The words that can get you spied on

BLUMNER E-mail: Click here Archive

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 17, 1999

What do Oliver North, Vince Foster and Malcolm X have in common? They are part of a list of words and phrases that a group of "hactivists" believe will trigger a word recognition filter in a global spy network sponsored by our own government.

Echelon is a cooperative communications surveillance program between the U.S. National Security Agency and the intelligence agencies of England, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. If reports on the system are accurate, it indiscriminately intercepts millions of communications an hour, including phone calls, e-mails and faxes, without any kind of court order or legislative oversight. The targets of this international spy program are non-military. And while it's ostensibly looking for the bad guys of the world, such as terrorists and international criminals, it also may be scanning the conversations of the good guys, too -- ours.

According to the online publication Wired, cyberprotesters frustrated with the lack of public knowledge and concern over this massive eavesdropping program have declared Thursday "jam Echelon day." They want everyone to append a list of suspicious-sounding words to their e-mail transmissions to overload the system or at least goose the NSA with millions of red herrings.

Whether the plan will work is hard to gauge. Echelon's operations are so secret that the NSA refuses to affirm or deny its existence. What we do know about it has come from private investigations and reports to the European Parliament. In the winter 1996-97 edition of CovertAction Quarterly, New Zealand author Nicky Hager explained that the Echelon computer network works by scrutinizing phone conversations and e-mail from all over the world looking for certain pre-programmed keywords. Once the system is tripped by those words, the conversation or e-mail is recorded and sent to the spy agency of the country interested. Each country has a different set of keywords. As Hager puts it, "the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks." However, other reports on Echelon indicate that the technology is not that advanced and only tracks the communications of particular people. Since the NSA won't say, it's hard to know what's accurate.

The hactivists organizing "jam day" believe Echelon works on the keyword system. They say the NSA's list includes: Oklahoma City, militia, gun, handgun, Randy Weaver, Davidian, Delta Force, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Whitewater, among others -- words that seem to have less to do with international terrorism than with domestic militia movements, organizations that for the most part have not been linked to terrorist activities.

Because so much mystery surrounds Echelon, no one outside the intelligence community knows whether the spy system is respecting constitutional limits on surveillance or whether it's a total cowboy following no discernable standards and invading privacy at will. There are even questions as to whether it has stuck to a crime-solving agenda. International news agencies have reported that Echelon's spying has been used for industrial espionage to give U.S. businesses an advantage, for intercepting the conversations of Princess Diana and for eavesdropping on Amnesty International. The NSA won't say what it's up to and has even been reluctant to inform Congress of Echelon's activities.

When U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the NSA for documents on the legal standards it applies when intercepting the conversations and e-mail of American citizens, the agency invoked attorney-client privilege and refused the request. The NSA actually told Congress that how it goes about monitoring Americans is a private matter between the agency and its lawyers.

After being reminded by an outraged Goss that the attorneys working for the NSA are government employees and that Congress must be able to peer over the shoulder of the NSA to keep the power of the executive branch in check, the agency did a 180 and cooperated.

But the potential breadth of Echelon has Congress spooked. At the prodding of former CIA analyst, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., the House approved a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 that requires the NSA to provide a detailed report to Congress on the legal standards it uses to intercept communications to and from Americans. And Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who chairs the Government Reform Committee, has committed to holding hearings on Echelon sometime in the near future.

Congress wants to know what Echelon is about and so should we. If an international communications dragnet exists, then it needs to be publicly exposed and shut down. No wonder Americans in a Wall Street Journal survey conducted last month said the biggest fear they have about the coming century is a loss of personal privacy. That topped terrorism and crime, the very things Echelon is supposed to stop. In the meantime, those who want to have a little fun potentially at the NSA's expense should mark Thursday on their calendar as a day to send out gobs of e-mail with "Bill of Rights" in the message.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.