ECHELON: the conspiracy theory a parliament confirmed
For years, claims of a global interception network shared between five governments were treated as paranoia. In 2001 a European Parliament committee investigated and concluded it existed.
RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire is one of the network's principal sites.
ECHELON is the name attached to a signals intelligence collection and analysis capability operated between the countries of the UKUSA agreement — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, now generally called the Five Eyes.
It belongs on this site for a specific reason: it is the clearest case available of a claim dismissed as conspiracy theory being formally substantiated by a legislature.
How it emerged
The UKUSA agreement itself dates from 1946 and was not officially acknowledged for over sixty years. The documents were finally released in 2010.
In 1988 the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell published an article in the New Statesman describing a system by which communications passing through satellite ground stations were intercepted and filtered against dictionaries of keywords, with the results shared between the partner agencies.
In 1996 the New Zealand researcher Nicky Hager published Secret Power, drawing on interviews with people who had worked inside the New Zealand agency, and describing the system in detail including the dictionary mechanism.
The European Parliament inquiry
In 2000 the European Parliament established a temporary committee on the ECHELON interception system, with Gerhard Schmid as rapporteur. It reported in 2001.
Its conclusions: a system for the interception of private and commercial communications exists; the participating states are the UKUSA partners; and its use for commercial espionage against European companies could not be excluded, with specific cases examined.
The committee recommended that European citizens and businesses use encryption routinely.
A parliamentary body recommending that the public encrypt their communications against allied governments is a considerable thing, and it was published in 2001.
What Menwith Hill is
The British end of this is concrete and stands in a Yorkshire field.
RAF Menwith Hill, near Harrogate, is a large satellite ground station operated in support of American signals intelligence, with a substantial US National Security Agency presence. Its distinctive white radomes are visible from the surrounding roads.
Its existence and general function are acknowledged. Its activities are not published, and parliamentary questions about it have historically been answered in general terms.
What Snowden added
The 2013 disclosures did not reveal ECHELON — that had been established for years. They revealed scale and mechanism: bulk collection programmes, direct access arrangements, and the interception of traffic at the level of undersea cables rather than only satellite links.
The picture that emerged was of a capability considerably larger than the 2001 committee had described.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Were the committee's recommendations implemented?
The 2001 report made specific proposals on encryption and oversight. What became of them across member states has never been systematically reviewed, and the Snowden material suggests the answer is not much.
Be the first to comment
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
European Parliament
Related
Psychic Phenomena
The Nine: who — or what — were they?
On New Year’s Eve 1952, in a laboratory in Maine, a voice announced itself as one of nine. Over the next forty years it reached a credentialled scientist, a celebrity psychic, a bestselling book and the creator of Star Trek. This is what is documented, and what is not.
Psychic Phenomena
New Year’s Eve 1952: the first session with the Nine
The founding event of the whole Nine phenomenon happened in a Maine farmhouse on 31 December 1952. Here is what the record supports about that evening, and how much of the familiar account was written down much later.
Psychic Phenomena
D. G. Vinod: the man at the beginning of the Nine
Every version of the Nine story starts with Dr D. G. Vinod in a trance in Maine. He is also the person that story then almost entirely forgets. Why the first channel is the biggest hole in the record.
Psychic Phenomena
Andrija Puharich: the doctor who kept turning up
A qualified physician, an inventor with real patents, an army medical officer — and the constant in forty years of the strangest story in American parapsychology. Puharich is the reason the Nine keep touching institutions.
0 comments