Clinton's NSA Eavesdropped on U.S. Calls

Via Global Intel and HuntingtonNews.Net, I found a rather interesting article on the NSA during Clinton's reign.
NewsMax.com

During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.

Searching the Internet, I found a definition of Echelon by FAS and some extensive links to news reports in 1999 and 2000 about Echelon and the reports from the EU investigation in 2001.

ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched.

Noting that NewsMax was gloating about the NY Times apparently incorrectly asserting that this interception of information was unprecedented, I figured they had an ax to grind, so I googled to check on their story. Sure enough, there was an article of the CBS News 60 Minutes show dated February 27, 2001.

Everywhere in the world, every day, people's phone calls, emails and faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance network. No, it's not fiction straight out of George Orwell's 1984. It's reality, says former spy Mike Frost in an interview broadcast on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 27. "It's not the world of fiction. That's the way it works. I've been there," Frost tells CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Kroft. "I was trained by you guys," says the former Canadian intelligence agent, referring to the United States' National Security Agency.


The NSA runs Echelon with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand as a series of listening posts around the world that eavesdrop on terrorists, drug lords and hostile foreign governments. But to find out what the bad guys are up to, all electronic communications, including those of the good guys, must be captured and analyzed for key words by super computers. That is a fact that makes Frost uncomfortable, even though he believes the world needs intelligence gathering capabilities like Echelon. "My concern is no accountability and nothing, no safety net in place for the innocent people who fall through the cracks," he tells Kroft.


As an example of those innocent people, Frost cites a woman whose name and telephone number went into the Echelon database as a possible terrorist because she told a friend on the phone that her son had "bombed" in a school play. "The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst was not too sure what the conversation was referring to, so, erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady," Frost recalls. Democracies usually have laws against spying on citizens. But Frost says Echelon members could ask another member to spy for them in an end run around those laws. For example, Frost tells Kroft that his Canadian intelligence boss spied on British government officials for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "(Thatcher) had two ministers that she said, quote, 'they weren't on side,' unquote...So my boss...went to McDonald House in London and did intercept traffic from these two ministers," claims Frost. |"The British Parliament now have total deniability. They didn't do anything. We did it for them."


American politicians may also have been eavesdropped on, says Margaret Newsham, a woman who worked at Menwith Hill in England, the NSA's largest spy station. She says she was shocked to hear the voice of U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.) on a surveillance headset about 20 years ago. "To my knowledge, all (the intercepted voices)...would be...Russian, Chinese... foreign," she tells Kroft.

Even more interesting is the allegation that Clinton was particularly interested in the economic espionage value of Echelon. From HuntingtonNews.Net:

“Clinton officials also utilized the program in ways that had nothing to do with national security - such as conducting economic espionage against foreign businesses.” In 1996, President Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, which, according to the Christian Science Monitor, authorized intelligence gathering on foreign businesses. "The Clinton administration has attached especial importance to economic intelligence, setting up the National Economic Council [NEC] in parallel to the National Security Council," the Monitor reported in 1999. "The NEC routinely seeks information from the NSA and the CIA," the paper continued, citing anonymous officials. "And the NSA, as the biggest and wealthiest communications interception agency in the world, is best placed to trawl electronic communications and use what comes up for US commercial advantage."

The ACLU has been complaining about Echelon since 1999. On April 6, 2000, the ACLU Counsel testified to the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee On The Constitution calling on Congress to conduct an investigation of possible violations of the Fourth Amendment, Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (18 U.S.C. 2510-20), .The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) 50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq. of 1978, The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (Pub. L. No. 99-508), and numerous precedents and court decisions. Yet a search of their site finds no usual victory press release claiming the success of their efforts. In other words, there has been no investigation by Congress in the past five years.
I searched some more on Google and found that the most recent technical information on Echelon is from 2001. From thebulletin.org:

That "Echelon" is not synonymous with the entire UKUSA eavesdropping effort does not mean that the questions raised about it are not valid. An intercept operation that scoops up a good deal of the world's communications satellite traffic, automatically processes it in search of whatever intelligence any UKUSA nation wished, and then sends it on its way, would be unsettling. At least for the immediate future the reality seems to be somewhat less frightening. The UKUSA SIGINT agencies certainly do not intercept every signal that passes through the airwaves. And, because of the volume of communications, the expense of collection systems, and the limits of their computer resources, NSA and its allies have always had to prioritize targets and selectively task collection systems. Campbell notes in Interception Capabilities that it is possible to identify certain satellite signals, whether television or communications, as of no intelligence interest, and that "these signals will not progress further within the system."


There is also a significant limit imposed on the ability to monitor voice communications, resulting from the failure of extensive U.S. efforts to produce "word spotting" software that would allow computer transcription of intercepted conversations. In 1993, former NSA director Bobby Inman admitted that "I have wasted more U.S. taxpayer dollars trying to do that [word spotting in speech] than anything else in my intelligence career." Nor has the capability been developed in the intervening years, according to Campbell's report. Thus, while faxes, telexes, e-mail, and computer traffic are subject to automatic processing and analysis, phone calls are not--although the phones of the parties involved in a call can be automatically identified and voice-prints can be used to identify who is speaking.

The article goes on to say how NSA hasn't been particularly effective with all the money spent, apparently because the software has not advanced sufficiently.

That judgment is reinforced by a number of articles, the most prominent one by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the December 6, 1999 New Yorker, which have painted a picture of NSA as an organization facing serious challenges. At least three developments have reduced NSA's ability to collect and process communications. One is the expanding use of fiber-optic cables. Any signal sent through the air can be snatched out of the air, but signals transmitted on fiber optic cannot. Tapping them has also apparently proven a major challenge in ways that tapping conventional cables has not, according to Campbell's report. A second problem is the quantum leap in the sophistication of encryption software. A September 16, 1999 cabinet-level report to President Clinton noted that "for the strongest form of encryption, only the intended recipient can unscramble the message and read the original plain text, unless someone else has gained access to the corresponding decoding software and decryption key." The explosion in communications volume, because of the widespread use of cell phones, faxes, and the Internet, is also a problem. As communications increase, the percentage of messages containing valuable intelligence drops, and finding that information becomes more and more difficult. Hersh reports that daily satellite telephone calls in the Arab world, many of which are encrypted, number in the millions.


Even if it becomes widely accepted that Echelon is not a technological Big Brother, individuals across the political spectrum are likely to remain concerned about violations of individual privacy. The NSA and its allies clearly do intercept an enormous volume of data. And a breakthrough in word-spotting or other technologies that would allow upgrades to Echelon certainly cannot be ruled out. In addition, many have not forgotten NSA's role in monitoring the activities of dissidents during the Vietnam War, which Bob Woodward disclosed in the October 13, 1975 Washington Post. And Hager revealed that in the past Britain's Government Communication Headquarters gathered communications intelligence on Amnesty International, apparently through the Echelon network.

At least four years ago, Echelon simply had to be lucky and/or invest sufficient time in keywords to produce a usable product. One has to wonder how much advance there has been since 2001. According to Wikipedia, Echelon intercepts up to 3 billion communications every day, but again, they seem to be referencing a 2001 document.
The Europeans were particularly concerned about Echelon's potential use for economic espionage. The Final Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system), European Parliament Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System, approved September 5, 2001 is available at the link. Most interesting is the minority report.
A Dissent from the European Parliament's Echelon Committee

On Tuesday evening, July 3rd , the European Parliament's Echelon Committee voted its final report. Together with the Green MEPs Alima Boumediene-Thiery (France) and Patricia McKenna (Ireland) Ilka Schroeder MEP has handed in the following minority position:

• This report makes an important point in emphasizing that Echelon does exist, but it stops short of drawing political conclusions. It is hypocritical for the European Parliament to criticise the Echelon interception practice while taking part in plans to establish a European secret service.


• No effective public control mechanism of secret services and their undemocratic practices exists globally. It is in the nature of secret services that they cannot be controlled. They must therefore be abolished. This report serves to legitimize a European Secret service which will infringe fundamental rights -- just as Echelon does.


• For the majority of the Parliament, the focus is the industry whose profit interests are supposedly threatened by industrial espionage. The vital issue however is that no one can communicate in confidence over distances any more. Political spying is a much greater threat than economic spying
.

• This report constantly plays down these dangers of Echelon, while it remains silent to the ENFOPOL interception planning in the EU. For every society it is a fundamental decision whether to live under permanent control. By adopting this report, the European Parliament shows that it is not concerned about protecting human rights and citizen's liberties.

Again from Wikipedia

Before the September 11, 2001 attacks and the legislation which followed it, US intelligence agencies were generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US and other western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilites spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data (perhaps even automatically through the ECHELON system without human intervention).


The proposed US-only "Total Information Awareness" program relied on technology similar to ECHELON, and was to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the "taps" already compiled by ECHELON. It was cancelled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.


It has been alleged that in 2002 the Bush Administration extended the ECHELON program to domestic surveillance. This controversy was the subject of the New York Times eavesdropping expose of December, 2005.

Clearly, Echelon is not listening into every conversation, reviewing every email, fax or other electronic communication. However, reviewing 3 billion a day is a sizable chunk. If the focus in primarily overseas, surely a large proportion of the communications can be reviewed. Adding the US, then the proportion falls precipitously. But still, a concerted effort using good keywords, over time will pull out evidence of repeated communications on the targeting topic. Otherwise, pulling out a one time comment would be simple luck. However, if targets are limited, a large proportion of messages could be reviewed by targeted individual.
One can only hope that Total Information Awareness was actually cancelled and not now funded by some Pentagon or CIA black slush fund. This program is our biggest nightmare.
Ultimately the question is how this incredible system has been used, and what information was kept and followed up. Hopefully, there will now be an investigation. Unfortunately, given the seven year history, I seriously doubt the results will be around for the next election.