Recovered history: When the mainstream media ignored what NSA was up to

The Progressive Review was one of the few journals that reported on NSA's spying on citizens when it was uncovered more than 15 years ago. Here are some of our stories from then:

1998-1999

A story in the London Daily Telegraph confirms what TPR and a few other alternative news sources have been reporting for some time: that the National Security Agency routinely eavesdrops on telephone, e-mail and fax communications around the world. A recent report of the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament notes that "within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transferring all target information from the European mainland by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK." The report continues:

"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words."

The Daily Telegraph notes that:

"The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organization, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies."

The Washington Post has finally told its readers about NSA's massive electronic spying, but only after the agency itself admitting having 1,056 pages of classified information on the late Princess Diana. Until now, NSA's practice of spying on global communications has been reported largely by alternative media such as the Progressive Review.

Using the sort of sophistry honed by the CIA in its denial of involvement in the drug trade, NSA denied that Diana was ever a "target." Wrote the Post, "The NSA system sucks up millions of electronic signals from around the world every hour, but only 'targeted' communications are actually analyzed and deciphered after a vast array of supercomputers sort them out on the basis of programmed search terms, such as 'Saddam Hussein.'

Last January, the European Parliament reported that all "e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency" by a system called Echelon. The operation is carried out in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, because American law doesn't permit it on US soil. NSA claims it does not monitor American conversations. 

Said the report: "Each of the five [countries] supply 'dictionaries' to the other four of keywords, phrases, people and places to 'tag,' and the tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country," according to the report."

News of the Diana file came out after a Freedom of Information request was made of the agency. While admitting it had the files, NSA denied the request because "because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."

Steve Wright of the British Omega Foundation reports that the Echelon super-spy system taps 2 million calls an hour.

The London Telegraph reports that German security experts have found evidence that the NSA Echelon communications spy system is engaged in heavy industrial espionage in Europe. "Victims have included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. Last year it developed what it thought was a secret invention enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon banning the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, a NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television last August to reveal how he had stolen Enercon's secrets."

An Australian TV program has shed new light on the Australian end of the Echelon communications spying operation in which virtually all phone, fax, and email messages in the world are monitored by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The program -- probably the single greatest invasion of privacy on earth -- has been ignored or downplayed by American corporate media, although it has begun to attract some attention in Europe.   

A former spy with Canada's Communications Security Establishment told Sunday's Ross Coulthart that his agency was asked to spy on two of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet -- the request coming from then British Prime Minister Thatcher -- and bug the mobile phone of Margaret Trudeau, the wife of the then Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau.

Australia is routinely monitoring any fax, phone or data communications passing through satellites over the Indian and Pacific Ocean. The interception of these communications is controlled by a so-called "dictionary system" that scans all communications simultaneously with the use of powerful super-computers that have been programmed with key words, key numbers and even specific voice patterns. Some of the intercepted messages are sent to Australia's intelligence but the bulk go automatically to America.

Coulthart also reported a number of examples where the NSA had used its intercepts to provide valuable commercial intelligence which it turned over to American companies so they could gain a trade advantage.

NICK FIELDING AND DUNCAN CAMPBELL, SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON: Spy agencies in Britain and America eavesdropped on Diana, Princess of Wales and Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, as part of a global system of monitoring communications, according to former intelligence officials . . . The officials also revealed that charities such as Amnesty International, Christian Aid and Greenpeace were secretly spied on. Overseas targets have even included the Vatican: messages sent by the Pope and the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta have been intercepted, read and passed on to Whitehall intelligence officers, the sources say.

Code named Echelon, the monitoring system is part of a worldwide network of listening stations capable of processing millions of messages an hour. At least 10 Echelon stations operate around the world. Canada, Australia and New Zealand participate, as well as Britain and the United States. Former intelligence officials have spoken out after a decision by the European parliament to launch an inquiry into Echelon's operations. Officially, the British and American governments continue to deny the network's existence. Wayne Madsen, who worked for 20 years at America's National Security Agency and other agencies, said last week: "Anybody who is politically active will eventually end up on the NSA's radar screen"  . . .

"I just think of Echelon as a great vacuum cleaner in the sky which sucks everything up," said Mike Frost, a former Canadian intelligence officer. "We just get to look at the goodies." Frost, who retired in 1992 after 20 years' service, has also revealed that Canada's equivalent of GCHQ was used by Margaret Thatcher to monitor two cabinet colleagues. "She wanted to find out not what they were saying," Frost said, "but what they were thinking"  . . .