MULTI-BILLION POUND GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE By Stephen Castle in Brussels
THE LONDON INDEPENDENT, 28 January 2000 Almost every modern form of communication, from satellites to the internet, is being intercepted by a multi-billion pound global surveillance operation dominated by the US and Britain, according to a report for the European Parliament. The scale of communications monitoring in the cyber age is laid out in a document, due to be debated next month, which puts the price-tag of the global snooping operation at 15 to 20bn euros annually.
The report sparked claims yesterday that the UK is aiding American economic and commercial espionage at the expense of its European partners by assisting it in surveillance work through a long-standing arrangement. According to the document, written by the researcher Duncan Campbell, more than 120 satellite-based systems are working simultaneously to collect intelligence.
International telephone calls can be monitored with a speaker recognition system - effectively a voiceprint - which can recognise the speech of a targeted individual making a call. However, effective "word-spotting" systems which are activated when key words are spoken are not available despite 30 years of research. The document also argues that a previously unknown international organisation called "Ilets" has "put in place contentious plans to require manufacturers and operators of new communications systems to build in monitoring capacity for use by national-security or law-enforcement organisations." In addition, it says that industrial or economic espionage is common because there is "wide-ranging evidence indicating that major governments are routinely utilising communications intelligence to provide commercial advantage to companies and trade." The paper is one of a series which has been commissioned by the European Parliament ahead of a set of public hearings in Brussels next month, against a backdrop of mounting concern over the erosion of civil liberties.
An earlier document prepared for MEPs in 1997 gave details of a highly automated Anglo-American system for processing intelligence known as Echelon, which collates communications, collected at interception points around the globe, and sends them for evaluation at spy stations. UK-US cooperation dates back to 1947 but Echelon's monitoring is now routine and indiscriminate and is now designed for non-military targets such governments, businesses and other organisations. The intelligence services seem so far to have kept pace with the explosion in the quantity of electronic communications through the internet, something which was thought at one time to pose a significant challenge to the agencies. Much of the globe's internet capacity is located in the US or passes through it and, the document argues, "communications from Europe to and from Asia, Oceania, Africa or South America normally travel via the United States".
That means that "a large proportion of international communications on the internet will by the nature of the system pass through the US and thus be readily accessible to NSA [National Security Agency]" and can be sifted relatively easily from their origin and destination. The document points out, however, that the costs and technical difficulties of surveillance are growing. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Update/2000-01/monitoring280100.shtml)