Bagian Ketiga
Commercial spying
With the rapid erosion of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s, Western intelligence agencies were anxious to redefine their mission to justify the scope of their global surveillance system. Some of the agencies' closest corporate friends quickly gave them an option - commercial espionage.
By redefining the term "national security" to include spying on foreign competitors of prominent US corporations, the signals intelligence game has gotten ugly. And it very well may have prompted the recent scrutiny by the European Union that ECHELON has endured.
While UKUSA agencies have pursued economic and commercial information on behalf of their countries with renewed vigor after the passing of communism in Eastern Europe, the NSA practice of spying on behalf of US companies has a long history.
Gerald Burke, who served as Executive Director of President Nixon's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, notes commercial espionage was endorsed by the US government as early as 1970:
"By and large, we recommended that henceforth economic intelligence be considered a function of the national security, enjoying a priority equivalent to diplomatic, military, and technological intelligence."<54>
To accommodate the need for information regarding international commercial deals, the intelligence agencies set up a small, unpublicized department within the Department of Commerce, the Office of Intelligence Liaison.
This office receives intelligence reports from the US intelligence agencies about pending international deals that it discreetly forwards to companies that request it or may have an interest in the information. Immediately after coming to office in January 1993, President Clinton added to the corporate espionage machine by creating the National Economic Council, which feeds intelligence to "select" companies to enhance US competitiveness.
The capabilities of ECHELON to spy on foreign companies is nothing new, but the Clinton administration has raised its use to an art:
In 1990 the German magazine Der Speigel revealed that the NSA had intercepted messages about an impending $200 million deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite manufacturer NEC Corp. After President Bush intervened in the negotiations on behalf of American manufacturers, the contract was split between NEC and AT&T.
In 1994, the CIA and NSA intercepted phone calls between Brazilian officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF about a radar system that the Brazilians wanted to purchase. A US firm, Raytheon, was a competitor as well, and reports prepared from intercepts were forwarded to Raytheon.<55>
In September 1993, President Clinton asked the CIA to spy on Japanese auto manufacturers that were designing zero-emission cars and to forward that information to the Big Three US car manufacturers: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.<56>
The Warning
While the UKUSA relationship is a product of Cold War political and military tensions, ECHELON is purely a product of the 20th Century - the century of statism.
The modern drive toward the assumption of state power has turned legitimate national security agencies and apparati into pawns in a manipulative game where the stakes are no less than the survival of the Constitution. The systems developed prior to ECHELON were designed to confront the expansionist goals of the Soviet Empire - something the West was forced out of necessity to do.
But as Glyn Ford, European Parliament representative for Manchester, England, and the driving force behind the European investigation of ECHELON, has pointed out:
"The difficulty is that the technology has now become so elaborate that what was originally a small client list has become the whole world."<64>
What began as a noble alliance to contain and defeat the forces of communism has turned into a carte blanche to disregard the rights and liberties of the American people and the population of the free world.
As has been demonstrated time and again, the NSA has been persistent in subverting not just the intent of the law in regards to the prohibition of domestic spying, but the letter as well. The laws that were created to constrain the intelligence agencies from infringing on our liberties are frequently flaunted, re-interpreted and revised according to the bidding and wishes of political spymasters in Washington D.C. Old habits die hard, it seems.
As stated above, there is a need for such sophisticated surveillance technology. Unfortunately, the world is filled with criminals, drug lords, terrorists and dictators that threaten the peace and security of many nations. The thought that ECHELON can be used to eliminate or control these international thugs is heartening. But defenders of ECHELON argue that the rare intelligence victories over these forces of darkness and death give wholesale justification to indiscriminate surveillance of the entire world and every member of it. But more complicated issues than that remain.
The shameless and illegal targeting of political opponents, business competitors, dissidents and even Christian ministries stands as a testament that if America is to remain free, we must bind these intelligence systems and those that operate them with the heavy chains of transparency and accountability to our elected officials.
But the fact that the ECHELON apparatus can be quickly turned around on those same officials in order to maintain some advantage for the intelligence agencies indicates that these agencies are not presently under the control of our elected representatives.
That Congress is not aware of or able to curtail these abuses of power is a frightening harbinger of what may come here in the United States. The European Parliament has begun the debate over what ECHELON is, how it is being used and how free countries should use such a system. Congress should join that same debate with the understanding that consequences of ignoring or failing to address these issues could foster the demise of our republican form of government. Such is the threat, as Senator Frank Church warned the American people over twenty years ago.
At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter.
There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology...
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.
That is the abyss from which there is no return.<65>
Endnotes
1. Steve Wright, An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, European Parliament: Scientific and Technologies Options Assessment, Luxembourg, January 6, 1998.
2. Bruno Giussani, "European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses," The New York Times, February 24, 1998.
3. Nelson, New Zealand: Craig Potton Publishing, 1996.
4. Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countries, (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985) pp. 137-8.
5. Ibid., 142-143.
6. Secret Power, p. 40. See note 3.
7. National Security Agency, About the NSA.
8. The Ties that Bind, p. 143.
9. The coverage area of the various Intelsat satellites can be found at the Intelsat website at: http://www.intelsat.com/cmc/connect/globlmap.htm
10. Secret Power, p. 28.
11. Ibid., p. 35.
12. Ibid.
13. Marco Campagna, Un Systeme De Surveillance Mondial, Cahiers de Television (CTV-France), June 1998; Peter Hum, "I Spy," The Ottawa Citizen, May 10, 1997.
14. Secret Power, pp. 35-36, 150; Ties That Bind, pp. 204-207.
15. Mike Frost and Michel Graton, Spyworld: How C.S.E. Spies on Canadians and the World (Toronto: Seal/McClelland-Bantam, 1995), p. 35
16. Robert Windrem, "Spy Satellites Enter New Dimension," MSNBC and NBC News, August 8, 1998.
17. An Appraisal of Technology of Political Control, p. 19.
18. Duncan Campbell and Linda Melvern, "America's Big Ear on Europe," New Statesman, July 18, 1980, pp. 10-14.
19. Simon Davies, "EU Simmers Over Menwith Listening Post," London Telegraph, July 16, 1998.
20. Nicholas Rufford, "Spy Station F83," The Sunday (London) Times, May 31, 1998.
21. Duncan Campell, "Somebody's Listening," The New Statesman, August 12, 1988, pp. 10-12; "The Hill," Dispatches, BBC Channel 4, October 6, 1993 (transcript provided by Duncan Campbell); Loring Wirbel, "Space - Intelligence Technology's Embattled Frontier," Electronic Engineering Times, April 22, 1997; Nicholas Rufford, "Cracking the Menwith Codes," The Sunday (London) Times, May 31, 1998.
22. Duncan Campbell, BT Condemned for Listing Cables to US SIGINT Station, September 4, 1997.
23. Ibid.; Spy Station F83.
24. Mentioned in Dispatches: The Hill.
25. An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, p. 19. Memex maintains a website describing their defense and intelligence products and contracts: http://www.memex.co.uk/prod/intelligence/comm.html **UPDATE: The information originally included is incorrect. The Pathfinder software is manufactured by the US company, Presearch Inc. (http://www.presearch.com). Memex is the commercial search engine that acts as the database and retrieval mechanism. (Email to the author date 12.29.99 from Pete Graner, Senior Scientist, Information Technology Group, Presearch Inc.)
26. Secret Power, p. 49.
27. Ibid., pp. 165-166.
28. Ibid., p. 44
29. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization, (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 138-139.
30. Secret Power, p. 45.
31. Ties That Bind, pp. 223-224.
32. Brown v. Glines, 444 U.S. 348 (1980).
33. Puzzle Palace, p. 314, 459.
34. External Collection Program: U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence and the Rights of Americans, Final Report, Book III, April 23, 1976, p. 765.
35. United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)
36. Puzzle Palace, pp. 370-373.
37. Puzzle Palace, p. 381.
38. Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, et. al., The Lawless State (Penguin: New York, 1976) p. 146..
39. Seymour Hersh, "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces," New York Times (December 22, 1974), p. 1.
40. The Lawless State, p. 153; US Commission on CIA Activites within the United States, Report to the President (US Government Printing Office: Washington DC, 1975), p. 144n3.
41. 50 USC Sec. 1801, et. seq.
42. For more information on the FISC, see this author's essay "Inside America's Secret Court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," The Privacy Papers, No. 2 (Washington D.C.: Free Congress Foundation, 1998).
43. Spyworld, pp. 234-238.
44. Ibid., p. 238.
45. Ibid., pp. 93-97.
46. Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, "Catching Americans in NSA's Net," Baltimore Sun, December 12, 1995.
47. Keith C. Epstein and John S. Long, "Security Agency Accused of Monitoring U.S. Calls," Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 1, 1988, pp. 1A, 10A.
48. Pete Carey, "NSA Accused of Forbidden Phone Taps," San Jose Mercury News, July 2, 1988, p. 1A.
49. Somebody's Listening, p. 11.
50. Catching Americans in NSA's Net.
51. Ibid.
52. John Merritt, "UK: GCHQ Spies on Charities and Companies - Fearful Whistleblowers Tell of Massive Routine Abuse," Observer (London), June 18, 1992.
53. Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Thatcher Ordered Lonrho Phone-Tap Over Harrods Affairs," Observer (London), June 28, 1992; cited in Secret Power, p. 54.
54. Dispatches: The Hill, op. cit.
55. Tom Bowman and Scott Shane, "Battling High-Tech Warriors," Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1995.
56. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones, May/June 1994.
57. Cited in Bruce Livesey, "Trolling for Secrets: Economic Espionage is the New Niche for Government Spies," Financial Post (Canada), February 28, 1998.
58. U.S. Spy Agency Helped U.S. Companies Win Business Overseas, Nikkei English News, September 21, 1998.
59. Timothy W. Maier, "Did Clinton Bug Conclave for Cash," Insight, September 15, 1997. The three article series is online at: http://www.insightmag.com/investiga/apecindex.html
60. Timothy W. Maier, "Snoops, Sex and Videotape," Insight, September 29, 1997.
61. Matthew Fletcher, "Cook Faces Quiz on Big Brother Spy Net," Financial Mail (England), March 1, 1998.
62. Trolling for Secrets, op. cit.
63. Spyworld, pp. 224-227.
64. Lucille Redmond, "Suddenly There Came a Tapping...", The Sunday Business Post (Ireland), March 9, 1998.
65. National Broadcasting Company, "Meet the Press" (Washington D.C.: Merkle Press, 1975), transcript of August 17, 1975, p. 6; quoted in Puzzle Palace, p. 477.
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