From...

December 30, 1999
Web posted at: 12:55 p.m. EST (1755 GMT)

by Douglas F. Gray

BERLIN (IDG) -- "Echelon" is probably the most popular buzzword among conspiracy theorists since "magic bullet" and "Area 51." But does the Echelon worldwide surveillance network exist allowing the world's governments to intercept the bulk of communications between citizens? According to security specialist Duncan Campbell, the answer is a definite yes.

The Echelon network originated during the Second World War when the U.K. cracked the secret codes used by the German government and the U.S. cracked the codes used by the Japanese government. Following the ending of the war, the UKUSA treaty was established in 1947 between the intelligence agencies of Canada, the U.K., the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, laying the definitive groundwork for Echelon.

QUICKVOTE Do you believe that Echelon exists? Yes No View Results

"Echelon is not a collection system, but an extensive filtering system," said Campbell, a British freelance journalist and television producer. He was speaking at hacker groups the Chaos Computer Club's 16th Chaos Communication Congress here.

Campbell wrote the first article on Echelon over 10 years ago, and has been reporting on the network ever since. Echelon is an official name for the global surveillance system, "but it is one of the thousands of codenames used," according to Campbell.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Make your PC work harder with these tips

Lawsuit claims NSA spying on Americans

Microsoft gains government security certifications

IDG.net's products pages

Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net

E-BusinessWorld

Year 2000 World

Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletters

Search IDG.net in 12 languages

News Radio

Fusion audio primers

Computerworld Minute

"The key component of Echelon is a computer function called 'dictionary,' which just does to text messages what (search engines) Yahoo or AltaVista do, it searches out words," Campbell said. Echelon can supposedly intercept text messages sent over any medium from fax machines to the Internet without being noticed. Echelon then sorts through the intercepted communication looking for keywords.

With this theory in mind, a fringe group of users on the Internet organized "Jam Echelon" day this year by attaching a list of words to each e-mail they sent, hoping to overwhelm the system. "It was great for political consciousness raising, but you don't know the keywords," Campbell said. "That list looked like it was written by a group of American libertarians," he added.

Also of concern is the driving force behind Echelon -- the highly secretive U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Campbell said. "Because so much of the switching technology (for the Internet) is based in the U.S., you can usually find a trace route through the U.S., including inter-European messages," he added.

Much of the paranoia surrounding Echelon is based in fact, Campbell said. He wrote and directed a documentary in the early 1990s called "The Hill" for the U.K.'s Channel Four television station about a 562-acre NSA complex in Menwith Hill, Yorkshire. The function of the NSA complex is shrouded in secrecy, he said.

Although the written word is easy for Echelon to deal with, the spoken word is a little more difficult for the network to handle. "After spending a great deal of money on trying to spot certain spoken words, the NSA realized it was a silly idea," Campbell said, noting that in speech-to-text applications, the user must first "train" the computer for the individual's voice.

"The primary means for intercepting voice communications is targeted towards watching calls to or from certain numbers," he said. The NSA also uses another method called "traffic analysis," which doesn't analyze the content, just who is talking with whom by noting the telephone numbers dialed, he added.

The Echelon network of the future faces a much harder task, with the introduction of new forms of surveillance, including direct interference with target computers, Campbell said.

He also pointed out that governments may secretly release information-stealing viruses and holes in the style of the Melissa virus and Back Orifice hacking tool. And of course, there could be just simple preemptive tampering with hardware and software, such as the NSA key in Windows, which caused suspicion earlier this year.

"As we move into 2000 and beyond, it is clear that the NSA and others face difficulty in getting what they want out of all the traffic, as well as facing encryption and fiber optics. The future for them is probably in network attacks," Campbell said.

"They also have to realize that the best and brightest don't want to work with them anymore, which was never true before," he added.

Douglas F. Gray writes for the IDG News Service.