Project Echelon: Orbiting Big Brother?

Space.com | November 20, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Earth-orbiting listening posts are on active duty in the United States-led war on terrorism. Signal-seeking spacecraft not only play a critical role in eavesdropping on nations from on high, but also within the borders of the U.S itself. Hints and speculations about the true nature and capabilities of these "all ears" spacecraft have reached folkloric proportions.

Some reports suggest that cell phone traffic, ground line chats and faxes, telexes and satellite telecommunications links, as well as Internet emails are intercepted around the planet. Once electronically gobbled up, the information is sifted by supercomputers loaded with souped-up software to flag keywords of special interest to a network of must-know-it-all intelligence communities.

This worldwide chunky-style data interception is purportedly run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), under the rubric of Project Echelon. Sister intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other like-minded governments or organizations are apparently in cahoots with the United States in operating this super-secret network of ground, airborne, and satellite gear.

In the United States, not surprisingly, officials are mum on whether Echelon even exists. Real or not, for some individuals, the very hint of such a system conjures up images of Big Brother, out-of-control snooping, willy-nilly wiretapping and civil liberties violations.

Still, many hope such high-tech electronic surveillance is on full alert and doggedly trying to uncover the whereabouts of terrorist Osama bin Laden and his gang.

Others even encourage the use of listen-in-and-learn spacecraft to spy within U.S. borders, and see it as one more potential tool for the efforts of the new Office of Homeland Security.

Some, however, feel that Echelon's time has already come and gone.

GRAB bag of data

Eavesdropping from space is certainly not new.

During the heady and sweaty days of trying to keep a reliable eye on the former Soviet Union, President Dwight Eisenhower approved the construction and launch of a secret reconnaissance satellite project, eventually known as the Galactic Radiation and Background experiment, or GRAB.

Sent into space in June 1960 -- but billed as a science project to measure the Sun's radiation -- GRAB's true purpose was to snag electronic air-defense emissions. The tiny satellite, developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, represented America's first "ears" in space. GRAB-1's orbit around Earth sent it through the energy beams from Soviet radar whose pulses traveled straight and far beyond the horizon into space.

GRAB-1 collected and recorded those pulses, transmitting the data to "collection huts" at various ground sites within the satellite's field of view. Information gleaned by the spacecraft was then taken by courier aircraft to the United States for assessment by the National Security Agency (NSA) and others. A GRAB-2 was orbited in June 1961.

GRAB data yielded technical intelligence about Soviet radar, enabling U.S. military planners to script effective war plans. The electronic intelligence satellites nosed-in on the Soviet Union from orbit, relaying details unobtainable by Air Force and Navy ferret aircraft that flew along accessible borders in Europe and the western Pacific.

Over the top

One of the pillars of U.S. intelligence is the collection and analysis of "signals intelligence," or "SIGINT" for short.

Over the decades, a variety of costly satellites have made their way into orbit, each outfitted with mega-antennas crafted to snare weak signals drifting through the ether.

Magnum, Ryolite, Jumpseat, Orion, Chalet, Aquacade, Vortex -- these are among the names tagged to these patrolling sentinels of the deep by space watchers. To what degree any of these satellites may have, or are now, playing a role in Echelon data gathering and distribution is hazy.

On October 10, a secret data relay satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, the new relay satellite could be used to route data involved in U.S. counter-terrorism operations or intelligence data specifically related to military operations in Afghanistan.

Echelon is very real, explains Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. He has pointed out that some of the oratory concerning Echelon and its abilities may be "over-the-top." But the fact that a U.S.-promoted effort to operate an electronic eavesdropping network with global reach "should come as no surprise," he explains.

Wild speculation?

Similarly sanguine is Richard Best, Jr., a specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division. The CRS is a research arm of the U.S. Congress.

"There has been a capability for many years to listen for specific words, to filter them out. But in terms of listening to every conversation or every email throughout the world, that's just wild speculation," Best told SPACE.com.

"My sense is that [the word] Echelon is loosely used, probably more outside the intelligence community than inside the community. It's involved, I believe, in electronic surveillance, but maybe I'm wrong, of non-military targets and they do it in cooperation with other countries," he said.

But sometimes those cooperative allies may also be targets. In mid-September, a special investigative committee reported to the European Parliament that Echelon was fact, not fiction. The conclusion came after a study was undertaken to review allegations that Echelon was intercepting private and commercial communications, mainly via satellite, for American industrial espionage purposes.

The committee could not substantiate that the United States was utilizing Echelon to the disadvantage of European businesses. Nonetheless, steps were taken by the European Union to block the intrusive nature of Echelon.

Has it also become fair play for U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies to turn satellites and other devices on Americans?

History serves as a reminder that the Nixon White House ordered the NSA to target the anti-war movement in the 1970s. On the other hand, to help thwart terrorism inside America today, growing sentiment among the citizenry seems to be a "do what it takes" attitude.

In the United States, and particularly in view of the events of September 11, Best said, there is growing understanding of the need to "collect what you can."

But if such an intelligence-hungry system like Echelon is real, why was there no warning from its operators that a massive attack on home soil was imminent?

Given 20/20 hindsight, Best said, one could go back and perhaps see a pattern. "People for whatever reason didn't see the pattern at the time. Whether in retrospect they should have, or whether there was no reasonable expectation that they could havethat's the question and I'm not going to sit here and speculate on that," he said.

Revitalize and beef up

On November 8, the U.S. Senate gave thumbs-up to an annual funding bill that bolsters America's spying skills. Total monies approved for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NSA, and other super-secret efforts remain classified. While both House and Senate lawmakers must now strike a balance between their respective funding bills, it is clear that billions of extra dollars -- beyond that of a minimum $30 billion yearly budget -- are earmarked to revitalize and beef-up ground- and space-based surveillance technologies.

"Five years from now, the NSA must have the ability to collect and exploit electronic signals in a vastly different communications environment than that in which we spent most of the second half of the 20th century," said Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat.

As he introduced the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 in Congress, Graham said that having the same level of electronic surveillance today that we had just a decade ago requires a major investment in new technology, such as sophisticated software to cope with huge amounts of collected data.

For years, there has been a growing imbalance between collection and analysis, Graham noted. "We are collecting a massive amount of information on an hourly basis," he explained, "but the percentage of that collected information which is analyzed and converted into effective intelligence has been steadily declining since 1990."

Smarter humans

The wisdom of Congress pumping added monies into high-tech, intelligence-gathering gadgetry like eavesdropping spacecraft is arguable, two noted experts contend.

"The Echelon network represents a reasonable attempt to share the burden of global coverage among several nations with shared concerns about terrorism, proliferation, and other key topics," said Robert Steele, a 25-year veteran of the national security community. He is Chief Operating Officer for Open Source Solutions in Oakton, Virginia.

Steele points out, however, that Echelon is largely based on 1970's technology. It has gradually lost most of its value because of considerable gains in private sector forms of communication that are not amenable to Echelon collection.

Spies on the ground are more in demand than spending and sending billions of dollars worth of intelligence-gathering satellites skyward, Steele argues.

"The information explosion has dramatically changed what and how nations need to do intelligence. Instead of secret collection, the emphasis must now be on all-source processing. Instead of technology in space, the emphasis must now be on smart humans with their feet firmly planted on Earth,"

"I am strongly opposed to the recapitalization of the secret satellite program," Steele told SPACE.com. New expenditures represent an "outrageous continuation of very old ideas," he said.

What is desperately needed, Steele adds, "is to improve human analysis, clandestine human collection, all-source processing, and access to the full range of multi-lingual open sources of information."

Going deaf?

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists's Project on Government Secrecy, offers a similar note of caution.

"After September 11, the limits of the so-called Echelon surveillance network should be clear to everyone. Far from being some kind of omniscient global surveillance system that is the instrument of U.S. hegemony, Echelon was not even adequate to the task of protecting against a direct attack on the United States," he told SPACE.com.

"Between those who assert that NSA's global surveillance activities are ubiquitous and inescapable, and those who say that NSA is slowly going deaf in the face of technological change, events seem to favor the latter position," Aftergood said.

Last modified November 21, 2005