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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:06PM
Come on guys - Snowden articles always get responses! Since everyone is afraid, I'll go first.
Yeah, I guess it would feel good to have a Snowden step up, and verify what you've been telling the world. Campbell did a good job, and some of us were listening to him. He deserves a little of Snowden's fame - or infamy, depending on your view of whistle blowing.
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:42PM
Come on guys - Snowden articles always get responses! Since everyone is afraid, I'll go first.
I don't really think it has anything to do with being afraid. Snowden content is just getting old. Being told that ECHELON is real is like being told by the US Government that Area 51 exists -- thanks but we already knew that. Content-wise these Snowden stories are just getting thinner by revelation, it is similar stories every time that are being rehashed over and over again sometimes sprinkled with something "new" and mildly shocking for the uninitiated. They should just stop kicking the dead mule already cause we already know how the story will be told - NSA BAD, Snowden GOOD.
The responses to the articles also then tend to follow the same lines, people either dislike Snowden and what he did or believe that he is some kind of Free-Speech-Jesus and that the constitution-hating-fascist-pig-dogs of the NSA have finally been brought into the light ... 50 posts later ... nothing new, worthwhile or even remotely interesting have been said.
Perhaps I have just become quite blasé in regards to future Snowden revelations, for me to even lift an eyebrow in the future it must be something extraordinarily spectacular and I doubt we'll ever see that. The initial shock value is gone.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday August 07 2015, @02:14AM
Well this one might shock some unless they read it all. Or maybe not.
Echelon as I knew it was perfectly permissible ELINT/SIGINT (and none of the other stuff heaped upon the name) as long as it functioned within the realms of real oversight by the elected. Same for “stay behind” (I hate it when people call it “Gladios”). In the past there has been a general problem of people throwing everything together into one big stew instead of keeping separate things separate. Now that's obviously also become the modus operandi within the surveillance and manipulation system.
Misuse/abuse by fascists (or anyone else pretending not to be that while acting in such a manner) is of course not in any way appropriate, not then and not now, nor is mass surveillance or any other kind of illegal surveillance. Not that legal has any meaning in the current context. In some very few cases surveillance of individuals are permitted and too often that as well has been misused, traditionally against unpopular political beliefs, and that isn't okay either. Not against nazis or communists either: without the adherence to democratic principles and human rights one becomes no better than what one was supposed to guard against.
One would like to think that every politician should be keenly aware of why oversight is so important but none of them seem to understand it. There's little that speaks as loudly as the nearly total silence on the importance of these matters from anyone elected or seeking to be elected or anyone that could be said to be powerful. It looks to be the same everywhere across the globe and across any boundaries including that between “enemies” and “friends”. There might be something small in the MSM once in a while but no attempt at providing the proper context. No outrage over the end of democracy.
I am not skilled. At anything. I am powerless as is nearly everyone. But the following is still how things appears to me.
Among all the intelligent and accomplished ordinary people out there unless one specifically seeks it out one will be “lucky” to find someone saying something like “we're being spied upon and that's wrong” but even that is incorrect. The scale of what has been implemented is far beyond the concept of being spied upon: one doesn't call it spying when it's management of livestock.
In my humble opinion this whole thing has been an enormous failure so far. I will gladly accept to be proven wrong but the careful “responsible” slow release of vetted information ensures near-perfect containment of the information.
They might as well stop if they have nothing better to do than this. Don't they realize they're pulling their punches each and every time and further away from the target on each repitition? Present company and some few hundreds or thousands (?) of others excluded: people are dead asleep.
By now I would release everything unredacted to everyone, everything from Snowden, everything given to Wikileaks, everything taken in any of the system intrusions. Yes that is a huge amount of data that few could store all of on their own (I sure couldn't) but at least that's a technical issue that has a solution.
Flood the world with consequences so that we might possibly avoid the future ones. Continue to show more of the consequences of where we are and where we are heading. Encourage more actual transparancy.
People might die and plenty will be hurt. For all I now I'll be hurt too, who knows maybe even die for some reason or the other or for writing something like this. And if it still doesn't wake up peopple in general then at least one tried with the best one had.
As said I would love to be proven wrong or to be convinced that what I'm writing is wrong. I am also aware that I am biased in favor of being proven wrong because then all the issues and problems disappear back into the thick layer of disbelief, and in addition to that in turn I am aware that such willful “chosen” ignorance is not a good thing.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:45PM
I have been telling people about ECHELON in all its evolutions. And for 30 years I have been told I'm just being paranoid.
This is one of those time I really hate being able to say "I told you so"
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:31PM
I recall text files discussing it, and wondering about it -- but lumped it into the TEMPEST monitoring sort of infeasibility due to the grand scope and efforts involved.
But yeah, this is not really stuff that helps me sleep at night.
With the always on and listening siri, cortana, google now, and amazon TV remote controls and what have you, the NSA can listen to keywords any step of the way.
With windows as a service, they don't require TEMPEST to see what you're typing as you talk on the phone, either...
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:59PM
I went through the whole thing erlier today (not native english) and it's well worth the read.
Being born mid '80s, and being just in my lower teens in the '90s, I became interested really interested in computing in the early '00s, there was a big shunk of information I was missing.
Until the Snowden revelations from 2 years ago, I genuinelt wouldn't believe that somebody, anybody, was able to spy *all* of the internet, at all times. Yet the NSA was capable of doing so at least as early as 2008 (the date on the files with one of the all-capital-letter-programs, can't remember).
So, today I went through all of the Campbell's article, and it basically says that one year after the launch of public/business satellites in 1966 ("intelsat", ironically), in 1967 the NSA had already the technology (ECHELON) in place to spy all of the comunications going through it (and if you're a tl;dr type: intelsat was a service for western governments and businesses, Russia/China didn't have the infrastructure to make use of it until several years later; ie. it was made to spy 'allied' govts, civilians and corps.).
So to put the pieces toghether: I held the NSA technical capabilities in very high regard, but I was genuinely largely underestimating. They had the technology to spy the webs before the webs even came to reality, and probably just adjusted the storage/computing resources and algorythms over time.
If you think of it in the surveillors' terms: it just can't get any better if everyones' communications become digital. Well maybe the "gold nugget" of having the signals on your person at all times.
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QUITE UNRELATED TO THE MAIN POINT:
This brings me to a side question, I can't research on my own right now. What is the relation between DARPA/ARPA and the NSA? To me, a foreigner, the US Military is US Military all the same, but is there any chance that the Internet wasn't deliberately designed for surveillance? Sorry for being bold.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:35PM
> To me, a foreigner, the US Military is US Military all the same
In 2011, the public portion of the US military budget was $665 billion. It is in no way a monolith, nothing that size could even approach monolithic integration. There are millions of right hands which have no idea what the millions of left hands are doing. For example, Tor was developed by the US military and we know from Snowden's releases that it has been very frustrating for the NSA.
> but is there any chance that the Internet wasn't deliberately designed for surveillance?
The history of the development of the internet is very public. Over the decades since its inception at BBN, there have been hundreds of thousands of competing interests trying to influence its development, including the NSA. But its pretty obvious that the internet was not deliberately designed for anything more specific than communications. Most of it developed organically over the years. The entire RFC process [wikipedia.org] which creates all the standards that define the internet, is about as bottom-up a process as you can get.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:55AM
There's a famous quote from the late Senator Frank Church, that Glenn Greenwald later used as the title for his book on Snowden: "In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, 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." He said this back in 1975, and as chairman of the Senate committee that bears his name that was mandated to do oversight on the actions of the American intelligence agencies, he would have known about the NSA, whose very existence was still classified at the time, and it seems quite clear in retrospect that he is referring to the NSA here without mentioning it by name.
And no, I don't think the Internet was designed for surveillance. The United States Military is a huge organisation, and branches of it sometimes work at cross purposes. The US Navy's Naval Research Laboratory did initial development of Tor and gave the project funding for many years after it became independent, and we all know from Snowden's disclosures that the NSA thinks that "Tor stinks [theguardian.com]". DARPA/ARPA are just as separate from the NSA.