 COLUMN
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Security Adviser
P.J. Connolly
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A return to Echelon
AS I WAS SAYING last week, the European nations aren't thrilled about Echelon, the ongoing electronic-surveillance project carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency in partnership with the NSA's Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand counterparts. I also mentioned that the draft report in preparation by a temporary committee of the European Parliament (to read it, go to http://fas.org/irp/program/process/europarl_draft.pdf) suggested that E.U. businesses and consumers begin using encryption as a foil to the Echelon effort, but the report is more than just a call for the use of cryptography.
In short, Echelon is a signals intelligence (or SIGINT) project that screens e-mail, fax, telephone, and other traffic. The Echelon partners in theory exchange information from each nation's intelligence resources, but in practice, NSA runs the show and provides the intercepts.
It's not like Echelon is the only SIGINT game in town: France and Russia have the geographic and financial resources to match Echelon -- as I noted last week. Most of the Western European nations have some sort of SIGINT capability. Ireland and Luxembourg are notable exceptions to this, but they also lack anything resembling a foreign intelligence service. Other countries are in a position to run decent -- although not global -- SIGINT operations as do China, India, Japan, and South Africa, but that's based solely on my own information.
Frankly this report deflates a lot of the hype over Echelon that's been aired in recent years. It makes the important point that Echelon is not capable of intercepting every e-mail, fax, and phone call placed anywhere, as has been claimed. The draft report explains the limitations on intercepting traffic over the current generation of fiber-optic cables, as well as the changes in the Internet's infrastructure that give the Echelon partners at best a ringside seat on Internet traffic. Essentially, Echelon thrives on satellite communications, and satellite provides a small enough percentage of the global communications infrastructure that most of us should be able to sleep easily.
But one thing that impresses me is the draft report's argument that when Echelon operates from a state security perspective, no laws are broken, but that if it is used for commercial intelligence -- as it is reported to have been -- then European laws are violated. In addition, the draft report points out that NSA operations from British and German bases may well conflict with those nations' responsibilities as E.U. members, and that wholesale interception of international communications probably represents a violation of European citizens' fundamental right to privacy.
We Yankees like to cast ourselves as the defenders of liberty, but this time it looks like the Old World has beaten us to the punch. James Madison probably figured that privacy was covered by the "unreasonable search" clause when he drafted the American Bill of Rights, but what I wouldn't give for a time machine right about now.
P.J. Connolly (pj_connolly@infoworld.com) wonders how long it will take before U.S. privacy laws will catch up with European statutes. Get this column free via e-mail each week. Sign up at www.iwsubscribe.com/newsletters .
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