Spy in the 'I'
By Douglas McDaniel
The day I found out about Echelon was the day I felt the ancient surge worry that must have molded the people of the Middle Ages. Those days when angels and devils were thought to be invisible meddlers in earthly affairs, and superstitious folk still believed God could wave his hand and smite a city or punish a nation with the plague.
As reports of supposed NSA global surveillance activities percolated from such exotic Web sources as French intelligence newsletters, German uber-news units and Spanish software geeks, I recalled my own childhood archon of total control, Santa Claus: He knows when you are sleeping, knows when you're awake, knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
Funny how the Invisible Watcher is always out there. It tells us what to do, herding the sheeple, tickling our brains with self-conscious restraint. You know, that deep-seated knowledge: Eventually, we are going to have answer for everything we do or say.
If you haven't heard of Echelon, well, imagine a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up worldwide communications into the black bat vortex of the NSA. Or that's how it seems. Such searches must have a flavor-of-the-day quality, depending on political winds, bazillion-dollar contracts out for bid, or what a station chief might be in the mood for. Monday it might be a scan on conversations using the words "Osama Bin Laden," on Tuesday, the mention of "cocaine" over wireless phones, on another day, the intimate moans of a Saudi prince's mistress, the Pope's weekly confession, even J.D. Salinger ordering a pizza for delivery! Who knows, if you are interesting enough, it's just as capable of beaming in on you.
For anyone logging into the encyclopedic volumes of information (and disinformation) on this state of affairs, the paranoia is also fully downloadable. But I would say we've evolved, perhaps just slightly, maybe even significantly, since the end of that first millennium when we feared the very voices in our heads. Post-Elvis, we are not so much frightened as amused by that full moon on the rise. We can now survey the surveyors on the Web, dial up satellite photos of Area 51 or download secret documents harvested by hackers. It's pretty much impossible for invisible government to be invisible anymore. We find this new sense of earthly revelation incredibly amusing.
"With the Internet conspiracy information has been turned into entertainment," Jodi Dean, a conspiracy studies professor at Hobart College in Australia, recently told Fortean Times. "I think that this is because of the way that the networked society turns all of its citizens into conspiracy theorists: We are all told to search for information and make links. Conspiracy thinking responds to the new subjectivities that are forming in the information age …What is interesting about the expansion of conspiracy into mass media is the way that conspiracy thinking comes to define the zeitgeist, to be synonymous with critical thinking in the networked society. And here Echelon and surveillance is especially interesting: we can be watched even if there are no watchers."
Not that engaging the networked society about Echelon comes without its inherent liability. Delusional psychosis is an occupational hazard for a conspiralogist. Nor or we getting any better at making the same shallow interpretations as our ancestors. Giving the Watchers too much credit, or oversimplifying the world into organized teams of who's good and who's evil, just to keep our dogma straight in our head, seems to be in our DNA.
On Feb. 18, the beginning of sweep's week for the international coverage of Echelon, it was like a bad flashback to my long gone college days of independent study on the impact of secret societies (Freemason, Jacobin, Bavarian Illuminati) on the American and French Revolutions. After a couple of decades merely suspecting "Late Great Planet Earth" author Hal Lindsey was right all along, I'd managed to put those worries away. I'd pretty much gotten on with my life and dismissed such notions as phantoms that appear at regular intervals in history. But the sweeps week coverage on the Web seemed to be tracing the literal shape of the eye at the top of the pyramid.
So I pointed, clicked and re-entered what's known as Chapel Perilous.
A link to a story coming out of France popped up on the screen and it was too terribly beautiful to resist. It claimed Microsoft and Echelon were working together. Bill Gates and the NSA? The report by a French intelligence newsletter called Intelligence Online, said to be leaked from the Strategic Affairs Department of France, mentioned "persistent rumors concerning the existence of spy programs or back doors in Microsoft software, and the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' R&D teams."
More clicks, more links, more Web sites with names like Infowar, Echelonwatch (the ACLU's NSA watchdog site) and Cryptome. I downloaded and printed like a mad fool, the office laser-printer running like some back-alley sweatshop for a Leftist pamphleteer, my co-workers eyeing my frenzied activities of running from my desk to the machine as if I'd "Gone Mulder" on them. Indeed, I had entered an "X"-static state.
The Internet's spying on the NSA's eye had been building for a year but the reports, hacked memoranda, FOIA documents and other subterranean stuff traced back 100 years, to Nicola Tesla's experiments on electrostatic magnetism. And then, post-war research by U.S. intelligence agencies for a project that came to be known as Tempest, which sought to tap the phenomena of background radiation from machines to glean useful information off telephone wires, telecommunications systems, and finally, PCs.
In the past year, the stories, once deep background for conspiracy buffs, began to hit the alternative media, and then the mainstream. In August of 1999, the Scripps Howard News Service ran a Sacramento Bee story about Mike Frost, a former Canadian surveillance spook, who came out of the closet about a massive campaign by SIGINT (United States Signals Intelligence) to spy on ordinary citizens. A weird mix of privacy activists at EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center) and conservative congressmen filed for documents under the FOIA, and called for NSA officials to explain these stories about spying on U.S. citizens, which would presumably be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. There was even a well-publicized "Jam Echelon Day" last fall, where all the hackers were supposed to flood the Web with so much noise, the excess data would deafen all the NSA eavesdroppers. I imagined a whole building full of geeks with headphones, falling off their chairs, screaming in pain.
In February, the sweeps week for NSA's super spy extravaganza was centered on hearings on Internet security held in the European Parliament in Brussels. A month before, the NSA had declassified in-house notes "to officially confirm the existence of the global Echelon eavesdropping network," according to Le Monde Du Renseignment. But by this time the story was that Echelon had spied on European companies to gain an economic advantage. A freelance television journalist, Duncan Campbell, submitted the report to EU about a vast system of satellites and worldwide listening posts that intercept all forms of electronic communications. Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon all had benefited from info that helped the companies to win bids from European firms. Campbell said the intelligence facilities "tap billions of messages per hour."
Superhuman powers, in short.
In the course of a few hours, a two-inch-thick pile of hard-copy printouts were on my desk. At the end of the day, I threw them into a folder and headed down to a coffee house in Cambridge, the Algiers Café, where I buzzed on coffee and managed an elaborate outline of this bad manna of the information age. I marveled at the variety of sources I'd found in just a few hours, looked at others in the coffee house as if they were sheep unaware of the looming wolf.
The stuff from Cryptome.org had been particularly sexy: There was a query about allegations from editor John Young asking for confirmation that Microsoft was set up with NSA funding and had even imposed MS-DOS on IBM; an e-mail from a cyberpunk in Denmark confirming fears of citizen-wide surveillance; a story from an Australian pub, the Age, about the "NSA key," a back-door written into all Microsoft encryption programs; another story from Ekstra Bladet about Margaret Newsham, a former NSA contractor who helped to design programming for Echelon, but now feared for her life.
"The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented," Newsham told the publication. "We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication----real time----and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with listening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant."
I drove home that Friday night thinking about the Fourth Amendment, leap-frogged by technology. After all, if Superman can see into your house, no door is broken down. So how is that illegal? When I arrived at home I checked my neighborhood for unmarked vans, tucked my thick file into an odd corner of my home, told my wife and son that I was onto the story of a lifetime. My wife recognized the caffeine fright, dismissed me and went on to watching Seinfeld. My son rolled his eyes with one of those "yeah, right dad" looks.
But that night, on the television, a promo for that weekend's "60 Minutes" sent all of our jaws to the floor. They were doing something on Echelon, too! When the segment aired that late Sunday afternoon, I took fast notes as Frost told the CBS-TV reporter that five countries (the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand) cooperated in circumventing domestic laws against spying on citizens by asking each Echelon member to eavesdrop on the others' citizens. After that thrilling 15 minutes of recognition was over, I sighed with relief: I had obtained more information in an afternoon of surfing the Web than "60 Minutes" would ever have time for. My son looked at me with awe and admiration. My wife peaked out the window for unmarked vans.
I arrived at the offices of Access Magazine gasping from excitement, throwing down a proposal for a story on Echelon on a half-dozen desks. I rushed back online, looking for more hot leads. There were more followups, but as the week wore on the Echelon story seemed to be disappearing like vaporwear. There was a report from Australia questioning the Duncan Campbell's journalistic integrity, another account stating that Newsham wasn't qualified to sweep the floors for the NSA. Yet another report poked fun at the way "60 Minutes" went about pursuing the research, even taking time to criticize the expensive shoes worn by reporter Steve Kroft as he slogged through the mud to get a view of Menwith Hill.
Was this an disinformation campaign, or just a natural balancing of coverage, often written by reporters peeved that they had to follow up on another guy's lead? It was like a rain of very cold water. Stories dismissing the Microsoft angle as ridiculous, or pointing to the leak as a French effort to misdirect everyone from its own program, dubbed "Frenchelon." Finally, something truly remarkable, an actual press release denying the allegations made by "60 Minutes," was posted by the NSA, which has a policy of answering to absolutely no one.
"We want to assure you," stated the release from Kenneth Heath, Chief of Staff for Legislative Affairs at the agency, "that NSA's activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards, and in compliance with statutes and regulations designed to protect the privacy rights of U.S. persons."
I called up Wayne Madsen, a senior fellow at EPIC, to see if I could find out if congressional hearings were indeed scheduled on Echelon. He doubted that it would happen in an election year. Apparently, candidates are unlikely to challenge a force so powerful that it could dig up dirt, and ruin their campaigning careers, with effortlessness of a one-click shop at eBay.
The coming to terms had begun. Little deals the brain makes to say it's OK. Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow scoffed at the supposed omnipotence of the NSA.
"They can't keep their stuff from crashing from so much data," he said. "Fortunately, we are rescued by their incompetence."
This nonchalance by such a Web-savvy foe of tyranny, both real or imagined, is a hint of the evolving mind of the emerging mass that's online. We too have become archangels, manipulators of the information systems, the pullers of strings, aces on the archives or arcana once held so tightly by the few. No longer the hoofed archangel we once made the bogey-force out to be, we find that they, like the rest of us, are susceptible to misinformation, system crashes, inability to process the overflow of data, the whole disgusting entropy of human systems.
Sure, Janet Reno wants to sneak a "Secret Searches" measure into innocuous bills, allowing any federal agent to surreptitiously search a person's home without having to inform the resident. Takes care of that X-ray vision issue. But just as sure, the NSA bureaucracy is an unmanageable mess, as evidenced by a recent infrastructure overhaul by Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who created whole new directorates to keep track of pizza orders, Popes and so on.
The hopeless crunch of numbers and the whine of the bureaucrat are both encouraging. Rather than a ghost in the machine, the spy in the "I" is 40,000 mathematicians with stress, kids, a mortgage, regular hours. And we can watch them watching us, a kind of democratization of surveillance society. They may be heavy, we sing, but we are all Big Brothers.
