THE MENWITH HILL SITE
- The EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT Investigates
The 1999
report "Assessing the Technologies of Political Control" [
28
] commissioned by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament, and considered by the committee of the office of Science and Technology Assessment (STOA) in Luxembourg states:
A follow up report for STOA entitled "The state of the art in Communications Intelligence (COMINT) of automated processing for intelligence purposes of intercepted broadband multi-language leased or common carrier systems, and its applicability to COMINT targeting and selection, including speech recognition" by Duncan Campbell [ 29 ] describes the ECHELON system and the state of the art in COMINT in great detail.
French politicians and lawyers have frequently accused the US and Britain of using electronic intelligence networks to win business away from foreign rivals [ 30 ]. However, France runs a worldwide electronic intelligence system of its own - known as "Frenchelon", based at Domme, near Sarlat in the Dordogne, and including an eavesdropping station in New Caledonia in the Pacific.
David Bowe, MEP for Cleveland and Richmond, is quoted in the Jan 5-11 1998 edition of "The Big Issue" as saying "The section on surveillance confirms my belief that American intelligence gathering operations present a serious threat to British and European political sovereignty, civil liberties and commercial interests. Peace campaigners and civil liberties champions have not been imagining a disturbing, all-seeing presence in our midst - there is one." Bowe continues to call on the European Parliament to oppose moves by the US to make all private messages sent via the Internet accessible to the NSA.
Yorkshire MEPs Tom Murphy, Mike McGowan, David Bowe and Barry Seal
join other Yorkshire campaigners in chains for a symbolic demonstration
on American Independence Day outside the Base at Menwith Hill
Heidi Hautala, Co-President of the Green/EFA Group said "Two years ago, Commissioner Bangemann simply denied the existence of an interception system such as Echelon, and his successor Frits Bolkestein is continuing to do so. But the Parliament's STOA Report on Echelon and the subsequent hearing organised by the Civil Rights Committee have given enough evidence that this system exists and works. We call upon the EU Commission and the Council to show more transparency in this question and to help to shed light on the legal grey zone in which telecommunication interception is practised."
This proposal was at first rejected by the major political groups in Parliament. Instead, on 5 July 2000 the European Parliament decided to set up a temporary committee and appointed 36 MEPs to lead a year-long investigation into Echelon [ 32 ]. A temporary committee is not restricted to dealing only with matters relating to community law (as a committee of enquiry would be) and can investigate to see if the rights of European citizens are adequately protected and determine whether European industry is put at risk by the global interception of communications. The committee was due to meet 7 times between July-September 2000 and in October 2000 Ilka Schröder, a Green Party member of the temporary committee from Berlin, filed criminal complaints in Germany against Echelon [ 33 ].
Members of the EP panel decided to visit the United States in May 2001 on a fact-finding mission to include discussions with various U.S. politicians and intelligence officials. Not surprisingly, no-one in the United States Government would admit that ECHELON even existed. The NSA, the CIA, the State Department and the Department of Commerce refused to talk to the committee. The MEPs cut their visit short, returning home angry and frustrated. [ 34 ]
The first draft of the report, prepared by Gerhard Schmidt, was published in early June 2001 [ 35 ] but the MEPs admitted they had been unable to find conclusive proof of industrial espionage. They considered the threat to privacy posed by ECHELON to be more disturbing and James Bamford is quoted as saying that "the real issue is whether Echelon is doing away with individual privacy - a basic human right" [ 36 ]. The report concludes the system cannot be extensive as it is based only on the worldwide interception of satellite communications, only a small part of the total communications made around the globe. The report decided that ECHELON had access to a limited proportion of radio and cable communications. However, privacy groups claim that Britain, the US and their Echelon partners, were developing eavesdropping systems to cope with the explosion in communications on email and the internet. In addition, evidence submitted showed that the ECHELON system gives 55,000 British and American operatives access to data gathered by 120 spy satellites worldwide. Every minute of every day, the system is capable of processing three million electronic communications.
Also, Nicky Hager has expressed fears that the US is moving to directly tap into undersea fibre-optic cables. The US Navy recently launched a $2.5 billion Seawolf-class attack submarine (the "USS Jimmy Carter"). The 106.7m, 9297-tonne nuclear-powered submarine is the third of a class capable of diving to 800m, deploying minisubs and remote-controlled underwater vehicles and attaching tapping devices directly to cables lying at the bottom of the world's oceans [ 37 ].
Duncan Campbell supplied four important submissions to the Committee on "Interception Capabilities - Impact and Exploitation". These were commissioned by the Committee in December 2000 to update and extend the previous 1999 EP report, "Interception Capabilities 2000". They cover the use of communications intelligence (COMINT) for economic purposes, legal and human rights issues, and recent political and technological developments. These submissions were presented to Brussels on 22 and 23 January 2001 . The fourth study, on new political and technical developments, was presented in the form of a slideshow [ 38 ]. The first paper summarises the role of ECHELON in COMINT [ 39 ] and points out that very few media reports have provided original new information about Echelon. The second paper [ 40 ] on the "COMINT impact on international trade" describes in detail how, since 1992 , Europe could have sustained significant employment and financial loss as a result of the U.S. government's use of ECHELON. Estimates of the damage vary from $13 billion to $145 billion but the exact figure will never be known. It refers to various annexes which describe (among other things) the work of the U.S. Trade Promotion Co-ordinating Committee (TPCC) and the Advocacy Center. The third paper [ 41 ] reveals how Britain protects the rights of Americans, Canadians and Australians against interception that would not comply with their own domestic law, while offering no protection of any kind to other Europeans.
The Echelon committee stated that "possible threats to privacy and to businesses posed by a system of the ECHELON type arise not only from the fact that is a particularly powerful monitoring system, but also that it operates in a largely legislation-free area." It called for the development and promotion of European "user-friendly open-source encryption software" - it wanted "encryption to become the norm".
The report also called for "a common level of protection against intelligence operations based on the highest level which exists in any member state". The Committee was particularly critical of the situation in the UK and some other member states where there is no parliamentary oversight of surveillance. It said that national governments should set up "specific, formally structured monitoring committees responsible for supervising and scrutinising the activities of the intelligence services" and called for the European Parliament to hold an international congress for NGOs from Europe, the USA and other countries to provide a forum on the protection of privacy against telecommunications surveillance.
- Alice Mahon MP.
