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Date: 2001-01-14
ECHELON & ein Phantom/satellit-.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- ECHELON mit nachgerade ungeheurem Abhörpotential geistert wieder einmal durch die britischen Medien. Wie beinah alle ECHELON-Geschichten ist diese erstens alt, zweitens völlig übertrieben dargestellt und spielt damit den Interessen der Dienste in die Hände, denen jede falsche Nachricht recht ist. Auf der UK-Crypto List stellt ein geduldiger Duncan Campbell essentielle Dinge klar. -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- Date sent: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 01:19:01 +0000 To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk From: Duncan Campbell <duncan@gn.apc.org> Subject: Commentary on the evdidence for Echelon Send reply to: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk A number of comments have been made recently about the question of the evidence for Echelon, coupled to some odd speculation. I would hope that the outlook of subscribers to this list generally would be to look for evidence, test its robustness, look for corroboration, and assess it all intellectually and scientifically. That is my approach, anyway, and I will try and help. This is a long posting, but it provides eno ugh facts and references, I hope, for readers to make a sensible assessment of their own answer to the question does ECHELON exist. With that in mind, I first offer a comparison between two alleged NSA projects commonly reported in the press; RHYOLITE and ECHELON. Here is a recent UK source for RHYOLITE, which claims that its a top secret spy satellite with almost unbelievable capabilities. The quote comes from UK Eyes Alpha, by Mark Urban (1996), at page 58.RHYOLITE was placed in a geosynchronous orbit - positioned 24,000 miles from earth with its spee d exactly matching the turning of the globe It was equipped with a large parabolic dish so that the feeble fragments of microwave energy could be refocused on its receiver. Each microwave circuit could carry hundreds of conversations. - The possibilities of RHYOLITE were, says one Sigint insider, 'mindblowing'. Under the Anglo-Saxon Sigint arrangements, GCHQ was a full party to the product of this satellite. Owen Lewis, then an Army officer working in Sigint and now a communications security consultant in industry, remembers, "When RHYOLITE came in, the take was so enormous that there was no way of hand ling it. Years of development and billions of dollars then went into developing systems capable of handling it." NSAs response to the explosion of information coming from space included passing large amounts of it over to GCHQ for transcription and analysis. The USA developed two types of geostationary sigint payloads: one descending from RHYOLITE was used mainly to gather interesting UHF signals such as m issile telemetry and various forms of communications; the other specifically targeted microwave traffic. Each type required three satellites continuously in geosynchronous orbit over the Equator to provide global coverage. The NSA found that the amount of information being picked up from microwav e circuits was so large that it had to be immediately beamed down to an earth station within line of sight. The problem with RHYOLITE is that there is no documentary evidence that it ever existed. True, a Californian drug dealer was once accused by the FBI or persuading an old schoolfriend who happened to get a job in a unbelievably top secret defence contractor's black vault where they used the docu ment shredder to mix cocktails is supposed to have got hold of a Rhyolite system manual and other goodies and thrown it over the fence of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Hollywood made a film about all this (The Falcon and the Snowman), which certainly ought to raise the credibility of the R HYOLITE story to equal with the splendid recent NSA paranoia epic, Enemy of the State. And theres a British Sigint type who once made claims about RHYOLITE to Mark Urban. But no documentation. No one has ever reported that they have seen a RHYOLITE satellites. Descriptions have been publis hed, (Point of information : the Owen Lewis above who used to work for the GCHQ Sigint organisation is the same Owen (Lewis, not Blacker) who has written on the list on this subject.) Now consider the claims about ECHELON stations. Theres a large paper trail available, including official documents that span from 1981 to date. They include a string of US government operational instructions. The first listing of ECHELON in an NSA document appears in my European Parliament report, Interception Capabilties 2000. It is dated 1981 and refers to Menwith Hill. http://www.europarl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/publi/pdf/98-14-01- 2en.pdf At the time that was published, that was a fragment rather than a full sheet. That was done to protect the source. In January 2000, Margaret Newsham said she was willing to identify herself as the source. A statement about this (by me) appears on John Youngs site. It reveals that Margaret wa s the main source for the original article about Echelon, which was published in 1988. http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/echelon-dc.htm Later in 2000, John Young published extensive technical details of the original plan for the component parts of the Echelon system, known as Project 377 or CARBOY II. According to the P-377 specifications and documents at cryptome.org, the project provided for the commonality of automated data p rocessing equipment (ADPE) in the Echelon system (my emphasis). CARBOY includes all the units needed to that would break down satellite links into component parts of telephone and telegraph channels. The telegraphy components could be either analogue or digital. Their output was fed to the telegraphy message processing subsystem. Other ECHELON component s were a facsimile processing subsystem, a voice processing subsystem, a voice collection module and a[voice] Tape Production Facility. By the time my IC2000 report was published, the US intelligence specialist Dr Jeff Richelson had located and obtained US Navy and Air Force documents from the 1990s, giving many details of US ECHELON sites. This material is referenced carefully in the IC2000 report, which says that the documents provide original new documentary and other evidence about the ECHELON system and its involvement in the interception of communication satellites". They are references 47-51. Although these references were not on-line when IC2000 was first published, Jeff Richelson has now put them and other official documents on-line in the NSA section of the National Security Archive. http://www.hfni.gsehd.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2 3 They show, for example, that the first task of the commander of the US Naval Security Group satellite station at Sugar Grove, West Virginia is to maintain and operate an ECHELON site. For the sake of the avoidance of doubt, this does not mean echelon its military meaning of "formation". Thi s is made clear by other documents referring to ECHELON training departments and similar functions. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/09- 03.htm Other documents that Richelson obtained from the US Air Force Intelligence Agency give further details of more units, and scope out a plan developed in January 1995 for the Air Force to post groups of its intelligence people into Sugar Grove and other bases for the activation of ECHELON units. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/12- 02.htm http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/12- 03.htm One might reasonably ask - what are these ECHELON units? What do they actually do? The last mentioned URL refers to the US Air Force component of the ECHELON stations. Its the 544th Intelligence Group, based in Colorado Springs. Their 1995 reports describe Sugar Grove as a COMSAT intercept station. That description is still current in 2001, and is repeated on their web site. http://www.aia.af.mil/common/homepages/pa/cyberspokesma n/jan/atc7.htm#DET3 You can click now, or read on. This is what it says: Detachment 3, 544th Intelligence Group is fully integrated with Naval Security Group Activity, located at Sugar Grove, W. Va. Its mission is to direct satellite communications equipment supporting research and development for multi- service nat ional missions. It provides enhanced intelligence support to Air Force operational commanders and other consumers of communications satellite information collected by Navy-commanded field stations. This is achieved by embedding personnel into field station operations and by providing a trained ca dre of collection system operators, analysts and managers for AIA. Det. 3's vision is to provide AIA a highly trained cadre of people to capitalize on emerging technologies to meet consumer requirements and to establish itself as a leader in the COMSAT environment by remaining on the cutting edge well into the 21st century. Det. 3 is comprised of four 1N2 signal analysts, a superintendent and a commander. The personnel of Det. 3 are expected to be on the forefront of technologic advances in communications. Therefore,the ECHELON site at Sugar Grove is a COMSAT intercept station which produces intelligence and gives it to consumers. Perusing the rest of the documents referred to in these sites shows that it is part of a network including, for example, the NSA station at Yakima, Washington state. This is exactly the same account of what ECHELON is (and isnt) as was published by the original authors on this subject, Nicky Hager (the author of the 1996 book, Secret Power) and myself. More recently, Richelson has written an article which neatly separates the wheat from the chaff, distingu ishing the factual existence and capabilities of the ECHELON stations from the torrent of inaccurate enlargement which has marked most of the derivative secondary reporting on the same subject. This appeared in the March-April 2000 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/2000/ma00/ma00richelson. html This article makes it clear - and I unhesitatingly agree - that much of what one reads about ECHELON in the press or on TV is nonsense. But ECHELON is shown to be the still extant name for the SATCOM intercept component of the US SIGINT system, even though they could have opted to change the nam e long ago. Australia doesn't use that name, but admits running part of the intergrated system under a different name. New Zealand and Canada have ECHELON stations. References to the Australian governments confirmation that they participate in the system as Hager describes it (but under a different and as yet undisclosed name) appear in the IC2000 report. So do references to government documents obtained in Canada (under their FOI provisions), identifying the substantial mid 1990s budget expenditure on ECHELON by CSE, the Canadian equivalent of CSE and GCHQ. No-one knows if British SATCOM intercept stations now use the name. We do know from the US that one US SATCOM intercept station (Misawa, Japan) uses a different codename, LADYLOVE. Sure, you have to do some reading to get all this. But thats wiser than hitting the keyboard in wilfull ignorance. To take up just one other point, Owen asked rhetorically why no call has been made on [EU] member states for authoritative information. That is what the EP Echelon committee has been doing since last September. To find out about this, you can read their web side and/or the well-informed Germa n on- line publication Telepolis. http://www.europarl.eu.int/committees/echelon_home.htm http://www.heise.de/tp Unlike RHYOLITE satellites, you can go and look at or see pictures of the alleged ECHELON stations. Pictures of all of them, except Guam, are on the web. They all have windowless buildings and arrays of medium to large satellite dishes aimed at geostationery positions along the Clark Belt. The y have double fences, lots of security, and mean looking guards. They look exactly like SATCOM intercept and intelligence stations. Thus, in contrast to undocumented allegations about RHYOLITE satellites that no one has ever seen, the ECHELON system is (in the form described in the primary reporting) robustly supported by authenticated and authenticatable evidence, official documents, and physical observation, as well as by n amed sources with proven access to information on the subject. I do believe that RHYOLITE once orbited our skies. What I dont believe in is bizarre theories of global illuminati sourced in nothing at all and advanced in comprehensive disregard of available evidence. When that is coupled to snide personal remarks, it lowers only the public estimation of th e writer. The above is offered in the interests of open evaluation of this interesting issue. Duncan Campbell -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- edited by published on: 2001-01-14 comments to office@quintessenz.at subscribe Newsletter - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- 
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