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takyon writes:

British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell has written about his career exposing government surveillance in an article simultaneously published at The Intercept and The Register. Campbell was placed under MI5 surveillance for revealing the name of Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) in a 1976 Time Out article. He was arrested along with a fellow Time Out reporter for talking to ex-SIGINT operator John Berry, and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in what became known as the ABC trial.

Campbell revealed the existence of the ECHELON surveillance program in a 1988 article entitled "Somebody's listening" in New Statesman. Now, on August 3, 2015, Campbell says that documents obtained from Edward Snowden have helped shed new light on ECHELON:

As Campbell writes today, in a first-person article in The Intercept, the archive of top-secret documents provided to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contains a stunning 2005 document that not only confirms ECHELON's existence as "a system targeting communications satellites"– it shows how the program was kept an official secret for so long.

It describes how in 2000, the European Parliament responded to increasingly authoritative reports that ECHELON was being used to indiscriminately survey non-military targets — including governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every corner of the world — by appointing a committee to investigate the program. Members of the committee vowed to get the truth from the NSA. What happened, according to an article in the NSA's own in-house "Foreign Affairs Digest" was this:

Corporate NSA (FAD, SID, OGC, PAO and Policy), ensured that our interests, and our SIGINT partners' interests, were protected throughout the ordeal; and ironically, the final report of the EU Commission [link] reflected not only that NSA played by the rules, with congressional oversight, but that those characteristics were lacking when the Commission applied its investigatory criteria to other European nations.

The initials there stand for NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate, Signals Intelligence, Office of the General Counsel, and Public Affairs Office. And then, in what is possibly one of the most memorable lines to come out of the Snowden archive, the author of the article, a "foreign affairs directorate special adviser," concluded with this observation:

In the final analysis, the "pig rule" applied when dealing with this tacky matter: "Don't wrestle in the mud with the pigs. They like it, and you both get dirty."

The companion article also mentions that ECHELON protests such as the "Jam Echelon Day" on October 21, 1999 were premature; the NSA has only recently begun to scan voice communications for keywords routinely.

Original Submission