“Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described the
Snowden’s disclosures — which amount to the first concrete evidence of the NSA’s domestic surveillance apparatus — as the most important leak in American history.”
So, now girls and boys, since I know you aren’t all as juvenile as you sound (“It’s a hero!…. it’s a spy!….it’s super—man!”), here’s a little run-down from the world of boring non comic-book adults. To wit, here’s
a brief history of the public exposure of the surveillance state, prior to the apotheosis of Edward Snowden, formerly of Fort Meade, Maryland, now of Russia, Ecuador, Hongkong, etc. etc.:
In 1996 ( that would be 17 years before Snowdon), Nicky Hager, a New Zealand journalist, exposed New Zealand’s involvement in Echelon, a satellite network, run by the Western powers, that had the ability to intercept practically all communications across the globe.
I blogged about it at length way back in 2010 here: – http://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/06/27/echelon-the-global-spy-system/.
“ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
The 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 telecommunications haystacks.”
Mind you, Hager’s book, based on an article for the magazine, Covert Quarterly, was itself late in the game, as she herself he himself acknowledged. Here’s the relevant part from the my blog post in 2010:
“Per Cryptome, the earliest public report on Echelon is in 1972. The first reporter to write on it is British intelligence reporter, Duncan Campbell: “They’ve Got It Taped,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988 (republished at Cryptome.org). Campbell testified before Congress on the subject in 1999 and prepared a report for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that was refused by EPIC’s director Marc Rotenberg, on the grounds that much of the information hadn’t been substantiated (see this correspondence between Rotenberg and Young). After that, there was debate between Campbell and Bamford over what the main focus of the espionage was.”
That would place the earliest public exposure of Echelon in 1972, which would be, let’s see, only FORTY TWO YEARS before the one by the TrueHooha (Snowden’s nick-name on the Ars Technica forum).
To be fair to the lad, he hadn’t yet been born..
But Hager is a journalist, not a whistle-blower from within the system, so maybe Snowdon, or, at least, his real-life predecessor, William Binney, are first off the mark there?
No.
It turns out that as far back as the 1970’s, Margaret Newsham, who designed programs for Echelon’s network, had described her work to Congress in 1988 and, in 1999, to the press:
[thanks to a commentator at American Everyman for alerting me to Newsham]
In interviews with Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet in 1999 (posted by the real American hero who runs Cryptome.org) Newsham stated:
“I know Echelon exists, because I helped make the system.”
Here’s an excerpt from one of the interviews with her, forwarded on the cypherpunk list and published at Cryptome, “I Sold My Life To Big Brother”
“For the second day running, former Echelon spy Margaret Newsham tells about the ‘Black World’ of espionage – and the fatal consequences it is had on her life. Half of her espionage colleagues are dead today.
“The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented. We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication – real time – and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with lightening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant.”
Was all the information forwarded to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade in Maryland?
“Not all of it, but quite a lot.”
Does the system use programs that are capable of virtually scouring the airwaves based on certain categories and trigger words?
“That’s one of the ways it functions, yes. It’s like an Internet search engine. By restricting your search to specific numbers, persons or terms, you get results that are all related to whatever you enter.”
Tell me, what did Snowden reveal that wasn’t revealed by Newsham?
This and dozens of equally devastating pieces are freely available at Cryptome.org, which is where I read them a few years ago. They’ve been there a lot longer, and so far as I know, the USG hasn’t hunted the authors or publishers across the globe.
Censorship doesn’t operate that way in the US. The powers-that-be have no objection to exposes appearing in small-circulation sites or in academic journals. To some extent they welcome it, since it blunts any charge of “censorship.”
But try and get a larger audience, and then the iron hand of the state emerges, as Nicky Hager found, when her his book, after initially creating a sensation, simply vanished from the public view.
From the same site, Cryptome, here is Duncan Campbell, the earliest journalist on the story:
“They spy on companies and interest groups,” says Duncan Campbell, who has looked at the listening post at Aflandshage near Copenhagen in Denmark. “The facilities at Aflandshage are hardly distinguishable from the Echelon installation in New Zealand.”
Physicist and technology expert Duncan Campbell has no doubt. Denmark is involved in illegal surveillance together with the other primary participants in the so-called Echelon system, the US, England, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
“My best guess is that the facilities at Aflandshage were additionally expanded shortly after the end of the Cold War. In 1990 or perhaps a little later.”
What does that mean?
“Well it means that Aflandshage is in any case not part of NATO’s defense against Russia and the other East Bloc countries like it was before. Everything indicates that the large parabolic antennas and accompanying buildings are used in the same way as the facilities in the other countries: to intercept communication from commercial satellites that transmit the phone and fax conversations of ordinary people. And to forward the intercepted information.”
And in this excerpt, also dated 1999, the Danish Minister for Defense admits that Denmark participates in a network of surveillance and has been doing so since World War II, and refuses to rule out the possibility that all civilian communications might be included as targets:
“Denmark participates in a global surveillance system,” admitted the Minister for the Defense Hans Hækkerup under heavy pressure.
As one of the first governments in the clandestine Western intelligence cooperation, Hækkerup acknowledged during a joint council in the Danish Parliament’s Europe Committee last Friday that the FE (Intelligence Agency of the Danish Armed Forces) participates in the interception of electronic communication.
Does this occur in cooperation with the NSA, which manages the so-called Echelon?
“I can’t confirm that, but I can tell you that the FE has been intercepting signals ever since the Second World War – and we’re still doing it.”
Nicky is a he.
Oh, thanks. I remember reading that recently and then I forgot.
Will correct.