Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper

[Brian Gladman]

From: "Julian T. J. Midgley" <jtjm@xenoclast.org>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 10:21 AM
Subject: RE: Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper


> On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Owen Lewis wrote:
> >
> > Keywords for the week are:
> >
> > Pot Kettle Black
>
> Well, maybe, but can you name the listening station (equivalent in
> capability to Echelon) built on US soil by the Europeans for the sole
> purpose of giving us access to their communications traffic?
>
> I think there's just a hint of lack of reciprocity here...

Correct.  Pretty well all nations have capabilities of various kinds to spy
on other nations but no other group of nations that I know of comes even
close to matching the global electronic surveillance capabilities of the
'anglo-saxon alliance'.

And as a founder member of this club it is inevitable that the UK will
always have the difficult task of trying to sustain its membership of this
club and the 'european club' since there are inevitably some very serious
conflicts of interest.

Duncan Campbell was kind enough to point me at the original source material
for these press reports but I have not yet had time to go through  it.   But
if press reports are to be believed one outcome of the European Parliament
study is a conclusion that Echelon is a 'fact of life' and that there is
little that the EU nations can do to counter it.

If this truly is a conclusion, the European Parliamentary group have been
badly briefed since nothing could be further from the truth.

But whether it would be in their interests to undermine Echelon is a much
more difficult issue since the main need for such assets is in areas where
US and European interests largely coincide.

The failure of the US and Europe to seriously discuss these issues is
dangerous since we need to remove the privacy and industrial/commercial
espionage concerns raised by Echelon without undermining its value in other
areas.

And without dialogue I don't see this happening.

   Brian Gladman