leverages the global information infrastructure (GII), with governments sifting large volumes of voice and data traffic
• a cultural phenomenon, a focus of anxieties among fringe groups on the left and right
• something that poses privacy, jurisdictional and other issues for people in Australia and other nations.

It has been the subject of much speculation - and mystification - along with exemplary academic research. Conclusions about its operation, evolution and impact must necessarily be uncertain.

ECHELON has been claimed as "the largest electronic spy network in history". In essence it is an information sharing mechanism that involves the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It encompasses telecommunications, in particular satellite and microwave traffic. Critics have characterised it as surveilling up to 3 billion communications per day, including personal, business and government voice calls, faxes, email, SMS telephone calls, faxes and other data transfers. Many of those communications take place outside the borders of the ECHELON states; some involve governments and nationals of friendly states.

Information is electronically sifted, using different categories (such as the recipient or keywords), with some messages undergoing detailed analysis. It is likely that some commercially-sensitive information is forwarded from national security agencies to policymakers and to contacts in leading corporations, for example to assist in trade negotiations.

As the following page notes, the effectiveness of ECHELON is unknown: there are few benchmarks for determining its effectiveness or comparing costs. As an essentially secret activity it has proved resistant to scrutiny by legislatures. It is likely to increase in scope and pervasiveness as policymakers rely on ICT as a silver bullet to solve intractable political and military problems.

     antecedents

Contrary to fin de siecle that 'gentlemen do not read each others mail, governments have traditionally surveilled public and private communications. Broadly, confidence in the 1844 statement that

When a man puts a letter into the post-office he confidently believes … the communications he makes to his family and friends will not be read, either by Postmaster-General, or penny postman, or Secretary of State, and that no human being will venture to break a seal which … has been regarded as sacred as the door of his own private residence

was misplaced.

Resource constraints meant that surveillance was often ad hoc and narrowly targeted rather than systematic and pervasive, with for example a concentration on

• diplomatic couriers (and even diplomatic missions)
• telegraph and telephone traffic, including messages by financiers, industrialists and political activists
• mail to/from such figures

The emergence of radio saw increasing emphasis on what is now tagged as signals intelligence (sigint), with different nations expending significant sums on monitoring military radio traffic and on encryption/decryption. One of the drivers for the evolution of electronic computing, from the time of Alan Turing to our own era, has been use of IT to identify patterns - isolate particular messages or anomalies - and to break codes through brute force and through algorithms on a scale and consistency that is difficult to achieve with people. That is an example of what Noah Kennedy described as the 'industrialisation of intelligence', with data analysis by security services having some influence in large-scale use of IT for financial predictions (notably stock exchanges) and complex systems such as economics.

During the Cold War the 'English-speaking alliance' of Canada, the US, New Zealand, Australia and the UK worked together in the collection of signals traffic - initially through radio monitoring stations and later through satellite stations. That activity reflected perceptions of joint interest and geography: there were for example advantages in having monitoring sites across the world in friendly locations.

Not all information was shared between those 'partners' (or other states such as South Africa). It is clear from official histories, parliamentary testimony and memoirs that although much data was collected by the minor members of 'UKUSA' they were provided with analysis of that data by the US on a very selective basis. Individual members - and nations such as France, Norway, Japan, Germany and Israel - thus also maintained independent or complementary surveillance and analysis programs.

Echelon should be seen as an incremental rather than revolutionary development, building on existing institutional relationships, skills and infrastructure. Its existence was not admitted for many years and there is still considerable uncertainty about

• the configuration and capacity of the network
• institutional relationships
• oversight by government intelligence watchdogs and by other entities such as government privacy bodies
• interaction with the private sector organisations that own and manage most of the GII
• what information is collected
• how that information is analysed, who sees the analysis and in what form (eg 'raw' data or abstracts)
• claims that 'national champions' such as major corporations are selectively provided with commercially critical information about competitors or about policy discussions in other nations.

Disclosures by US and European agencies indicate, unsurprisingly, that in a 'borderless' digital environment data collection is not restricted to 'enemies'. It instead, in principle, covers all traffic that can be captured - including communications by 'allies' and by citizens, despite formal constraints in states such as the US on domestic surveillance.

     operation

At its simplest we can conceptualise Echelon as three elements -

• data capture
• data exchange
• data analysis

Most literature about the network assumes that traffic is surveilled through specialist facilities, spread across the globe, that cover satellite, microwave, radio, mobile phone and cable (eg international fibre-optic links). Some surveillance may involve switches at key nodes (eg 'taps' in international exchanges).

For convenience individual Echelon states appear to have a broad responsibility for monitoring traffic in different parts of the globe. Australia for example supposedly concentrates on communications originating in Indonesia and Indochina; the UK covers Europe, Russia west of the Urals and Africa. In practice much of the surveillance appears to be undertaken by US personnel operating from facilities in partner countries, with nationals of those states sometimes being restricted from all/part of a station. Much surveillance appears to be overlapping, with the US covering Latin America, most of Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China.

Data exchange involves provision of surveilled information to partners and receipt of decrypted information, whether as abstracts, raw data or in an enriched format (eg information that has been drawn from a range of sources).

Much concern has centred on data analysis aspects of Echelon and other schemes such as the US 'Total Information Awareness' program. It is assumed that traffic is fed through a series of filters that centre on specific words, figures, phrases, speech patterns (eg the voice recognition highlighted in our discussion of biometrics), addresses and even images. Communications would receive a weighting: traffic that emanates from particular locations or addresses, or with content that sets off an initial trigger, would be weighted to ensure that it passes through a cascade of filters.

Reports about the operation of data analysis vary, with claims that most occurs in real time conflicting with suggestions that computational requirements are so large that much 'flagged' traffic is simply stored for a future analysis that often does not eventuate. That is one basis for calls by activists in Western countries to overload traffic with 'noise' on days of protest, a response discussed later in this note. Another response, considered by governments in the EU and elsewhere, is to rely on high level encryption for sensitive communications, arguably on the basis that if/when decryption occurs it will be too late for the information to be use.

As discussed in the following page, critics have commented that data is not information: the human factor in interpreting communications is often of paramount significance although data matching is of assistance. Interpretation may be inhibited by shortages of analysts with appropriate language skills (eg Mandarin or Farsi) and backgrounds.

     the matrix

One contact in the Australian intelligence community joked a few years ago that if Echelon didn't exist, the paranoids would have to invent it.

Speculation about global data collection and analysis schemes has been appropriated to form a heady - or merely ludicrous brew for consumers of popular culture or conspiracy theory.

At their most credible such tales centre on claims that government has the capacity to listen to all/most phone calls. It is unclear whether government does so and whether other surveillance in practice is more threatening.

At its most zany anxiety about Echelon posits the network as a centrepiece of 'New World Order' fantasies, replete with mandatory barcodes (or RFID tags) for all humans, the famous little black helicopters beloved by paranoids, global tracking of all electronic payments (typically by 'the Illuminati', 'Bilderbergers' or some other bugaboo, ensconced deep beneath the Swiss Alps or godless Wall Street), and seamless mind control through command of the New York Times and Melbourne Age or subliminal messages on broadcast tv. If only life was that simple.

     studies

Literature on intelligence agencies is highlighted elsewhere on this site, eg here and here.

Background is provided in The Ties that Bind - Intelligence Cooperation between the UKUSA Countries (London: Allen & Unwin 1985) by Desmond Ball & Jeffrey Richelson. For a perspective on tensions between democracy and security see Best Truth: Intelligence & Security in the Information Age (New Haven: Yale Uni Press) by Bruce Berkowitz & Allan Goodman

Other works of importance by Ball include A Suitable Piece of Real Estate (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger 1980), A Base for Debate: The US Satellite Station at Nurrungar (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1987) and Pine Gap: Australia & the US Geosynchronous Satellite Program (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1988). The New Zealand end of the network is discussed in Nicky Hagar's more impassioned Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network (Nelson: Craig Potton 1996).

For the NSA see The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency (New York: Houghton Mifflin 1982) by James Bamford and follow-up Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday 2001) and Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (New York: Random 2005) by Patrick Keefe. A perspective on challenges in pattern identification is provided by Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002) and works on encryption highlighted here.

Pointers to conspiracist literature - Pat Robertson's The New World Order (Dallas: Word 1991) and Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (New York: Harper 2001) by Jim Marrs are particularly amusing - feature here.

Sites maintained by academic Echelon-watchers, advocacy organisations and alfoil-beanie wearers (eg disinfo.com) are highlighted in the following page of this note.






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