Skeptics question scope of NSA’s
information gathering with Echelon
By Wayne Specht, Stars and
Stripes
Best and brightest minds work for agency
At its Web site, www.nsa.gov, the National Security Agency claims it employs the
country’s premier codemakers and codebreakers.
Based at Fort George G. Meade, Md., the NSA conducts
electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence information for the military and
national policymakers. It is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the
United States and perhaps the world.
These mathematicians contribute directly to the
agency’s two missions: designing cipher systems to protect the integrity of U.S.
information systems, and searching for weaknesses in adversaries’ systems and codes.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden is the NSA
director and chief of the Central Security Service, established by Presidential Directive
in 1972. The CSS promotes full partnership between the NSA and the cryptologic elements of
the four branches of the Armed Forces.
Also at Fort Meade is the National Cryptologic School
offering training for the NSA workforce, and training resources for the entire Department
of Defense.
NSA’s workforce represents an unusual combination
of specialties: analysts, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, linguists, computer
scientists and researchers. It also includes customer relations specialists, security
officers, data flow experts, managers, administrative and clerical assistants.
NSA gathers intelligence on issues including
international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.
Recent reports alleging the agency uses its vast array
of supercomputers to conduct industrial espionage at foreign surveillance outposts have
been denied by NSA’s senior leaders.
NSA coordinates its intelligence gathering effort from
ground-based listening posts throughout the world, including Misawa and Kadena air bases
in Japan.
Data and intelligence captured by aerial surveillance
platforms such as the Navy’s P-3 and EP-3 Aries aircraft, and the Air Force’s
Rivet Joint, Cobra Ball and Open Skies aircraft, also is funneled to NSA. Satellites
orbiting the Earth also gather and deliver intelligence to NSA headquarters for inclusion
in daily top-secret reports for the president and national command authorities.
— Wayne Specht |
MISAWA AIR BASE, Japan — Fourteen massive domes, and a nearby
quarter-mile wide antenna on the westernmost corner of this base, may be a part of what
critics say are government eavesdroppers collecting all e-mails, phone calls and faxes.
Recent newspaper accounts of a worldwide electronic network dubbed
“Echelon” by the United States and four other nations have some skeptics wanting
more facts.
Echelon, it is believed by some, is the code name for the software
system that intercepts satellite-based communications for intelligence agencies in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
An investigative committee of the European Parliament recently
concluded the U.S. National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., operates the network, but
the system is far less capable than previously reported.
A May 18 report by the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee
on the Echelon Interception System concluded that while the existence of the system
“is no longer in doubt,” analysis shows that it “cannot be nearly as
extensive as some sections of the media have assumed,” reports the Associated Press.
Still, the committee urged European Union member states, businesses
and private citizens to use encryption software whenever possible.
Allegedly the NSA, according to the American Civil Liberties Union,
works in conjunction with other intelligence agencies.
NSA’s standard response to queries about Echelon, whose origin
dates to 1971, or any other sensitive program involving national intelligence gathering,
is to to ignore them.
Misawa may play a role
Since American forces occupied Japan in 1945, Misawa has served as an
ideal vantage point for eavesdropping on military communications by North Korea and the
former Soviet Union.
In his look at the ultra-secret NSA, “Body of Secrets,”
author James Bamford describes the 14 large radomes at Misawa Air Base in northern Honshu,
“like giant soccer balls on a stretch of green.”
Nearby is the FLR-9 antenna, nearly a quarter mile in diameter, and
affectionately known around base as the “elephant cage.”
From this key listening post, Bamford said signals collected by
antennas inside the radomes are piped into the Misawa Cryptologic Operations Center manned
by NSA civilians, and several hundred military signal intelligence specialists working
around the clock shifts.
Chief Petty Officer Betty Parker-McCullough, public affairs
spokeswoman for the Naval Security Group Activity on Misawa’s Security Hill where the
Navy’s intelligence operations are based, said she was not familiar with Project
Echelon.
Questions about how that information is used, and whether laws are
being violated, are driving the current debate, but is clouded by any real evidence of
Echelon’s capabilities.
“I would be very skeptical that the NSA could or even would try
to process every bit of data out there,” Dr. Jeffery Richelson, a senior fellow at
the National Security Archives, said in a New York Times interview. “It makes sense
to question how information they do gather is used, but the hysterical idea that the NSA
really cares about the e-mail conversations of everyday citizens is bottom-line nonsense.
What everyone is worried about doesn’t really exist.
“Of course,” he added, “Fifty years from now it
could.”
A Mainichi newspaper account in June said Echelon has been spying on
Japanese embassies and consulates in Oceania for 20 years.
Nicky Hager, a New Zealand researcher who testified before the
European Union commission that blasted the spy network, told the Mainichi that Echelon had
covertly carried out industrial espionage against Japan.
Hager claims the spying was done at the behest of the United States,
which wanted to find out how an economically powerful Japan’s policies were
influencing the South Pacific. Hager added that Japanese encoding was too advanced and
little information of worth seeped out, a point confirmed by Japanese Foreign Ministry
officials.
The Japanese business publication Nihon Keizai Shinbun claimed the
CIA in 1996 surreptitiously gained access to a Ministry of Trade and Industry of Japan
computer to get information for U.S trade representative Mickey Canter during Japan-U.S.
automotive trade negotiations.
Last year, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held
a hearing on Echelon that included testimony of CIA Director George Tenet and Air Force
Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, NSA’s current director.
Because of the potential intrusiveness and the privacy implications,
Hayden said NSA’s electronic surveillance activities are subject to oversight from
all three branches of the government.
“Recently, NSA has been the subject of media reports which
suggest that NSA collects all electronic communications, spies on U.S. citizens and
provides intelligence information to U.S. companies,” Hayden told committee members.
“There also have been claims that NSA activities are not subject to regulation or
oversight. All of these claims are false or misleading.”
Congressman Bob Barr, R-Ga., a member of the House Judiciary
Committee, recently told CBS News he wants hearings on Capitol Hill about Echelon to help
ensure that Americans don’t lose their right to privacy. “By all accounts that
we’ve been able to tell, the government is snooping far too much and without any
oversight or reasonable or probable cause basis on which to listen in to by some stories
I’ve seen,” Barr said. “These are communications such as e-mails, Internet
transmissions, phone conversations … up to 2 million communications every hour of
every day.”
Hayden told the committee the NSA is not authorized to collect all
electronic communications.
“NSA is authorized to collect information only for foreign
intelligence purposes and to provide it only to authorized government recipients,” he
said.
Hayden said legal proscriptions notwithstanding, it is not
technically possible to collect all electronic communications everywhere in the world
“on an indiscriminate basis.”
Hayden said in carrying out its mission, NSA constantly deals with
information that must remain confidential, “so that we can continue to collect
foreign intelligence information on various subjects that are of vital interest to the
nation.”
“The American people,” he continued, “must be
confident that the power they have entrusted to us is not being, and will not be,
abused.”
The Associated Press and NSA sources were used in this
report. Hiroshi Chida contributed to this report.
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