<nettime> Konfrontatie: ECHELON /2

[konfront@xs4all.nl]

[text in english]

*KONFRONTATIE  **   KONFRONTATIE  **   KONFRONTATIE  **  KONFRONTATIE*
 _______________________________________________________

********************************************************
* Konfrontatie verschijnt 2 wekelijks in gratis E-mail vorm. Voor abonnemen=
t*
* of opzegging hiervan stuur een verzoek aan konfront@xs4all.nl. Ook
reacties *
* zijn welkom. Oude nummers en diverse andere artikelen zijn te vinden op
*
*  http://www.xs4all.nl/~konfront.
*
********************************************************

Konfr. extra/6 feb 98  konfront@xs4all.nl   http://www.xs4all.nl/~konfront

--------------------------------------------------------
inhoud:

Hooked up to the spy network: The UKUSA system

Ten years later, on Saturday, 15 January 1994, technicians in satellite
earth stations around the Pacific were busy tuning their equipment to a new
satellite. The first of the new generation of Intelsat 7 series satellites,
it had been launched several weeks before, from the European Kourou air
base in French Guyana, and then manoeuvred into position far out in space
above the Equator at 174 degrees east, due north of New Zealand above
Kiribati.

The 20 Intelsat (International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation)
satellites that ring the world above the Equator carry most of the world's
satellite-relayed international phone calls and messages such as faxes,
e-mail and telexes. The new satellite, Intelsat 701, replaced the
10-year-old Intelsat 510 in the same position. The changeover occurred at
10 pm New Zealand time that summer evening.

At the GCSB's station at Waihopai, near Blenheim in the north of the South
Island, the radio officer staff were just as busy that evening, setting
their special equipment to intercept the communications which the
technicians in legitimate satellite earth stations would send and receive
via the new satellite. These specially trained radio officers, who learned
their skills at the Tangimoana station, usually work day shifts, but on 15
January 1994 they worked around the clock, tuning the station's receivers
to the frequency bands the GCSB wanted to intercept, selecting the specific
channels within each band that would yield the types of messages sought
within the UKUSA network and then testing that the high-tech intelligence
collection system was working smoothly. That satellite changeover was a
very significant event for the Waihopai station and the GCSB. Although it
would always be only a small component of the global network, this was the
moment when the station came into its own.

There have been various guesses and hints over the years about what the
Waihopai station was set up to monitor -- "sources" in one newspaper said
foreign warship movements; a "senior Telecom executive" told another
newspaper it was most likely "other countries" military communications" --
but, outside a small group of intelligence staff, no one could do more than
theorise. Waihopai was established specifically to target the international
satellite traffic carried by Intelsat satellites in the Pacific region and
its target in the mid-1990s is the Intelsat 701 that came into service in
January 1994, and is the primary satellite for the Pacific region.

Intelsat satellites carry most of the satellite traffic of interest to
intelligence organisations in the South Pacific: diplomatic communications
between embassies and their home capitals, all manner of government and
military communications, a wide range of business communications,
communications of international organisations and political organisations
and the personal communications of people living throughout the Pacific.
The Intelsat 7 satellites can carry an immense number of communications
simultaneously. Where the previous Intelsat 5s could carry 12,000
individual phone or fax circuits at once, the Intelsat 7s can carry 90,000.
All "written" messages are currently exploited by the GCSB. The other UKUSA
agencies monitor phone calls as well.

The key to interception of satellite communications is powerful computers
that search through these masses of messages for ones of interest. The
intercept stations take in millions of messages intended for the legitimate
earth stations served by the satellite and then use computers to search for
pre-programmed addresses and keywords. In this way they select out
manageable numbers (hundreds or thousands) of messages to be searched
through and read by intelligence analysis staff.

Until the Intelsat 701 satellite replaced the older 5 series, all the
communications intercepted at Waihopai could already be got from two
existing UKUSA stations covering the Pacific. But, unlike their
predecessors, this new generation of Intelsat 7s had more precise beams
transmitting communications down to the southern hemisphere. The existing
northern hemisphere-based stations were no longer able to pick up all the
southern communications, which is why new stations were required.

Eleven months later, on 3 December 1994, the other old Intelsat satellite
above the Pacific was replaced by Intelsat 703. Since then Waihopai and its
sister station in Australia constructed at the same time have been the main
source of southern hemisphere Pacific satellite communications for the
UKUSA network.

Many people are vaguely aware that a lot of spying occurs, maybe even on
them, but how do we judge if it is ubiquitous or not a worry at all? Is
someone listening every time we pick up the telephone? Are all our Internet
or fax messages being pored over continuously by shadowy figures somewhere
in a windowless building? There is almost never any solid information with
which to judge what is realistic concern and what is silly paranoia.

What follows explains as precisely as possible -- and for the first time in
public -- how the worldwide system works, just how immense and powerful it
is and what it can and cannot do. The electronic spies are not ubiquitous,
but the paranoia is not unfounded.

The global system has a highly secret codename -- ECHELON. It is by far the
most significant system of which the GCSB is a part, and many of the GCSB's
daily operations are based around it. The intelligence agencies will be
shocked to see it named and described for the first time in print. Each
station in the ECHELON network has computers that automatically search
through the millions of intercepted messages for ones containing
pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. For the
frequencies and channels selected at a station, every word of every message
is automatically searched (they do not need your specific telephone number
or Internet address on the list).

All the different computers in the network are known, within the UKUSA
agencies, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can search for
keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has
been designed to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to
function as components of an integrated whole. Before this, the UKUSA
allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each
agency usually processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations.
Mostly, finished reports rather than raw intercept were exchanged.

Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's Dictionary computer
contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for
each of the other four agencies. For example, the Waihopai computer has
separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD and CSE in addition to its
own. So each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes,
Internet messages and other electronic communications that its computers
have been pre-programmed to select for all the allies and automatically
sends this intelligence to them. This means that the New Zealand stations
are used by the overseas agencies for their automatic collecting -- while
New Zealand does not even know what is being intercepted from the New
Zealand sites for the allies. In return, New Zealand gets tightly
controlled access to a few parts of the system.

When analysts at the agency headquarters in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham
and Canberra look through the mass of intercepted satellite communications
produced by this system, it is only in the technical data recorded at the
top of each intercept that they can see whether it was intercepted at
Waihopai or at one of the other stations in the network. Likewise, GCSB
staff talk of the other agencies' stations merely as the various "satellite
links" into the integrated system. The GCSB computers, the stations, the
headquarters operations and, indeed, the GCSB itself function almost
entirely as components of this integrated system.

In addition to satellite communications, the ECHELON system covers a range
of other interception activities, described later. All these operations
involve collection of communications intelligence,< 1 > as opposed to other
types of signals intelligence such as electronic intelligence, which is
about the technical characteristics of other countries' radar and weapon
systems.

Interception of international satellite communications began in the early
1970s, only a few years after the first civilian communications satellites
were launched. At this time the Intelsat satellites, located over the
Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, simply beamed all their messages down
to the entire hemisphere within their view.

Throughout the 1970s only two stations were required to monitor all the
Intelsat communications in the world: a GCHQ station in the south-west of
England had two dishes, one each for the Atlantic and Indian Ocean
Intelsats, and an NSA station in the western United States had a single
dish covering the Pacific Intelsat.

The English station is at Morwenstow, at the edge of high cliffs above the
sea at Sharpnose Point in Cornwall. Opened in 1972-73, shortly after the
introduction of new Intelsat 4 satellites, the Morwenstow station was a
joint British-American venture, set up using United States-supplied
computers and communications equipment, and was located only 110 kilometres
from the legitimate British Telecom satellite station at Goonhilly to the
south. In the 1970s the Goonhilly dishes were inclined identically towards
the same Atlantic and Indian Ocean satellites.< 2 >

The Pacific Intelsat satellite was targeted by an NSA station built on a
high basalt tableland inside the 100,000-hectare United States Army Yakima
Firing Centre, in Washington State in the north-west United States, 200
kilometres south-west of Seattle. Also established in the early 1970s, the
Yakima Research Station initially consisted of a long operations building
and the single large dish. In 1982, a visiting journalist noted that the
dish was pointing west, out above the Pacific to the third of the three
Intelsat positions.< 3 >

Yakima is located between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, in a
desert of canyons, dunes and sheer rock cliffs, where the only vegetation
is grass. The Army leases the land to ranchers who herd their cattle in the
shadow of the dishes. When visited in mid-1995 the Yakima station had five
dish antennae, three facing westwards over the Pacific Ocean and two,
including the original large 1970s dish, facing eastwards. Besides the
original operations building there were several newer buildings, the
largest of them two-storey, concrete and windowless.

Two of the west-facing dishes are targeted on the main Pacific Intelsat
satellites; the Yakima station has been monitoring Pacific Intelsat
communications for the NSA ever since it opened. The orientation of the two
east-facing dishes suggests that they may be targeted on the Atlantic
Intelsats, intercepting communications relayed towards North and South
America. One or both may provide the link between the station and the NSA
headquarters in Washington. The fifth dish at the station is smaller than
the rest and faces to the west. Given its size and orientation, it appears
to be the UKUSA site for monitoring the Inmarsat-2 satellite that provides
mobile satellite communications in the Pacific Ocean area. If so, this is
the station that would, for example, have been monitoring Greenpeace
communications during the nuclear testing protests in the waters around
Moruroa Atoll in 1995.

The GCSB has had important links with the Yakima station since 1981, when
the GCSB took over a special, highly secret area of intelligence analysis
for the UKUSA network (see Chapter 6). Telexes intercepted using Yakima's
single dish were first sorted by the Yakima computers, and then subjects
allocated to New Zealand were sent to the GCSB for analysis. The Yakima
station had been using Dictionary-type computers for this searching work
for many years before the full ECHELON system was operating.

Between them, the Morwenstow and Yakima stations covered all Intelsat
interception during the 1970s. But a new generation of Intelsat satellites
launched from the late 1970s required a new configuration of spy stations.
The Intelsat 4A and 5 series satellites differed from earlier ones in that
they did not transmit only to the whole of the side of the world within
their view; they now also had "east and west hemispheric" beams that
transmitted separately.< 4 > For example, Intelsat 510, which operated
above the Pacific until its replacement in December 1994, had one "global"
beam covering the whole region, but all the other transmissions went either
to the east or to the west Pacific. Yakima was not within the "footprint"
of any hemispheric beams covering Australasia, South East Asia and East
Asia, making interception of these signals difficult or impossible.

These changes to Intelsat design meant that the UKUSA alliance required at
least two new stations to maintain its global coverage. Again the GCHQ
provided one and the NSA one. A new NSA station on the east coast of the
United States would cover Atlantic Intelsat traffic beamed down towards
North and South America (Morwenstow covered the eastern Atlantic), and a
GCHQ station in Hong Kong would cover both the western hemisphere of the
Pacific Intelsats and the eastern hemisphere of the Indian Ocean Intelsats.

The site chosen for the new NSA station was hidden in the forested South
Fork Valley in the mountains of West Virginia, about 250 kilometres
south-west from Washington DC, on the edge of the George Washington
National Forest, near the small settlement of Sugar Grove. The site had
been used in the 1950s and early 1960s for a failed attempt to spy on
Russian radio communications and radars by means of reflections from the
moon. The current satellite interception station was developed during the
late 1970s, when a collection of new satellite dishes (from 10 to 45 metres
in diameter) and the new windowless Raymond E. Linn Operations Building
were constructed. It also incorporated a two-storey underground operations
building already at the site. It started full operations about 1980.< 5 >

Like Morwenstow and Yakima, Sugar Grove is only 100 kilometres from an
international satellite communications earth station, making it easy to
intercept any "spot" beams directed down to the legitimate stations. In
this case it is the Etam earth station, the main link in the United States
with the Intelsat satellites above the Atlantic Ocean.

The other new station, in Hong Kong, was constructed by the GCHQ also in
the late 1970s. The station, which has since been dismantled, was perched
above the sea on the south side of Hong Kong Island, across Stanley Bay
from the British Stanley Fort military base and right next to high-rise
apartments and luxury housing. In crowded Hong Kong the station's anonymity
was assured simply because there are so many satellite dishes scattered
over the island. What helped to give away this one was the sign, on the
entrance to an exclusive housing enclave across the bay, saying that taking
photographs is strictly forbidden. When one of the Indian guards on the
gate was asked why it was forbidden to take photos of a housing area, he
pointed across the bay and said in serious tones, "Communications facility
-- very, very secret".

The Hong Kong station had several satellite dishes and buildings, including
a large windowless concrete building (similar to the ones at Yakima and
Sugar Grove) and a collection of administration and operations buildings
running down the hill into the base from the gates. Intelsat communications
intercepted at the station were seen regularly by GCSB operations staff in
Wellington.< 6 >

When visited in August 1994, the station fitted the requirements of the
Intelsat monitoring network. It had one dish pointing up east towards the
Pacific Intelsats, another towards the Indian Ocean Intelsats and a third,
for the station's own communications, pointing up to a United States
Defence Satellite Communications System satellite above the Pacific. Other
dishes had perhaps already been removed. Dismantling of the station began
in 1994 -- to ensure it was removed well before the 1997 changeover to
Chinese control of Hong Kong -- and the station's staff left in November
that year. News reports said that the antennae and equipment were being
shipped to the DSD-run Shoal Bay station in Northern Australia, where they
would be used for intercepting Chinese communications.

It is not known how the Hong Kong station has been replaced in the global
network. One of the Australian DSD stations -- either Geraldton or Shoal
Bay -- may have taken over some of its work, or it is possible that another
north-east Asian UKUSA station moved into the role. For example, there were
developments at the NSA's Misawa station in northern Japan in the 1980s
that would fit well with the need for expanded Intelsat monitoring.< 7 >

Throughout the 1980s a series of new dishes was also installed at the
Morwenstow station, to keep up with expansion of the Intelsat network. In
1980 it still required only the two original dishes, but by the early 1990s
it had nine satellite dishes: two inclined towards the two main Indian
Ocean Intelsats, three towards Atlantic Ocean Intelsats, three towards
positions above Europe or the Middle East and one dish covered by a radome.

The Morwenstow, Yakima, Sugar Grove and Hong Kong stations were able to
provide worldwide interception of the international communications carried
by Intelsat throughout the 1980s. The arrangement within the UKUSA alliance
was that, while the NSA and GCHQ ran the four stations, each of the five
allies (including the GCSB) had responsibility for analysing some
particular types of the traffic intercepted at these stations.

Then, in the late 1980s, another phase of development occurred. It may have
been prompted by approaching closure of the Hong Kong station, but a more
likely explanation is that, as we have seen, technological advances in the
target Intelsat satellites again required expansion of the network.

Two UKUSA countries were available to provide southern hemisphere coverage:
Australia and New Zealand. One of the new southern hemisphere stations
would be the GCSB's Waihopai station and the other would be at Geraldton in
West Australia. (Both stations are described in detail later.) The new
stations were operating by 1994 when the new Intelsat 7s began to be
introduced. Waihopai had opened in 1989, with a single dish, initially
covering one of the older generation of Intelsat satellites.

The positioning of the Geraldton station on Australia's extreme west coast
was clearly to allow it to cover the Indian Ocean Intelsats (they all lie
within 60 degrees of the station, which allows good reception). Geraldton
opened in 1993, with four dishes, covering the two main Indian Ocean
Intelsats (at 60 degrees and 63 degrees) and possibly a new Asia-Pacific
Intelsat introduced in 1992. It also covers the second of the two Pacific
Intelsats, Intelsat 703.

The logic of the system suggests that, at the same time as the Waihopai and
Geraldton stations were added to the network, a seventh, as yet
undiscovered, station may have been installed in the South Atlantic. This
station, probably located on Ascension Island, would complete the 1990s
network by intercepting the Atlantic Intelsats' southern hemisphere
communications.< 8 >

New GCSB operations staff attend training sessions that cover the ECHELON
system, showing how the GCSB fits into the system and including maps
showing the network of UKUSA stations around the world. The sessions
include briefings on the Intelsat and the maritime Inmarsat satellites --
their locations, how they work, what kinds of communications they carry and
the technical aspects of their vulnerability to spying. This is because
these are primary targets for the UKUSA alliance in the Pacific.

But the interception of communications relayed by Intelsat and Inmarsat is
only one component of the global spying network co-ordinated by the ECHELON
system. Other elements include: radio listening posts, including the GCSB's
Tangimoana station; interception stations targeted on other types of
communications satellites; overhead signals intelligence collectors (spy
satellites) like those controlled from the Pine Gap facility in Australia;
and secret facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications
networks.

What Waihopai, Morwenstow and the other stations do for satellite
communications, another whole network of intercept stations like
Tangimoana, developed since the 1940s, does for radio.

There are several dozen radio interception stations run by the UKUSA allies
and located throughout the world. Many developed in the early years of the
Cold War and, before satellite communications became widespread in the
1980s, were the main ground signals intelligence stations targeting Soviet
communications. Some stations were also used against regional targets. In
the Pacific, for example, ones with New Zealand staff were used to target
groups and governments opposed by Britain and the United States through a
series of conflicts and wars in South East Asia.

A recent new radio interception station is the Australian DSD station near
Bamaga in northern Queensland, at the tip of Cape York. It was set up in
1988 particularly to monitor radio communications associated with the
conflict between Papua New Guinea and the secessionist movement in
Bougainville.< 9 > GCSB staff are also aware of Australian intercept staff
posted in the early 1990s to the recently opened Tindal Air Force base in
northern Australia, suggesting that an even newer -- as yet undisclosed --
DSD intercept station may have been established there.

Most of this network of stations target long-range high frequency (HF)
radio. A powerful HF radio transmitter can transmit right around the world,
which is why HF radio has been a major means of international
communications and is still widely used by military forces and by ships and
aircraft. Other stations target short-range communications -- very high
frequency and ultra high frequency radio (VHF and UHF) -- which, among
other things, are used extensively for tactical military communications
within a country.

There is a wide variety of these radio interception operations. Some are
very large, with hundreds of staff; others are small -- a few staff hidden
inside a foreign embassy bristling with radio aerials on the roof; others
(like the Bamaga station) are unstaffed, with the signals automatically
relayed to other stations. Because of the peculiarities of radio waves,
sometimes stations far from the target can pick up communications that
closer ones cannot.

Each station in this network -- including the GCSB's Tangimoana station --
has a Dictionary computer like those in the satellite intercept stations.
These search and select from the communications intercepted, in particular
radio telexes, which are still widely used, and make these available to the
UKUSA allies through the ECHELON system.

The UKUSA network of HF stations in the Pacific includes the GCSB's
Tangimoana station (and before it one at Waiouru), five or more DSD
stations in Australia, a CSE station in British Columbia, and NSA stations
in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Japan, Guam, Kwajalein and the Philippines.
The NSA is currently contracting its network of overseas HF stations as
part of post-Cold War rationalisation. This contraction process includes,
in Britain, the closure of the major Chicksands and Edzell stations.

The next component of the ECHELON system covers interception of a range of
satellite communications not carried by Intelsat. In addition to the six or
so UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or
more stations targeting Russian and other regional communications
satellites. These stations are located in Britain, Australia, Canada,
Germany and Japan. All of these stations are part of the ECHELON Dictionary
system. It appears that the GCHQ's Morwenstow station, as well as
monitoring Intelsat, also targets some regional communications satellites.

United States spy satellites, designed to intercept communications from
orbit above the earth, are also likely to be connected into the ECHELON
system. These satellites either move in orbits that criss-cross the earth
or, like the Intelsats, sit above the Equator in geostationary orbit. They
have antennae that can scoop up very large quantities of radio
communications from the areas below.

The main ground stations for these satellites, where they feed back the
information they have gathered into the global network, are Pine Gap, run
by the CIA near Alice Springs in central Australia, and the NSA-directed
Menwith Hill and Bad Aibling stations, in England and Germany
respectively.< 10 > These satellites can intercept microwave trunk lines
and short-range communications such as military radios and walkie-talkies.
Both of these transmit only line of sight and so, unlike HF radio, cannot
be intercepted from faraway ground stations.

The final element of the ECHELON system are facilities that tap directly
into land-based telecommunications systems, completing a near total
coverage of the world's communications. Besides satellite and radio, the
other main method of transmitting large quantities of public, business and
government communications is a combination of undersea cables across the
oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across the
seabed between countries, account for a large proportion of the world's
international communications. After they emerge from the water and join
land-based microwave networks, they are very vulnerable to interception.

The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying
messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across the
countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across
a country. Intercepting them gives access to international undersea
communications (once they surface) and to international communication trunk
lines across continents. They are also an obvious target for large-scale
interception of domestic communications.

Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite
communications -- large aerials and dishes -- are difficult to hide for too
long, that network is reasonably well documented. But all that is required
to intercept land-based communication networks is a building situated along
the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from the
legitimate network. For this reason the worldwide network of facilities to
intercept these communications is still mostly undocumented.

Microwave communications are intercepted in two ways: by ground stations,
located near to and tapping into the microwave routes, and by satellites.
Because of the curvature of the earth, a signals intelligence satellite out
in space can even be directly in the line of a microwave transmission.
Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave interception from
space by United States spy satellites does occur. < 11 >

A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency called Spyworld,< 12 >
co-authored by a previous staff member, Mike Frost, gave the first insights
into how much microwave interception is done. It described UKUSA "embassy
collection" operations, where sophisticated receivers and processors are
secretly transported to their countries' overseas embassies in diplomatic
bags and used to monitor all manner of communications in the foreign
capitals.

Since most countries' microwave networks converge on the capital city,
embassy buildings are an ideal site for microwave interception. Protected
by diplomatic privilege, embassies allow the interception to occur from
right within the target country.< 13 > Frost said the operations
particularly target microwave communications, but also other communications
including car telephones and short-range radio transmissions.

According to Frost, Canadian embassy collection began in 1971 following
pressure from the NSA. The NSA provided the equipment (on indefinite loan),
trained the staff, told them what types of transmissions to look for on
particular frequencies and at particular times of day and gave them a
search list of NSA keywords. All the intelligence collected was sent to the
NSA for analysis. The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA
to fill gaps in the United States and British embassy collection
operations, which were still occurring in many capitals around the world
when Frost left the CSE in 1990.

Separate sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in
embassy collection. Leaks in the 1980s described installation of
"extraordinarily sophisticated intercept equipment, known as Reprieve in
Australia's High Commission in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea and in the
embassies in Indonesia and Thailand. The operations are said to take a
whole room of the embassy buildings and to be able to listen to local
telephone calls at will.< 14 > There is good reason to assume that these
operations, too, were prompted by and supported with equipment and
technical advice from the NSA and GCHQ.

Of course, when the microwave route is across one of the UKUSA countries'
territory it is much easier to arrange interception. For example, it is
likely that there is a GCHQ operation intercepting, and feeding through
Dictionary computers, all the trans-Atlantic undersea cable communications
that come ashore in Cornwall.

There are also definitely United States and possibly Canadian facilities
for this type of interception. By far the most important of these is the
NSA-directed Menwith Hill station in Britain. With its 22 satellite
terminals and over 2 hectares of buildings, Menwith Hill is undoubtedly the
largest station in the UKUSA network. In 1992 some 1200 United States
personnel were based there.< 15 > British researcher Duncan Campbell has
described how Menwith Hill taps directly into the British Telecom microwave
network, which has actually been designed with several major microwave
links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into the
station.< 16 > The station also intercepts satellite and radio
communications and is a ground station for the electronic eavesdropping
satellites. Each of Menwith Hill's powerful interception and processing
systems presumably has its own Dictionary computers connected into the
ECHELON system.

Menwith Hill, sitting in northern England, several thousand kilometres from
the Persian Gulf, was awarded the NSA's Station of the Year prize for 1991
following its role in the Gulf War. It is a station which affects people
throughout the world.

In the early 1980s James Bamford uncovered some information about a
worldwide NSA computer system codenamed Platform which, he wrote, "will tie
together fifty-two separate computer systems used throughout the world.
Focal point, or =D2host environment=D3, for the massive network will be the=
 NSA
headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the
British SIGINT organisation, GCHQ. < 17 >

There is little doubt that Platform is the system that links all the major
UKUSA station computers in the ECHELON system. Because it involves
computer-to-computer communications, the GCSB and perhaps DSD were only
able to be integrated into the system in the 1990s when the intelligence
and military organisations in the two countries changed over to new
computer-based communications systems.

The worldwide developments, of which construction of the Waihopai station
was part, were co-ordinated by the NSA as Project P415. Although most of
the details remained hidden, the existence of this highly secret project
targeting civilian communications was publicised in August 1988 in an
article by Duncan Campbell. He described how the UKUSA countries were "soon
to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic
surveillance system', with "new stations and monitoring centres ... to be
built around the world and a chain of new satellites launched'.

The satellite interception stations reported to be involved in P415
included the NSA's Menwith Hill station, the GCHQ's Morwenstow and Hong
Kong stations and the Waihopai and Geraldton stations in the South Pacific.
Other countries involved, presumably via the NSA, were said to be Japan,
West Germany and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China.

"Both new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised,"
Campbell explained. "They rely on near total interception of international
commercial and satellite communications in order to locate the telephone
and other target messages of target individuals....< 18 >

There were two components to the P415 development, the first being the new
stations required to maintain worldwide interception. More striking,
though, was the expansion of the NSA's ECHELON system, which now links all
the Dictionary computers of all the participating countries.

The ECHELON system has created an awesome spying capacity for the United
States, allowing it to monitor continuously most of the world's
communications. It is an important component of its power and influence in
the post-Cold War world order, and advances in computer processing
technology continue to increase this capacity.

The NSA pushed for the creation of the system and has the supreme position
within it. It has subsidised the allies by providing the sophisticated
computer programmes used in the system, it undertakes the bulk of the
interception operations and, in return, it can be assumed to have full
access to all the allies' capabilities.

Since the ECHELON system was extended to cover New Zealand in the late
1980s, the GCSB's Waihopai and Tangimoana stations -- and indeed all the
British, Canadian and Australian stations too -- can be seen as elements of
a United States system and as serving that system. The GCSB stations
provide some information for New Zealand government agencies, but the
primary logic of these stations is as parts of the global network.

On 2 December 1987, when Prime Minister David Lange announced plans to
build the Waihopai station, he issued a press statement explaining that the
station would provide greater independence in intelligence matters: "For
years there has been concern about our dependence on others for
intelligence -- being hooked up to the network of others and all that
implies. This government is committed to standing on its own two feet."

Lange believed the statement. Even as Prime Minister, no one had told him
about the ECHELON Dictionary system and the way that the Waihopai station
would fit into it. The government was not being told the truth by officials
about New Zealand's most important intelligence facility and was not being
told at all about ECHELON, New Zealand's most important tie into the United
States intelligence system. The Waihopai station could hardly have been
more "hooked up to the network of others", and to all that is implied by
that connection.

1. The generally accepted definition of communications intelligence is
"technical and intelligence information derived from foreign communications
by someone other than the intended recipient. It does not include foreign
press, propaganda or public broadcasts." It generally refers to external
intelligence and so does not usually include governments spying on their
own people.

2. Duncan Campbell, The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier, Michael Joseph Ltd,
London, 1984, p.167.

3. Rick Anderson, Seattle Times, 19 September 1982, p.1.

4. M. Long, World Satellite Almanac, second edition, Howard W. Sams &
Company, Indianapolis, 1987, pp. 206-208, 457-460.

5. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Sidgwick & Guildford, London, 1983,
pp.167-171.

6. The station may not have been initially targeted on Intelsat. Some
photos of the station taken by Des Ball in June 1983 show the two
interception dishes facing directly skywards, meaning either that they were
temporarily not being used or that they were targeted at that time on
satellites above East Asia (in the early 1980s there were no Intelsats
there).

7. A US$29 million project codenamed LADYLOVE at the station, for
completion in mid-1982, involved an "interim deployment" construction of
one dish and a "new operational electronic system" housed initially in
equipment vans. A US$21 million "major new collection and processing
complex with associated antenna systems" followed in 1987.

8. Ascension Island is a 20-square kilometre British territory, situated
halfway between Brazil and Angola in the middle of the South Atlantic. It
has a major radio interception station with joint GCHQ/NSA staffing, a base
for US anti-submarine Orion aircraft, six separate radar and optical
tracking stations for US strategic missile tests and its large US-built
airfield was the main support base for the Falklands War (Richelson and
Ball, The Ties that Bind, Allen & Unwin, Boston, 1985, pp. 194, 201 and
220; Duncan Campbell, New Statesman, "Report reveals island base, 21 May
1985).

9. Mary Louise O'Callaghan, Melbourne Age, "PNG to investigate Australian
spy claim", 26 November 1991, p.1.

10. For a full description of these "overhead" systems, see Jeffrey T.
Richelson, The US Intelligence Community, Ballinger, Cambridge, 1989.

11. Information from Jeffrey Richelson.

12. Mike Frost and Michel Gratton, Spyworld, 1994, Doubleday, Toronto. The
book describes in detail how and where these operations occurred.

13. Mike Frost helped to arrange a series of these operations, including
investigating the microwave routes through some cities while assessing the
suitability of the local Canadian embassy.

14. Brian Toohey and Marion Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks, Angus &
Robertson, Sydney, 1987, p.139.

15. Archie Hamilton, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Written
Answers to Questions, British Parliament record for 9 June 1992, p.97.

16. Duncan Campbell, op. cit., p.168.

17. James Bamford, op. cit., p.102. Internal Menwith Hill station papers
from the early 1990s still referred to a computer-based communications
system called Platform.

18. Duncan Campbell, New Statesman, "They've got it taped', 12 August 1988,
pp.10-12.

Captions Chapter 2

[Image]

1. The Waihopai station - part of a super-secret global system called
ECHELON - automatically intercepts satellite communications for the foreign
allies. The Labour government that approved the station was not told about
these links. (Photo: Marlborough Express)

[Image]

2. One of two dishes at a British spy station in Cornwall that between them
intercepted all Atlantic and Indian Ocean satellite phone and telex until
the early 1980s. (Photo: Duncan Campbell)

[Image]

3. Six UKUSA stations target the Intelsat satellites used to relay most
satellite phone calls, internet, e-mail, faxes and telexes around the
world. They are part of a network of secret stations and spy satellites
which, between them, intercept most of the communications on the planet.

[Image]

4. The controversial Pine Gap base in central Australia is a major ground
station for United States electronic spy satellites. It has kept expanding
after the Cold War; today there are 12 "golf balls". It plays a key roll in
United States military strategies.

[Image]

5. Canada's Leitrim station, just north of Ottawa, appears to be used to
intercept Latin American satellites.


---
#  distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body
#  URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/  contact: nettime-owner@icf.de