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EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
by Nicky Hager
See also http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm offsite where I got some of this from [TG]
For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.
The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.
It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.
The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.
The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.
The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations.
Under ECHELON, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand's satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies' keywords, it automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.
The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats.
The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometres southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east. *1
The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats). *2
Each of the five stations' Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the interception occurred.
New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA's Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring.3 Until New Zealand's integration into ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).
The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite communications not carried by Intelsat.In addition to the UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.
A group of facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications systems is the final element of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method of transmitting large quantities of public, business, and government communications is a combination of water cables under the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across seabeds between countries, account for much of the world's international communications. After they come out of the water and join land-based microwave networks they are very vulnerable to interception. The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across the countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country. Interception of them gives access to international undersea communications (once they surface) and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.
Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite communications use large aerials and dishes that are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication networks is a building situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from the legitimate network into some anonymous building, possibly far removed. Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave interception from space by United States spy satellites also occurs.4 The worldwide network of facilities to intercept these communications is largely undocumented, and because New Zealand's GCSB does not participate in this type of interception, my inside sources could not help either.
A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-authored by one of its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 18). It described UKUSA "embassy collection" operations, where sophisticated receivers and processors are secretly transported to their countries' overseas embassies in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in foreign capitals. *5
Since most countries' microwave networks converge on the capital city, embassy buildings can be an ideal site. Protected by diplomatic privilege, they allow interception in the heart of the target country. *6 The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps in the American and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in many capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990. Separate sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy collection. *7 On the territory of UKUSA nations, the interception of land-based telecommunications appears to be done at special secret intelligence facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well placed to intercept the large amounts of the world's communications that cross their territories.
The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ official spoke anonymously to Granada Television's World in Action about the agency's abuses of power. He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding them into powerful computers with a program known as "Dictionary." The operation, he explained, is staffed by carefully vetted British Telecom people: "It's nothing to do with national security. It's because it's not legal to take every single telex. And they take everything: the embassies, all the business deals, even the birthday greetings, they take everything. They feed it into the Dictionary." *8 What the documentary did not reveal is that Dictionary is not just a British system; it is UKUSA-wide.
Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station in Britain taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into the station.9
The NSA Menwith Hill station, with 22 satellite terminals and more than 4.9 acres of buildings, is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in the UKUSA network. Located in northern England, several thousand kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it was awarded the NSA's "Station of the Year" prize for 1991 after its role in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists in the interception of microwave communications in another way as well, by serving as a ground station for US electronic spy satellites. These intercept microwave trunk lines and short range communications such as military radios and walkie talkies. Other ground stations where the satellites' information is fed into the global network are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near Alice Springs in central Australia and the Bad Aibling station in Germany. *10 Among them, the various stations and operations making up the ECHELON network tap into all the main components of the world's telecommunications networks. All of them, including a separate network of stations that intercepts long distance radio communications, have their own Dictionary computers connected into ECHELON.
In the early 1990s, opponents of the Menwith Hill station obtained large quantities of internal documents from the facility. Among the papers was a reference to an NSA computer system called Platform. The integration of all the UKUSA station computers into ECHELON probably occurred with the introduction of this system in the early 1980s. James Bamford wrote at that time about a new worldwide NSA computer network codenamed Platform "which will tie together 52 separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or `host environment,' for the massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ." *11
The Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency headquarters. This is where all the intercepted messages selected by the Dictionaries end up. Each morning the specially "indoctrinated" signals intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa,Cheltenham, Canberra, and Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary system. After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory that lists the different categories of intercept available in the data bases, each with a four-digit code. For instance, 1911 might be Japanese diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian CSE), 3848 might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might be any messages about distribution of encryption technology.
They select their subject category, get a "search result" showing how many messages have been caught in the ECHELON net on that subject, and then the day's work begins. Analysts scroll through screen after screen of intercepted faxes, e-mail messages, etc. and, whenever a message appears worth reporting on, they select it from the rest to work on. If it is not in English, it is translated and then written into the standard format of intelligence reports produced anywhere within the UKUSA network either in entirety as a "report," or as a summary or "gist."
A highly organized system has been developed to control what is being searched for by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the heart of ECHELON operations and works as follows.
The individual station's Dictionary computers do not simply have a long list of keywords to search for. And they do not send all the information into some huge database that participating agencies can dip into as they wish. It is much more controlled.
The search lists are organized into the same categories, referred to by the four digit numbers. Each agency decides its own categories according to its responsibilities for producing intelligence for the network. For GCSB, this means South Pacific governments, Japanese diplomatic, Russian Antarctic activities, and so on.
The agency then works out about 10 to 50 keywords for selection in each category. The keywords include such things as names of people, ships, organizations, country names, and subject names. They also include the known telex and fax numbers and Internet addresses of any individuals, businesses, organizations, and government offices that are targets. These are generally written as part of the message text and so are easily recognized by the Dictionary computers.
The agencies also specify combinations of keywords to help sift out communications of interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words "Santiago" and "aid," or cables containing the word "Santiago" but not "consul" (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers (and combinations), under a particular category, that get placed in the Dictionary computers. (Staff in the five agencies called Dictionary Managers enter and update the keyword search lists for each agency.)
The whole system, devised by the NSA, has been adopted completely by the other agencies. The Dictionary computers search through all the incoming messages and, whenever they encounter one with any of the agencies' keywords, they select it. At the same time, the computer automatically notes technical details such as the time and place of interception on the piece of intercept so that analysts reading it, in whichever agency it is going to, know where it came from, and what it is. Finally, the computer writes the four-digit code (for the category with the keywords in that message) at the bottom of the message's text. This is important. It means that when all the intercepted messages end up together in the database at one of the agency headquarters, the messages on a particular subject can be located again. Later, when the analyst using the Dictionary system selects the four- digit code for the category he or she wants, the computer simply searches through all the messages in the database for the ones which have been tagged with that number.
This system is very effective for controlling which agencies can get what from the global network because each agency only gets the intelligence out of the ECHELON system from its own numbers. It does not have any access to the raw intelligence coming out of the system to the other agencies. For example, although most of the GCSB's intelligence production is primarily to serve the UKUSA alliance, New Zealand does not have access to the whole ECHELON network. The access it does have is strictly controlled. A New Zealand intelligence officer explained: "The agencies can all apply for numbers on each other's Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with are the Americans. ... [There are] more hoops to jump through, unless it is in their interest, in which case they'll do it for you."
There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have access to the full potential of the ECHELON system the agency that set it up. What is the system used for? Anyone listening to official "discussion" of intelligence could be forgiven for thinking that, since the end of the Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA intelligence machine are terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic intelligence. The idea that economic intelligence has become very important, in particular, has been carefully cultivated by intelligence agencies intent on preserving their post-Cold War budgets. It has become an article of faith in much discussion of intelligence. However, I have found no evidence that these are now the primary concerns of organizations such as NSA.
A different story emerges after examining very detailed information I have been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA allies and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence reports New Zealand receives from its four allies each week. There is quite a lot of intelligence collected about potential terrorists, and there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations. But by far, the main priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be political and military intelligence to assist the larger allies to pursue their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the particular governments are concerned about can become a target.
With capabilities so secret and so powerful, almost anything goes. For example, in June 1992, a group of current "highly placed intelligence operatives" from the British GCHQ spoke to the London Observer: "We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes it is called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three organizations. "It is then possible to key in a trigger word which enables us to home in on the telex communications whenever that word appears," he said. "And we can read a pre-determined number of characters either side of the keyword."12 Without actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary system works. Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that the four-digit code covering Third World aid be placed.
UKUSA Signals Intelligence Agreement Partners
Australia-------------------- Defense Signals Directorate (DSD)
Canada----- Communications Security Establishment (CSE)
New Zealand---- Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)
UK---- Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ)
USA----------------------------- National Security Agency (NSA)
Note that these GCHQ officers mentioned that the system was being used for telephone calls. In New Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept written communications: fax, e-mail, and telex. The reason, according to intelligence staff, is that the agency does not have the staff to analyze large quantities of telephone conversations.
Mike Frost's expos of Canadian "embassy collection" operations described the NSA computers they used, called Oratory, that can "listen" to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Just as we can recognize words spoken in all the different tones and accents we encounter, so too, according to Frost, can these computers. Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of other calls and recorded digitally on magnetic tapes for analysts back at agency headquarters. However, high volume voice recognition computers will be technically difficult to perfect, and my New Zealand-based sources could not confirm that this capability exists. But, if or when it is perfected, the implications would be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA agencies could use machines to search through all the international telephone calls in the world, in the same way that they do written messages. If this equipment exists for use in embassy collection, it will presumably be used in all the stations throughout the ECHELON network. It is yet to be confirmed how extensively telephone communications are being targeted by the ECHELON stations for the other agencies.
The easiest pickings for the ECHELON system are the individuals, organizations,and governments that do not use encryption. In New Zealand's area, for example, it has proved especially useful against already vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use any coding, even for government communications (all these communications of New Zealand's neighbors are supplied, unscreened, to its UKUSA allies). As a result of the revelations in my book, there is currently a project under way in the Pacific to promote and supply publicly available encryption software to vulnerable organizations such as democracy movements in countries with repressive governments. This is one practical way of curbing illegitimate uses of the ECHELON capabilities.
One final comment. All the newspapers, commentators, and "well placed sources" told the public that New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence in the mid-1980s. That was entirely untrue. The intelligence supply to New Zealand did not stop, and instead, the decade since has been a period of increased integration of New Zealand into the US system. Virtually everything the equipment, manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and so on, used in the GCSB continues to be imported entirely from the larger allies (in practice, usually the NSA). As with the Australian and Canadian agencies, most of the priorities continue to come from the US, too.
The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book arrived in the book shops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister's department trying to decide if they could prevent it from being distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political costs were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated.
Throughout my research, I have faced official denials or governments refusing to comment on publicity about intelligence activities. Given the pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and stonewalling, it is always hard for the public to judge what is fact, what is speculation, and what is paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand's role in the NSA-led alliance, my aim was to provide so much detail about the operations the technical systems, the daily work of individual staff members, and even the rooms in which they work inside intelligence facilities that readers could feel confident that they were getting close to the truth. I hope the information leaked by intelligence staff in New Zealand about UKUSA and its systems such as ECHELON will help lead to change. n
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Years of oppression and physical separation have amplified our need for electronic means of communications. This has been used to create the perfect climate for suveillance. Phone fax and email can be listened in to AND be aware that the telephone is a bug whether or not the receiver is up. Even when the receiver is down it can still pick up and transmit to the 'security' services what you are saying.
A European Commission report warns that the United States has developed an extensive spying network on European Citizens and we should all be worried, reports Simon Davies. 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 to be delivered this week.
The report -- Assessing the Technologies of Political Control -- was commissioned last year by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It contains details of a network of American-controlled spy stations on British soil and around the world. that "routinely and indiscriminately" monitors countless phone, fax and email messages. It states: "Within Europe all email 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 Yorkshire.
The report confirms for the first time the existence of a the secretive Echelon system. Until now evidence of such astounding technology has been patchy and anecdotal. But the report - to be discussed on Thursday by the committee of the office of Science and Technology Assessment in Luxembourg - confirms that the citizens of Britain and other European states are subject to an intensity of surveillance far in excess of that imagined by most parliaments. Its findings arc certain to excite the concern of MEP'S. "The Echelon system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, Echelon is designed primarily for non- military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country.
"The Echelon system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words". According to the report, Echelon uses a number of national dictionaries containing key words of interest to each country.
For more than a decade, former agents of US, British. Canadian and New Zealand national security agencies have claimed that the monitoring of electronic communications has become endemic throughout the world. Rumours have circulated that new technologies have been developed which have the capability to search most of the world's telex, fax and email networks for "keywords". Phone calls, they claim, can be automatically analysed for key words.
Former signals intelligence operatives have claimed that spy bases control led by America have the ability to search nearly all data communications for key words. They claim that Echelon automatically analyses most email messaging for "precursor", data which assists intelligence agencies to determine targets. According to former Canadian Security Establishment agent Mike Frost, a voice recognition system called Oratory has been used for some years to intercept diplomatic calls.
The driving force behind the report is Glyn Ford, Labour MEP for Greater Manchester East. He believes the report is crucial to the future of civil liberties in Europe. "In the civil liberties committee we spend a great deal of time debating issues such as free movement, immigration and drugs. Technology always sits at the centre of these discussions. "There are times in history when technology helps democratise, and times when it helps centralise. This is a time of centralisation. The justice and home affairs pillar of Europe has become more powerful without a corresponding strengthening of civil liberties."
The report recommends a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance being used at Menwith Hill and other centres. It bluntly advises: "The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network (Internet) accessible to US intelligence agencies.
The report also urges a fundamental review of the involvement of the American NSA (National Security Agency) in Europe, suggesting that the activities be either scaled down, or become more open and accountable. Such concerns have been privately expressed by governments and MEP'S since the Cold War, but surveillance has continued to expand. US intelligence activity in Britain has enjoyed a steady growth throughout the past two decades.
The principal motivation for this rush of development is the US interest in commercial espionage. In the Fifties, during the development of the 'special relationship', between America and Britain, one US institution was singled out for special attention. The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organisation. received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. "Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
The NSA is one of the shadowest of the shadowy US intelligence agencies. Until a few years ago, it existence was a secret and its charter and any mention of its duties are still classified. However, it does have a Web site (www.nsa.gov:8080) in which it describes itself as being responsible for the signals intelligence and communications security activities of the US government.
One of its bases, Menwith Hill, was to become the biggest spy station in the world. Its ears - known as radomes - are capable of listening in to vast chunks of the communications spectrum throughout Europe and the old Soviet Union. In its first decade the base sucked data from cables and microwave links running through a nearby Post Office Tower, but the communications revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties gave the base a capability that even its architects could scarcely have been able to imagine.
With the creation of Intelsat and digital telecommunications, Menwith and other stations developed the capability to eavesdrop on an extensive scale on fax, telex and voice messages. Then. with the development of the Internet, electronic mail and electronic commerce, the listening posts were able to increase their monitoring capability to eavesdrop on an unprecedented spectrum of personal and business communications. This activity has been all but ignored by Parliament.
When Labour MEP'S raised questions about the activities of the NSA. the Government invoked secrecy rules. It has been the same for 40 Years. Glyn Ford hopes his report may be the first step in a long road to more openness. "Some democratically elected body should surely have a right to know at some level. At the moment that's nowhere."
Posted on the a-infos news service by Bob Olsen Toronto bobolsen@arcos.org (:-)
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Section 1 mirrors a Greek site: /Athens/Forum/8604/strigas.txt
He started his career as an attaché and nowadays is a specialised consultant to the supreme military commander of NATO and has close connections with the Trilateral Commission. Most of his time is spent in Brussels and in the last year and a half he has published 4 successful books.
Strigas has revelaed some shocking facts in Greece about domestic politics using secret documents etc. as proof. He also predicted a military crisis between Greece and Turkey 18 months before it happened and named exactly the small island which was the focus of the crisis. Unfortunately his books are only available in Greek but in them he reveals a great deal about the US National Security Agency and the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Club, sometimes far more than anything you can find on the world-wide web.
This interview is translated, imperfectly, from the original Greek.
* We all know that countries are being guided by their political and military leaders. Big countries and small do exist and also the small countries are dependant on the big ones. Despite this in your books you mention two international decision making centres which, in your opinion, are above countries and ideologies. Could you be more specific about that?
* It may sound exaggerated but people these days are being guided by political and military leadership according to the orders of two global centres: The Trilateral Commission and The Bilderberg Club. This marks a new era and it is not something that has happened in the past.
In the past, the world was ruled by ideologies. We know ideologies were used to control the people. But conflicting ideologies were also creating wars. Therefore, for a while, countries formed alliances.
More recently there has been a change in the global scenery. Everything has been globalised. The world has become a global village. Therefore it needs global decision making centres. From this point of view the Planetarchy, if we can call it that, will be the politics of the 21st century. This marginalises national governments which are now dependent on those international centres.
Today we see that profit now determines the destinies of countries. The world is already being ruled by representatives of those two centres. The task of today's governments is to look after 93% of the international wealth. That is the wealth that those two centres own.
* What exactly are the Bilderberg Club and the Trilateral Commission?
* The Bilderberg Club is an international decision making centre named after a hotel near the Dutch town of Oosterbeek where its first convention took place in 1954. Its headquarters is in The Hague in Holland. In its conventions two types of people take part we can call the 'protagonists' and the 'supernumerary'.
The supernumerary are something like guest speakers, they are only allowed to speak a few minutes and always on the first day of the convention. The Guidance Committee of the Club protagonists is made up of Americans and Europeans from the developed countries, never has a person from the Third World been on it.
The Club is made up of people with conservative 'aberrations' such as Giovanni Anieli, Luns, Rothschild etc. The Bilderberg Club's president is today James Callahan, British ex-prime minister and his assistant is the ex-General Secretary of NATO, Lord Carrington. Maybe you remember that in 1993 the Club met in Greece, in the Asteras hotel in Bouliagmeni.
The Bilderberg Club today controls 33% of the world's wealth. Some members of the Bilderberg Club, without having departed from it officially, established in June 1973 a new, more powerful group, the Trilateral Commission led by David Rockefeller, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Members of the Trilateral Commission operate in parallel with but somewhat above the Bilderberg Club as a centre of research and analysis. The founding members of the Trilateral Commission are Sirus Vance and Warren Christopher. David Rockefeller is president and Zbigniew Brzezinski is chief executive. The Trilateral Commission manages 60% of international wealth.
* How do those centres get so much power?
* I think it is obvious that they take the power from the international wealth they control and from the various political appointments, presidents and prime ministers (which are mostly technocrats) which they control and guide.
* But how is possible to select candidates? Do top politicians accept being only token leaders of their countries?
* This is a reasonable question but remember, human ambition has no limits. Skilful people exist that do not care for means nor consequences in order to rise to the top of their country's leadership. The selection for suitable protagonists to serve the two centres is made after checked information which analysts of the NSA [U.S. National Security Agency] have collected, with the help of organisations such as CIA, DIA and DEA.
The NSA personal reports are transferred in the end to the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Club. The Committee meets secretly and the conclusion is sealed in a special envelope which is then given to the Bilderberg Club and Trilateral Commission presidents. The presidencies approve the decision almost 99% of the time.
Qualifications for candidates are very fluid, [joke?] I mean elastic consciousness or, if you want, plasticity, to comply with the international decision making philosophy. Another element of control is that they must not disturb the global balance. This is essential because this balance has nothing to do with the balance of the world but simply balance of the global profit and loss account. The members must globally ensure the income of the two international centres funds.
* But didn't that happen also in the past?
* In the past if someone was a prime minister or a president he would have come into conflict with the great powers, he would have been characterised as 'troublemaker' and underminer of liberty and then would have been 'vanished' politically or biologically.
Today the politicians are servants whose masters do not allow them to make any independent moves. You have seen in the recent German elections (which happened at the same time as our [Greek] council elections) that the French were the ones that were celebrating the victory of Kohl because the Mark is supporting the French Franc. The leaders no longer have any freedom. You likewise are probably obliged to your friends to take them into consideration in your own moves and plans.
* Could you give us an example?
* Let's imagine that this, or the next, Greek government had the will to solve the Albanian and Turkish problem and the dispute between Greece and the former Yugoslavia for Macedonia. What would they do? Just 300 men are enough to invade the Aktio base in Preveza, Western Greece, which belongs to the NSA and then every problem would be solved. If this base were occupied all communications in the Balkans and Turkey would be paralysed. But such a move would need much courage.
* What are the methods, groups and structures of the global decision making centres?
* The methods that are being used are simple; I promote you as a president, prime minister, military leader; you satisfy your vanity and have ethical and economical profits. In return you have to blindly obey us. If not we destroy you by corruption, forced resignation or assassination. At least this is what happened up until now.
* What tendencies do you see in those centres today then?
* These days you can see a tendency for renewal. And therefore it was decided in the last Bilderberg meeting to give the people 2% percent more of their international wealth, something that the old ones did not accept. There are conflicts between conservatives and more liberal types. But I believe the last will in the end dominate.
* Recently, humanity watched anxiously the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which dynamics led to this collapse and what did it really mean?
* The collapse of the Soviet Union was begun in 1973 by the Trilateral Commission and part of the Bilderberg Club. The members who left Bilderberg and formed the Trilateral Commission used shock tactics and have brought the control of the remains of the Soviet Union to the Bilderberg. This was made possible because in the Summer of 1973, 30 July specifically, The Trilateral Commission controlled 60% of global wealth with their World Bank. So it became the dominator of the game. The purpose of the Soviet Union's collapse is to demonstrate internationally the failure of the Communist ideology and present it as a system that is inhuman.
Besides this, because the population of the earth is growing, the extra 2% that will be given to the people will be granted to the Soviet Union out of the mining of their geological mineral wealth. The soviet people must be educated as consuming citizens as in the west. In order to control those people many new countries will be created that will not have constant peace.
* What is the role of the International Monetary Fund?
* The International Monetary Fund is a branch of the World Bank. Today, most countries are obliged to borrow money because they cannot get it from private capital or from other countries. This necessity occurs either because of a failure to manage public resources or because the 5 year plan failed or because there is internal turmoil etc..
There exist of course also politicians that redeem the sympathy of the people by offering them short-term material comforts and asking from them the minimum of their possible efforts. They do this of course with money they take from the national budget that should be normally given to development projects.
Anyway, the point is that sometimes countries reach a dead-end. When this happens the IMF exploits the circumstances: it grants a pre-approval of the loan to those countries but with its own conditions. This means that you will get the loans from the banks (that are all controlled by the World Bank) if you take specified measures which are almost every time anti-social. This results in turmoil in the society. The government panic. In order to calm down the turmoil even more money must be borrowed.
In this way the government finally gets totally controlled by the IMF.
Let's take for example the Greek education system. 60% of the Education Ministry outlays are coming from loans of the IMF. So it is not at all odd that from the 150.000 kids only 40.000 go to the public universities.
All the above explain also why public works in our country always begin but never end.
* What are the global decision making centres most afraid of?
* One is the soft spot of the global leaders (even if this sounds impossible) and this lies in their constant fear whether someday the people wake up and demand the wealth that is rightly theirs. The same happened in the ex-Soviet Union. The NSA had information that some people were leading millions of soviets to a revolution in order to get back more than 70 years stolen wealth. They were informed about this movement in time and prevented it by dismembering the country.
* You mentioned before an enormous in power organisation, the NSA.
* Yes, that's right. The NSA (National Security Agency) was founded on 4th November 1952 by president Truman and its headquarters is at Fort Mead USA. It has more than 2,000,000 agents and scientists all over the world.
There is no committee in Congress, not even any laws that control their activities. In reality there is not even an act to affirm its establishment. There exist only documents to protect it.
The security standard is very high and its electronic equipment is unique. It has the most perfect computer centre in the world. Its computers are gathering and analysing daily all the information from the hundreds of monitoring stations that are on the whole planet and in this way they oversee the telecommunications of both the friendly and enemy countries. The Greek part of the NSA network is the American base of Aktio.
It is equipped with scores of satellites which, for example, monitor the movements of the Serbs or of Saddam and in seconds they inform the headquarters of the organisation.
If you ask someone which is the biggest secret service in the world, they might mention the CIA, DIA or KGB. The NSA has deliberately cultivated the impression that the secret services of USA that do everything are the CIA and the DIA. Many books and articles have been written about these secret services. But of the NSA no-one has ever written anything. In reality the better known services are executive organs of the NSA which, from its side, is the executive organ of the two global decision making centres that we mentioned before; the Bilderberg Club and the Trilateral Commission.
Remember, the NSA manufactures politicians (presidents and prime ministers) always according to the orders of the two global centres. It recruits geniuses from all over the world, it is said that it is the inventor of the infections of the modern world and of many more things that it is impossible for the simple human mind to hold.
* How can anyone manufacture politicians?
* You mean well built?!! There is a committee of politician manufacturing whose president is David Rockefeller with vice president Richard Foren, who is a leading consultant to General Electric. Members of this committee are Henry Kissinger, Alexander Hague, Toshio Nakamura, Edmold Rothschild, Jovianni Anielli, Sirus Vans, Charles Duncan (ex-president of Coca- Cola) and Helmut Schmidt.
The politicians that are going to be presidents or prime ministers are approved or turned down by the above council which meets once a month in the central building of the NSA.
When the candidate is approved or disapproved the brainwash from the Mass Media begins. Money is given from the Central Banks to help establish a party, campaign etc.. At the same time the other secret services take orders so that the NSA plan is carried out.
* What do you see in the near future? Will the status quo remain or will there be changes in the world?
* I think that the changes will begin in the area of Saudi Arabia, changes that will have an effect on the whole international scene. I predict the fragile balance of the oil cartels will be altered when 3-4 oil wells of Aramco's cartel are bombed. This will mean an increase in the price of petroleum products. The cartels for one or two years will have low profits.
If this happens Greece, with its oil, can play a leading role. Here we will have a repeat of the Onasis phenomenon which was recently made public with all its twisted situations. This time Greece can play a leading role in Europe because the economic strength of its oil will make it the 3rd power in the European Union. I mean that England will loose its oil wells in the Black Sea, which belong to BP and Shell, at the same time as the coup d'etat in Saudi Arabia. It is very possible that the geographic borders of Greece with Turkey, former Yugoslavia and Albania will change and also the borders of Germany and Poland (the Oderneisser line).
England will loose Scotland because the Scottish autonomists will blow its oil wells. After the IRA has made an agreement with England a part of it will go to support the Scottish autonomists.
Being under high pressure, and after having passed the economic convulsion which will lead to the global shock we mentioned before, the world's economy will make an opening to China. China, of course, will ask for something in return. An exchange could be India.
What does this mean? It means that China will be allowed to invade India under false pretences. The Bilderberg Club will supply India, and the Trilateral Commission will renew the armour of China.
In this war, in order to reduce the world's population, the neutron bomb will be used. One time general of NATO's army, Alexander Hague, was fighting off proposals for the neutron bomb, so on 29th June 1979 they tried to assassinate him.
If this happens Pakistan and Turkey will be dragged in, and Turkey will split up in two halves, Eastern and Western part. If this happens Tansu Ciller will put Turkey in the European Union.
Taking this opportunity I should tell you that within the vast changes that will happen in the near future is a step-up of the Ecumenical Patriarchy of Konstantinopolis. I mean that it will play a more important role than today. Already Ciller has a draft law ready for the Turkish parliament if conditions allow it. In this law the Patriarchy will become a separate state, something like the Vatican.
* Except for exploiting the global wealth where else do the two global decision centres target? Isn't it a little bit unreasonable to say that a small group of humans does affect and control almost all the countries on earth? How do they manage not to loose control of them?
* Let's make something clear. Everyone that is in either the Bilderberg Club or in the Trilateral Commission is just a representative of the global cartels. Allied cartels choose some persons to represent them in the above decision making centres. Their opinion for the international trend they favour depends on the cartel they represent. Besides as cartel people the only thing that they understand is profit rates. The protagonists in those decision making centres just bring gold to the cartels.
Exceptional members such as Rockefeller, Mitsubishi etc. are just bright exceptions or as it was before in the Trilateral Commission Paul Austin the boss of Coca-Cola that was sleeping during all talks and resolutions!
Therefore the Bilderberg Club and Trilateral Commission propose to the people of the cartels such as Rockefeller, Hunt etc. the international politics that they will follow.
The second part of your question has this answer. In 1963 the Kennedys tried to reduce tension between the USA and the USSR and to stop the war in Vietnam. But the cartels had budgeted that they would collect billions of dollars with the continuation of the investments in armour and the war. John Kennedy knew that they would kill him. He decided to get sacrificed because of his illness (an old injury in the back bone which caused horrible pains) and believed that they would stop there. They took off the scene also Robert Kennedy who would certainly win the next election and would stop the war. Nixon dared to reduce the dispute this means that he did not continue the war till 1978 but did stop him at 1973. Therefore they involved him in the Watergate scandal and they sent him packing.
So the control and the guidance is in their hands. The two global centres as well as the 'legal' governments also have persons involved in matters that have nothing to do with politics. They are bankers, ship-owners, industrialists and higher civil servants. They collect information and transmit it to the centres. There the resolutions and the proposals follow. After the proposals the falldown and as a last solution death.
* How can us humans react to this totalitarianism? What hope is there?
* The only thing that the two global centres are afraid is World Public Opinion. If the citizens of the countries get informed and realise that they are not governed by their politicians they will maybe learn to react.
This reaction can take many forms. For example, politicians may refuse to work for specific circles of interests. Then the pressure is obvious. They do take it seriously in mind. Then they will play the governments to and fro. Bring the army onto the streets. And when they make sure that there is no solution the main government committee must be directly summoned to draw up new guide lines. It is obvious that the old main government committee must resign immediately and a new one must be elected.
* Are there opponent groups that want the people to wake up?
* There are secret groups which came out from the global decision making centres themselves. I am paid by NATO to be against monopolies and against the big bosses themselves. This luxury allows the fast conversion of other colleagues or people from the cartels so that they finally get persuaded that instead of having $1 trillion a year profits, to have something lower. But this small difference can help thousands of families.
A few such persons do exist and act against those two global centres. One of them is Oppenheimer the son, that lives now in the eastern part of Moscow. His father lives in the western part. The son Oppenheimer is against the power structure. He agrees to reduce (very barely of course) his profit rates. His father doesn't.
Let us note here that his father convinced the Bilderberg Club and the Trilateral Commission to bring down Gorbachev who sold Russian diamonds for 468 dollars a carat. Then he promoted Yeltsin, who sells them for 69,7 dollars a carat. If the people of Russia do not rise up they will have to wait for Oppenheimers death, for until then they will not prosper.
ENDS
I have to tell you this about Strigas, since I watched almost all the interviews (I live in Athens) He knows everybody important in Greece. Politicians go after him (!) to help them for promotion and support by American officials. He HAS many connections abroad and from what he says he knows Stefanopoulos (Clinton's advisor-well known BB) personnaly as a friend. BUT he is almost illiterate, cannot speak Greek properly, makes big mistakes when writing in English (of course some mistakes in supposedly official docs are mistaken on purpose ie false), but all this about universities is bullshit. However he has a relative in NATO or SHAPE in very high position and gets his info from there. As far as TC is concerned, he must, accordig to the reporter, be a last chain of the mechanism. He dresses in expensive and fancy clothes has lots of money, and has an astonishingly complete dataabase with info on averybody in Greece!. You get the image. He is a person who does the small dirty work spreading false info but to make himself credible, he gives away some true faxt. All this on demand.
It does sound a bit dramatic to have the suspected surveillance stuff on the most sensitive pages on my site but I posted these warnings up because I was frightened by the ungodly vibes I got recently from a bloke you could only describe as secret police. Who he was though I don't know.
The issue of fear is a big one. All totalitarian forces use fear to control those who might either reveal their real intentions or refuse to obey orders. I am convinced that there are elements within the UK police, intelligence services and Freemasons who have strong totalitarian tendencies. They believe that they are somehow superior to ordinary people and better bred or educated to decide their fate. They see common people as worthless idiots who deserve to live slave-like lives and justify this by telling themselves and their fellow fascists that they are genetically superior, some kind of a master race.
All this of course, even though I am doing my bit to implement common-sense solutions in an undemocratic country, makes me a 'subversive'.
Over the last year or so I have made friends with several people you might consider 'establishment', in other words not the kind of green/left fringe I'm used to spending time with. My environmental and civil rights/land rights work attracted the attention of these establishment people.
One November weekday in 1997 I happened to be in West London not far from the home of George, one of these friends of mine. He is a Christian and a violin teacher and this was the first time I had ever called on him out of the blue without telephoning first.
George, incidentally, was the victim of a ridiculous car accident last year (1997). He was driving along a single carriageway A road in his Vauxhall Cavalier when a Transit van registered to the British military veered over and smashed into the front of his car writing it off completely. George was very shaken up of course but was amazed to hear from his insurance company that the other side were claiming they had brakes which were severely pulling to one side. The only problem was that it was an open road and there was no reason at all for the other vehicle to be braking.
What with Diana, princess of Wales and all the mysterious car accident deaths surrounding organic Dairy farmer Mark Purdey, who's fighting the organo-phosphate manufacturers in the 'Mad Cow Disease' enquiry, it seems like this is the crude method of choice for political assassinations in the UK right now!
Anyway, back to my meeting with George back in November. Luckily he wasn't busy so we went out for lunch. George chose the restaurant in a department store in New Malden, we bought ourselves lunch and sat down amongst the pensioners for a chat.
About five minutes into our meal a man appeared in my field of vision who just stood out a mile. He was about 50, very stocky, with neat grey hair and a grey beard and dark glasses. The moment I saw him I got serious bad vibes and I watched him on and off as he joined the short queue and bought himself a cup of coffee. He sat down facing us and stared ahead, with his dark glasses on he looked self-conscious and out-of-place. I looked at him once or twice nonchalantly but was aware of him constantly in my peripheral vision. I saw him move and glanced over. To my amazement he was looking at a card he had in his hand and then looked over at us, he saw I was looking at him and replaced the card in his inside jacket pocket.
George and I finished our meal and I pointed the weirdo out to him. George's eyebrows moved up and down to express his amazement too.
I thought of going over to the man with the dark glasses and the coffee and asking him if he was with MI5 or the CIA, but to be frank, I was too frightened. He just emanated the most horrible vibes, something deep, dark and powerful. He might well have been armed.
So whilst I can't prove a thing I think we were watched by some kind of an agent because we had gotten together without letting the intelligence services know first with a phone call.
The moral: if you want to meet a member of the UK secret police, just give an elite-watching friend of yours a surprise visit without phoning first, that'll get them to crawl out of the woodwork!
Interview with the ex-boss of the NSA http://www.us.net/softwar/mcc.html
Cryptome all sorts of secrets http://jya.com/crypto.htm
The UKUSA Community and SIGINT http://watserv1.uwaterloo.ca/~brobinso/cseukusa.html
Covert Action Quarterly site #1
http://mediafilter.org/caq
Covert Action Quarterly site #2
http://www.worldmedia.com/caq
The Greek World Government page http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8604/
The NSA spy satellites explained http://caq.com/CAQ/CAQ59GlobalSnoop.html
The NSA http://www.texemarrs.com/archive/sep96/ie.html
NSA's Supercomputer http://parallel.rz.uni-mannheim.de/top500/reports/report95/Centers/node7.html
NSA's budgets and mission http://www.ccic.gov/pubs/imp97/98.html
Origins of the NSA http://www.awpi.com/IntelWeb/US/NSA/charter.html
Some interesting US military documents??? http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8604/ushit.htm