3/14/2017
We Have Met the Enemy…
Geoff Metcalf
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Benjamin Franklin
“The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security.”
--Louis Freeh
In the wake of the clamor
over the most recent WikiLeaks data dump, ‘Vault 7’, ‘UMBRAGE’, et al,
it should be noted this is not really anything new. What we are seeing
here is simply the evolution of something that goes back to the late 50s
(to the incomplete best knowledge I have).
It is kinda cool to finally see even the New York Times
(www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wikileaks-cia-cache.html?_r=0)
acknowledging material I was writing about in 1998
(http://www.wnd.com/1998/04/6108/ ).
In April of 1998 I wrote “Privacy has become an anachronism.” I was
commenting on “a massive system designed to intercept all your e-mail,
fax traffic and more.” I was explaining ‘Echelon’, the illegitimate
offspring of a UKUSA treaty (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukusa/ )
signed by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. Its purpose was, and is, to have a vast global intelligence
monster, which allegedly shares common goals. The system was so
“efficient” that reportedly National Security Agency folk from Fort
Meade could work from Menwith Hill in England to intercept local
communications without either nation having to burden themselves with
the formality of seeking approval (a court order) or disclosing the
operation. And this was all pre-9/11 and pre-the anti-constitutional
‘Patriot Act’.
It is illegal (without a Judge’s signed permission) for the United
States to spy on its citizens … kinda. The laws have long been
circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. Under the terms of
UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British
citizens, and then the two conspirators trade data. A classic technical
finesse. It is legal, but the intent to evade the spirit is
inescapable.
I often fictionalized the genesis of ‘Echelon’ as an informal meeting of
a group of post war American and British intelligence types drinking in
some remote rustic bar. An imagined CIA type complains to his MI6 buddy
about the hassles of US laws preventing US intelligence from
surveillance of bad guys, and the Brit echoes the same complaint.
“Hey wait a moment mate,” says Nigel, the make-believe MI6 guy, “I can
spy on your guys and you can spy on our bad players…why don’t we just
come up with a mechanism whereby we spy on your villains, you spy on our
villains, and we just ‘share’ the intel?”
This system was called ECHELON, and has been kicking around in some form
longer than most of you. The result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the
United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was,
and is, to have a vast global intelligence monster which allegedly
shares common goals.
The London Telegraph reported in December of 1997 that the Civil
liberties Committee of the European Parliament had officially confirmed
the existence and purpose of ECHELON. “A global electronic spy network
that can eavesdrop on every telephone, e-mail and telex communication
around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a
European Commission report. …”
The report noted: “Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax
communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National
Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European
mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort
Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, in the North York
moors in the UK.
“The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of
the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON was
designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations
and businesses in virtually every country.”
An interesting sidebar appeared in the International Herald Tribune
under the headline, “Big Corporate Brother: It Knows More About You Than
You Think.” The story details Acxiom Corp, which was a humongous
information service hidden in the Ozark foothills. Twenty-four hours a
day, Acxiom electronically gathered and sorts all kinds of data about
196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and magazine
subscriptions, telephone numbers, real estate records, automotive data,
hunting, business and fishing licenses, consumer surveys and demographic
detail that would make a marketing department’s research manager
salivate. This relatively new (legal) enterprise was known as “data
warehousing” or “data-mining”, and it underscores the cruel reality that
the fiction of personal privacy has become obsolete. Technology’s
ability to collect and analyze data has made privacy a quaint albeit
interesting dinosaur.
The Tribune reported that “Axciom can often determine whether an
American owns a dog or cat, enjoys camping or gourmet cooking, reads the
Bible or lots of other books. It can often pinpoint an American’s
occupation, car and favorite vacations. By analyzing the equivalent of
billions of pages of data, it often projects for its customers who
should be offered a credit card or who is likely to buy a computer.”
Most of this information is from y 1998 piece. Echelon has developed,
matured, and morphed into a much more powerful hybrid. ‘Carnivore’ was
software to help triage the cacophony of data. Vault 7 and ‘Umbrage’ are
logical (some would argue “insidious”) growth.
More to follow…