Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network
by Michy Hager
Chapter Two
Hooked up to the spy network: The UKUSA system
EXCERPT...
The global system has a highly secret codename -- ECHELON. It is by far the most significant system of which the GCSB is a part, and many of the GCSB's daily operations are based around it. The intelligence agencies will be shocked to see it named and described for the first time in print. Each station in the ECHELON network has computers that automatically search through the millions of intercepted messages for ones containing pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. For the frequencies and channels selected at a station, every word of every message is automatically searched (they do not need your specific telephone number or Internet address on the list).
All the different computers in the network are known, within the UKUSA agencies, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can search for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has been designed to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Before this, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations. Mostly, finished reports rather than raw intercept were exchanged.
Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. For example, the Waihopai computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD and CSE in addition to its own. So each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, Internet messages and other electronic communications that its computers have been pre-programmed to select for all the allies and automatically sends this intelligence to them. This means that the New Zealand stations are used by the overseas agencies for their automatic collecting -- while New Zealand does not even know what is being intercepted from the New Zealand sites for the allies. In return, New Zealand gets tightly controlled access to a few parts of the system.
When analysts at the agency headquarters in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham and Canberra look through the mass of intercepted satellite communications produced by this system, it is only in the technical data recorded at the top of each intercept that they can see whether it was intercepted at Waihopai or at one of the other stations in the network. Likewise, GCSB staff talk of the other agencies' stations merely as the various "satellite links" into the integrated system. The GCSB computers, the stations, the headquarters operations and, indeed, the GCSB itself function almost entirely as components of this integrated system.
In addition to satellite communications, the ECHELON system covers a range of other interception activities, described later. All these operations involve collection of communications intelligence,< 1 > as opposed to other types of signals intelligence such as electronic intelligence, which is about the technical characteristics of other countries' radar and weapon systems.
CONTINUED...
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/sp_c2.htm
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