US Echelon spy network a fact, European Parliament told

STRASBOURG, Sept 5 (AFP) -

Virtually no satellite-bounced communication -- e-mail, phone or fax -- is immune to the US-run Echelon global spying network, the European Parliament was told Wednesday after a year-long probe.

The good news, according German MEP Gerhard Schmid, rapporteur of the enquiry report, is that "the extremely high volume of traffic makes exhaustive, detailed monitoring of all communications impossible in practice."

Parliament accepted the 138-page report and its resolution of 44 recommendations by a vote of 367 to 159, with 34 abstentions.

The globe-girding Echelon system involving the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand -- a quasi alliance dating to World War II -- sucks up airborne data "much like a vacuum cleaner," Schmid told parliament in presenting the report.

"Then it uses search engines that filter for key words relevant to intelligence services," he said. "We're not asserting this. We've got evidence, a link of indices which would stand up in court under oath.

"We can assure you," he said, "that if there was anything really wrong (with the report) the intelligence services in the (Echelon) countries would have enjoyed pointing that out. But they haven't. And that speaks for itself."

But he said most industrialized nations, including many in the EU itself, have comparable, if inferior, spying systems and that it is basically a case of spy-versus-spy.

"Let's be honest," said Schmid. "The intelligence services in most of the EU member states use strategic telecommunications control...The purpose is usually relevant: fighting organized crime, terrorism, trafficking in drugs, human beings. That's fair enough."

And he said Echelon, with some asides for commercial spying, appears to be doing essentially the same.

The US justifies electronic spying to gain contract procurement advantage for its firms "on the grounds of combatting attempted bribery" by the European firms, he said.

Working largely unnoticed for some six months, the Echelon committee got sudden attention last March after a European Commission official told it that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tested the encryption system that Brussels uses to communicate with its foreign missions.

The EU's executive branch said afterwards that the 10-year-old system's supplier -- the German engineering group Siemens -- had claimed in its sales pitch that the NSA had tried but failed to crack its codes.

Last May, the EU sent a delegation to Washington to meet with the state and commerce departments, the CIA, and NSA, but those meetings were abruptly cancelled by the US side.

Schmid said other meetings would probably be held this fall -- in Europe -- in an effort to coordinate electronic surveillance and set ground rules, but provided no details.

The Echelon report called on EU states "to negotiate with the USA a code of conduct similar to that of the EU" concerning data security.

It called on EU institutions and public bodies of member states "to systematically encrypt" sensitive communications "so that encryption becomes the norm."

And it urged the European Commission, the EU's executive, to ensure its own data is protected and to update its encryption systems, and recommended member states do likewise.

The report had little to say about Britain, which as an Echelon partner harbors satellite listening stations on its soil.

But German MEP Christian von Boetticher, who headed the investigating committee, told parliament, "Our British friends, because of their EU membership, are asked to put an end to American espionage activities and control the ones carried out on their land.

"Otherwise," he said, "they are contravening European legislation."

Schmid earlier said that not a single European company had come forward during the investigation to complain about being spied upon by the Americans.

"One explanation for this is that companies, when they find they are being spied upon by the competition, don't want to talk about it. It's a question of prestige...of embarrassment."

"Imagine," von Boetticher told parliament, "that you are a policeman investigating a crime. There are five victims, and five suspects, but nobody will say anything and nobody knows exactly what happened.

"This was our situation when we began our enquiry. One year later we have ascertained that the weapon was not a bomb but high precision technology. And there was only one perpetrator. The victims gave us evidence, but were not willing to testify. And that's not enough for a court sentence."

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001