March 20, 2000, Volume 3 - Number 5
Cool War
Lying and spying in cyberspace
Read a copy of an old science fiction novel by Frederick Pohl entitled Cool War (Del Rey Books, 1982), and you will see that, as usual, science fiction was behind the curve. The premise is that when the Cold War ends, we turn the institutions built during the Cold War against our “friends” for economic and political advantage.
Intelligence agencies in Australia, the U.K., Canada, and the United States, among others, have set up an international electronic surveillance network called Echelon. The Australian intelligence agency officially confirmed its existence on May 23, 1999, and European magazines have been printing features on it for months. In a nutshell, Echelon deploys “sniffer” programs that monitor the data traffic at six critical junctions on the Internet, looking for key words and red-flag phrases—much like a censorware program used for children.
Echelon reportedly intercepts approximately two million communications per hour and sends the hits to the appropriate intelligence branch of the appropriate member nation. Experts estimate that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other espionage organizations scan as much as 90 percent of all Net traffic. The NSA (also called “No Such Agency” because it hides its existence so well) is not supposed to engage in domestic spying. Thanks to Echelon, the NSA can avoid breaking the law by asking British intelligence to monitor U.S. mail, and vice versa.
Media coverage of Echelon has been scant in the United States. In Europe, however, Echelon is getting a lot of coverage, including the cover of The Economist (Aug. 14 and May 1, 1999) in the U.K. European nations claim that the Echelon countries commit industrial espionage when they hand over the information they collect to private companies, which then steal contracts from such firms as Thomson S.A. and Airbus. Swedish, French, and German intelligence agencies promise that investigations are forthcoming.
Spies Like Us
On this side of the Atlantic, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) added language to the Foreign Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 that requires the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Justice to report to Congress what legal standards justify their communications intercepts involving U.S. citizens. You can get more details at cryptome.org/hr106-457.txt.
Rep. Barr is a former CIA official and U.S. Attorney who serves on the House Judiciary and Government Reform Committees and is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As of this writing, Barr's panel has demanded information on Echelon from the NSA, which has, for the first time in its history, refused to turn over such information and documents, citing attorney-client privilege.
Unfortunately, Barr is a conservative Republican with a “well-known style of fiery rhetoric” that has alienated leftist civil libertarians. Reform Chairman Dan Burton has also committed to hold hearings on this matter.
The Internet is almost perfect for this sort of spying. It is widely accessible and easy to search at your leisure. Email encryptions jam Echelon's efforts, says British crypto expert Brian Gladman, but most people simply won't bother encrypting. “This won't happen,” wrote Gladman, “not because it cannot be done, but rather because most users prefer functionality over security and, given the chance to put processor and software improvements into one or the other, the market will, for the present at least, continue to be driven by functionality.”
You may also want to look at the report by Steve Wright, director of Omega Foundation (a British human rights group), entitled “An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control” (cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm). Omega prepared the report for the European Parliament's Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) group.
Civil liberty and privacy advocates may want to know that the dictionaries of the text parsers reportedly contain the names of such organizations as Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Although the NSA is one of the most secretive organizations in the world, the British government, with its Official State Secrets Act, has even more powers of secrecy than the U.S. government.
Consequently, the European Parliament and individual European governments are demanding that U.S. and British intelligence agencies hand over information about Echelon and implement accountability mechanisms. From the European viewpoint, the U.S. government has not only prevented European citizens from buying strong cryptography tools, but is now spying on them.
Joe Celko is an Atlanta-based independent consultant. He is the author of three
books on SQL -- SQL For Smarties (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995),
SQL Puzzles and Answers (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995), and
Instant SQL Programming (Wrox Press, 1997) -- and wrote the SQL for Smarties column for DBMS
magazine. You can contact him via email at www.celko.com or 71062.1056@compuserve.com.
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