Code name Echelon Analysis/Commentary Guess who's spying on citizens using digital technology? The U.S. government, that's who. Yes, the braniacs at the National Security Agency, reputably 38,000 strong, not content with intercepting the banal muttering of diplomats on cell phones, have decided to sift through our e-mail. The NSA has been operating Echelon, a global digital surveillance network for twenty years now and has even enlisted our English-speaking cousins: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The idea is devastatingly simple: Let's catch bad guys by sifting through every e-mail, fax, and telex sent worldwide. Echelon operates through an agreement called UKUSA, originally meant to target signal antennas on the countries of the Soviet Bloc and their allies. But with the Cold War for all practical purposes over, Echelon has turned its sights on domestic and other friendly transmissions. And who's to complain? Echelon runs bigger and better computers than anyone else, and has security on its side. In the military-industrial lexicon, "security" reads "S-E-C-R-E-C-Y." A New Zealander, Nicky Hager, broke the story of Echelon in his book Secret Power. But the news has taken two, three years to gather steam. Reports of the joint surveillance appeared in Wired, Time, on the BBC website, and recently, in the Washington Post, the Ottowa Citizen, and The New York Times. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union set up an Echelon website, hoping to attract attention to the gross abuse of privacy. But the Echelon governments, while mostly silent, probably don't feel they have done anything wrong. They're doing what they do -- making the world safe for peace, getting the other guy before he gets you, and ferreting out those who would undermine the status quo. In short, "we're only looking for bad guys" seems to be the prevailing excuse. The NSA, to be fair, has a mandate to engage in eavesdropping. Born from American efforts to decrypt enemy and proto-enemy transmissions during the '40s and '50s, it was officially established by President Truman in 1952. During the Cold War years it targeted Russian and Chinese embassies and flew reconnaissance satellites. Only lately has it turned to indiscriminate snooping. Echelon collects digital signals from both terrestrial and satellite transmissions in real time through a process of digital vacuuming. Using collection stations in the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, Echelon consolidates billions of messages and sifts them for suspicious words or phrases. It forwards only suspicious materials to the intelligence agencies of appropriate UKUSA member countries. Some of the information is reportedly commercial in nature: a contract bid, news of a big international deal, and such. Obviously, Echelon has incensed investigative reporters throughout the world. But the story hasn't been very closely followed by Joe and Jane Average. After a day of being snooped on by supervisors at work, watched by video cams in supermarkets and parking lots, and tracked and monitored by marketers on the Internet, perhaps the average citizen simply doesn't care. Nor does the European Union seem to care, for a very different reason. Maybe France, Germany, Italy, etc., have been doing a little snooping on the side too. International law has never provided safeguards against warrantless searches or reading other peoples' mail. And there's a tradition of keeping an eye on the tribes across the border or the sea. In the U.S., this isn't the first time the international interception of messages has occurred. In 1975, Congress put a stop to Operation Shamrock, the practice of reading all international telegrams leaving or entering the country. (Again, this was NSA's bright idea.) Perhaps the NSA should be made more accountable to the people in its search for enemies. Or perhaps indiscriminate spying is, like the watch cam in the parking lot, just something we all have to learn to live with. November 24, 1999