Page 2 of
2 US gets bigger ears in the
sky By Alan Boyd
Misawa Air Base in Japan. In the
Pacific, Inmarsat transmissions are monitored by
Pine Gap, Waihopai in New Zealand, Misawa, and
Yakima in the US. Pine Gap is the main ground
station for the intercepts, with half of its 900
operatives believed to be from the CIA and US
signals agencies.
Misawa, staffed by
Japanese and US technicians, specifically
intercepts signals from Russian satellites in the
North Pacific, together with bases in Hawaii, Osan
Air Base in South Korea, and
the
Yakima and Sugar Grove, West Virginia, ground
stations in the mainland United States.
One of the 1970s generation of Intelsat
satellites still covers East Asia exclusively and
is tracked from Pine Gap and Kojarena. But the
focus since the 1990s has increasingly been on
regional satellites. Palapa, the Indonesian
orbiter that has a footprint covering most of
Asia, including China, is monitored from Shoal
Bay, a base in Australia's Northern Territory.
Australian Defense Minister Brendan Nelson
has said the new Geraldton base will be part of a
Mobile User Objective System that the US is
developing that will use satellites to supply
ground troops in Asia and the Middle East with
instant intelligence, graphics and maps. Nelson
said negotiations with the US began in 2003.
There is speculation that it may also
support Pine Gap's other function of providing
early warning of missile launches as part of the
so-called "Son of Star Wars" defense system. This
role was formerly performed by the US-Australian
facility at Nurrungar, South Australia. Until its
closure in 1999, Nurrungar was the only ground
station capable of monitoring first-strike missile
launches by the Soviet Union.
But a US
assessment also found it was one of the
highest-priority nuclear targets. Pine Gap and
Nurrungar were crucial to the success of both
US-led invasions of Iraq, providing early warning
of Scud missile launches. In an earlier era, they
were used to select and find targets for US
bombers in the Vietnam War.
The success
rate of ECHELON is not known, but many analysts
doubt that it is possible to trawl efficiently
through billions of items of information in a time
frame that would make it readily available to
military forces and intelligence agencies.
As the EU study noted, satellites generate
only a tiny fraction of global telecommunications
transmissions: the more usable material is likely
to come from laborious intercepts of signals or
microwave transmissions obtainable from
terrestrial forms of communication. And computers
often are not capable of sorting the wheat from
the torrent of chaff.
Researcher Duncan
Campbell has even cast doubts on the capability of
intercepting all e-mail, telephone and fax
communications. "This has proved to be erroneous;
neither ECHELON nor the signals intelligence
system of which it is part can do this. Nor is
equipment available with the capacity to process
and recognize the content of every speech message
or telephone call," he said.
Commercial
applications Nevertheless, the ECHELON
concept has been copied - on a single-country
basis - by Russia, France and China, among others.
One reason may be that the objective has
widened from filtering diplomatic and military
transmissions to getting a head start on
commercial competitors. There is circumstantial
evidence that the system has been used by both the
US and Britain to decide the fate of business
contracts in Asia.
Documents released in
the US suggest it is also used for direct
commercial espionage, often under the guise of
monitoring corruption. "It is the new Cold War.
The United States intelligence agencies, facing
downsizing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have
found themselves a new role spying on foreign
firms to help American business in global
markets," said Campbell.
In 1990, the
German newsmagazine Der Spiegel claimed that
president George H W Bush, father of the current
US president, had used intercepted messages
between Indonesian authorities and Japan's NEC
Corp to stop a US$200 million telecommunications
deal. He is said to have insisted that it be split
with a US telecom firm, AT&T.
Boeing
landed a $6 billion deal for arms, airliners and
maintenance in Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the
National Security Agency reportedly handed
president Bill Clinton evidence from intercepted
faxes and phone calls that the rival European
Airbus consortium had discussed the payment of
bribes to government officials. Clinton is also
said to have cited intercepted evidence
implicating one of former president Suharto's
daughters in a $150 million kickback to gain
leverage in a $40 billion package of deals,
including the Paiton power station, signed with
Indonesia in 1994.
Washington has even
used intercepts against its own ECHELON partners.
In 1995 a portfolio compiled by the CIA led to
Britain losing a $400 million contract to build a
power station near Bombay (now Mumbai) that went
instead to the United States' Enron, General
Electric and Bechtel. Similarly, the British were
pushed out of a major construction deal in the
Philippines.
The ultimate act of
commercial espionage may still be working itself
through the system. In 2000, a French intelligence
report accused US intelligence agencies of
developing software - in conjunction with
Microsoft - that would enable the CIA to spy on
the 90% of computer users around the world who use
Microsoft programs. Briton Brian Gladwell, a
former North Atlantic Treaty Organization computer
expert, stated in an interview after his
retirement that the practice was akin to "where we
were 250 years ago with pirates on the high seas".
"Governments never admitted they sponsored
piracy, yet they all did behind the scenes. If we
now look at cyberspace, we have state-sponsored
information piracy. We can't have a global
e-commerce until governments like the US stop
state-sponsored theft of commercial information."
Alan Boyd is a Sydney-based
correspondent.
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