NSA key in Windows

[Jeremy Scott-Joynt]

now that's odd... it worked for me 15 minutes ago, but failed just now. 
Anyway, here's the (fortunately cached) text, if anyone's interested.

Jeremy Scott-Joynt
> At 3:06 pm -0400 6/9/99, Sweigert, David wrote:
>>Readers of this list may be interested in
>>http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/body/0,1634,89923-142316-98
>>1920-0,00.html, which discusses Echelon and its impact in Europe.
>>It's also the first mention I've seen of Echelon in mainstream
>>American-based media.
>>
>
> And this has now disappeared from the site.
>
>>
>>OOPS! Address Failed

______________
By PETER FORD
(September 6, 1999 12:39 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - You are not
supposed to spy on your friends. As details emerge of U.S. intelligence
agencies eavesdropping on the e-mail, faxes, and phone calls of European
businesses, politicians in Europe are calling for better ways to safeguard
industrial secrets.
The most contentious source of trenchcoat contretemps among trans-Atlantic
allies: Internet encryption.
The United States is trying to persuade the European Union to allow only
Internet codes for which law enforcement and national security agencies
would have a "key." That would help to combat terrorists and drug smugglers.
But it would also give U.S. officials potential access to the commercial
secrets of foreign companies.
"Unless we have guarantees of safeguards, controls over who listens to whom
and what for, Europe is not going to leave the key under the doormat so that
the Americans can walk in and steal the family silver," says Glyn Ford, a
member of the European parliament.
But with no communist threat to occupy them, Western intelligence agencies
in the 1990s appear to be devoting more of their time and resources to
industrial espionage against each other. And, says Michael Hershman,
chairman of DSFX, the world's largest private investigative agency,
"Industrial espionage is going up steadily" because of "globalization and
increased competition."
Before the end of the year, the European Parliament is due to discuss a
series of reports detailing the manner in which the U.S. National Security
Agency (NSA) intercepts international electronic communications.
The operation, which uses an international network of listening posts and
supercomputers known as "Echelon," was described last year as "an
intolerable attack against individual liberties, competition, and the
security of states" by Martin Bangemann, outgoing European commissioner for
industry.
The latest report, issued earlier this summer, described how the top-secret
system scoops up electronic signals from satellites, undersea cables, and
microwave relay stations all over the world and scans them for key words of
interest to participating intelligence agencies. Echelon includes Britain,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the United States, in a
grouping called UKUSA.
"There is wide-ranging evidence" the report found, that Washington is
"routinely using communications intelligence to provide commercial
advantages to companies and trade."
The report cited a number of examples, including the NSA's interception of
phone calls in 1994 between the French firm Thomson-CSF and Brazilian
officials concerning a $1.4 billion satellite surveillance system for the
Amazon jungle. The eavesdropping allegedly revealed that the company was
bribing Brazilian officials. Washington informed the Brazilian government,
and Lexington, Mass.-based Raytheon Corp. won the contract instead.
The U.S. government is also said to have used communications intelligence to
ferret out Tokyo's positions during past trade talks, and to help
Seattle-based Boeing beat out the European Airbus consortium in a 1994
battle to sell $6 billion worth of airplanes to Saudi Arabia.
"There are serious allegations in the report ... that need investigating,"
says Ford.
The NSA refuses to comment on the claims. "We will not confirm or deny the
existence of any system called Echelon," says NSA spokeswoman Judy Emmel.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) denies that it engages in industrial
espionage. "We are not in the business of spying for private firms," said
then-CIA director James Woolsey in January 1995. "We assess international
economic trends ... and support trade negotiations."
That is presumably what CIA agents were doing in Paris a month later, when
they were expelled by the French government for spying. The agents had been
seeking information on the French position at international
telecommunications negotiations.
They also illustrated one of the major drawbacks to economic espionage. "The
main problem is you don't want to get caught with accusations of espionage
against your friends," says Adm. Stansfield Turner, CIA chief under
President Jimmy Carter.
A Turner launched a program to hand over to the Commerce Department such CIA
intelligence as might be useful to U.S. firms bidding for international
contracts - such as the value of opposing bids - but his successors have
insisted the agency now gathers only general economic information with which
to brief U.S. policy-makers.
Intelligence experts say that all major governments engage in economic
espionage of one sort or another. Some even boast about it: In his 1993
memoirs, a former French spy chief claimed his agents discovered the United
States was about to devalue the dollar in 1971, allowing Paris to make a
large profit by currency speculation.
Certainly, Washington is worried by the threat of foreign industrial spies.
In 1996, President Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, the first
nationwide U.S. statute prohibiting the theft of trade secrets. Eleven cases
have been brought under the act so far, and a Taiwanese businessman has been
convicted. The Justice Department is preparing other cases, some of them
against foreign governments, according to knowledgeable sources.
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 NEC routinely seeks information from the
NSA and the CIA, officials say. 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 U.S. commercial
advantage.
The European Parliament reports have sparked Continent-wide anger. Questions
have been raised by officials in Denmark, Germany, Norway, and Holland,
while the Swedish government has launched an investigation into whether
Swedish companies have been victims of covert NSA surveillance.
In Italy, a Rome deputy district attorney has opened an inquiry to determine
whether NSA activities violate Italian privacy law.
More important, perhaps, the reports encouraged France and Germany to lift
their restrictions on the use and sale of strong encryption software, which
Washington has been trying to limit.
Arguing that strong encryption will allow international criminals to conduct
electronic business unhindered, Washington has long been seeking to persuade
European governments to regulate the use of such software.
Specifically, the United States has demanded that Europe should adopt a "key
escrow" system, whereby a third party would have a "spare key" to all code
systems. The recent revelations of the NSA's activities have only deepened
European suspicions that this demand has more to do with U.S. intelligence
needs than law enforcement.
"The reports provide another argument to confirm our position that
high-level encryption should be freely allowed to protect perfectly legal
confidential messages," says Joachim Kubosch, spokesman for - Bangemann.
"I am in favor of using all these technologies to catch people like the
Oklahoma bombers," adds Ford. "But we cannot allow the United States to use
them to steal tens of thousands of jobs from Europeans."