Echelon: US uses internet for economic espionage

(article published in France-Soir, January 2000)

(BRUSSELS2) The European Parliament has in its hands a small stick of dynamite concocted by its Scientific and Technical Assessment Office. The latter has just produced four studies - which should be debated on February 22 by the Committee on Civil Liberties - and could cause some turmoil in relations between Europeans or with the Americans. Indeed, “since 1947, the United States and the United Kingdom have sealed an agreement to share their listening capabilities on all communication networks. ". Objective: of course the fight against terrorism or crime but above all the economy. Clearly, industrial espionage is at the center of the system, especially since the end of the cold war. In the 1970s, the two brotherly countries set up a global listening network, called Echelon, which has different listening bases, including two in the United Kingdom (in Chicksands and Cheltenham), Internet, cables under - seamen of telephones, radio, nothing escapes Echelon which has, underlines the report, sufficient capacities to "swallow" all the information transiting on the world network. The intercepted information is sorted and codified, by type of information (C for commercial messages, D for diplomatic messages, etc.) or by country (FRD for French diplomacy, etc.). As soon as an economic stake is detected, the element is transmitted, after synthesis, to the commercial services concerned, to the companies possibly. Echelon thus enabled the Americans to achieve some major commercial victories. When Airbus wanted to sell planes in Saudi Arabia in 1995, Boeing and Mc Donnel Douglas made a counter-offer and won the market. The Americans were also able to follow “closely” the European negotiations on vehicle quotas with Japan. But that's not all ! To facilitate access to information, the United States, the report insists, has deliberately promoted certain technologies. The FBI (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) has thus initiated telecommunications legislation in many countries to limit encryption. Similarly, the main designers of computer software have been strongly encouraged to include codes in their programs allowing the NSA - national security agency - to decipher them easily.