Yagami Website

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

— Senator Frank Church, quoted in: ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network

In his article Exposing the Global Surveillance Network in the #59 issue of CovertAction Quarterly (European mirror) Nicky Hagar writes:

"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 ... The activities they [Hagar's sources] 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. ... It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world."

The ECHELON system was exposed in detail for the first time in 1996 in Nicky Hagar's book Secret Power. In Chapter 3 we read:

"All the text messages (written communications such as telexes, faxes, e-mail) intercepted at the Waihopai station are fed into these computers. This is an enormous mass of material -- literally all the business, government and personal messages that the station catches. The computers automatically search through everything as it arrives at the station.

"This is the work of the Dictionary program. It reads every word and number in every single incoming message and picks out all the ones containing target keywords and numbers. 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 the telecommunications haystack."

And the same is happening at the other satellite tracking stations run by the NSA -- in Australia (Geraldton), England (Morwenstow), the U.S. (Sugar Grove and Yakima) and other places. The spooks have the world covered, and consider themselves free to read anyone's email that they wish to. Should this be allowed to continue? Perhaps it can't be stopped. In that case the appropriate counter-measure is to use encryption as much as possible.

Actually massive electronic eavesdropping by the NSA on telephone and telex communications is reported as having been practiced now for 35 years.

• Magazine Says U.S. Runs Spy Operation in Europe

Recently added links:

• Pine Gap, Australia

• Chris Oakes: Echelon 'Proof' Discovered

• Jeffrey Richelson: Desperately Seeking Signals

• We Care About Privacy — NSA Ha!ha!

• Spy claims may tarnish Britain's 'Euro-friendly' image

• French anger at US-British global spying

• 60 Minutes ECHELON transcript

• The media must learn the difference between a wiretap and "Echelon"

Older links:

This page was previously afflicted by link rot. As of 2002-11-08 all links are working, except where [link expired] is shown (in these cases a good search engine, such as Google, might turn up current documents).

Ramparts Magazine (1972 interview with Perry Fellwock):

U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir [link expired]

Articles by Duncan Campbell:

• They've got it taped

  "In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time."

• Screw the Internet [link expired]

  "The scale of NSA operations is staggering. Tens of billions of messages are intercepted every year. All international communications by satellite or undersea cable, and many domestic communications can be collected by taps or via satellite interception stations."

Chapter 8 [link expired] of James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency

Göran Andersson: U.S. Industrial Espionage Is Confronted [link expired]

Niall McKay (1998-10-10): Investigation Into NSA's Top Secret ECHELON Spy Network Dropped By EU

Niall McKay (1999-05-10): Spying on the Spies

Robert Lemos (1999-12-03): Privacy group sues NSA over spy net

Patrick S. Poole: ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network

Keith Parkins: Spooks on the net

Keith Parkins: PGP - Pretty Good Privacy

Simon Davies: Spies like US

David Banisar: Big Brother Goes High-Tech

Loring Wirbel: Space: intelligence technology's embattled frontier

Andrew Wood: Big Brother is Watching [link expired]

J.D. Tuccille: Party Line

Spy Power Boost for Secret Station — Satellite move clears way for phone taps

Privacy Rights: Echelon and the UKUSA

ECHELON — U.S. NSA Snooping on Allies

Menwith Hill

National Security Agency, Fort Meade, MD

Pine Gap Research Area [link expired]

The European Parliament: An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control

• Interim Report[link expired]

• 
  
• Summary and Options Report [link expired]

Interception Capabilities 2000

1999 STOA Report on communications intelligence

Die Technologie der politischen Kontrolle