 COLUMN
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Security Adviser
P.J. Connolly
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Echelon finds a foe
A WHILE BACK, I talked about encryption and the reasons why people don't use it. The funny thing is, a government report surfaced recently that urges businesses and citizens to start implementing cryptography. The catches are that the government body involved was the European Parliament and its concerns centered on the U.S.-led Echelon project. For anyone who hasn't been following this kind of thing, Echelon ties together the national eavesdropping resources of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. It dates back to an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom in 1946 to continue sharing intercepted communications as the countries had done during the World Wars.
In the first war, Americans were learning the basics of codebreaking from the British. In the second war, things were closer to equal; the British had inherited the details of the German Enigma-machine cipher's workings from the French and Polish after their defeats, while the American military cracked the Japanese Red and Purple systems. The "UKUSA" agreement of 1946 was an effort to harness the skills of both countries in the face of the Soviet threat. Canada joined soon after, followed by Australia and New Zealand in 1977.
From the American side of things, Echelon still behaves as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Security Agency (NSA). Given that office's history, it didn't surprise me that when representatives of the European Parliament came to Washington last month, they didn't get a very warm reception. In fact, the NSA cancelled a scheduled meeting with the Europeans, which struck me as counterproductive but totally in character for the spooks formerly known as "No Such Agency." Eventually the European MPs and their staff went back to Strasbourg, France, empty-handed. But revenge is a dish best served cold, and they didn't have to work very hard to come up with a solution.
To the NSA and to the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters and their Commonwealth counterparts, they essentially said: "Intercept this." Even I, the Yankee-Doodle Dandy, have to admire the response of the Europeans in calling upon their businesses and citizens to adopt open-source e-mail encryption with the specific purpose of foiling Echelon and other systems that might exist. A draft of the report is available at http://fas.org/irp/program/process/europarl_draft.pdf. (Or see James Banford's Body of Secrets, a recently published history of the NSA, starting on page 394.)
The part about "other systems" is food for thought. Given that France and Russia are the only major powers with the geography and money to build an intercept system on the global scale of Echelon, it might well be time for Americans to get serious about encrypting their e-mail.
P.J. Connolly doesn't use encrypted e-mail, but that's going to change soon. Don't send your public keys to pj_connolly@infoworld.com, because there's no guarantee of a reply.
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