New Report Alleges Industrial Espionage
By Charles Trueheart
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 24, 2000; Page A13
PARIS, Feb. 23—A report released today describing massive
U.S.-led
eavesdropping on private telephone conversations, faxes and
e-mail messages
around the world prompted a wave of concern and indignation in
Europe.
The report by a special European Parliament commission said that
the
electronic intelligence-gathering network had the potential to
violate the
privacy of millions of European citizens and suggested that it
has been used
to benefit U.S. corporations in economic and industrial
espionage.
The ground- and satellite-based intercept system, which is known
as Echelon,
was designed primarily for use against nonmilitary targets, such
as
terrorists, drug traffickers and money launderers, the report
says.
But the system "enables the countries using it to obtain
significant economic
information and, hence, to secure a leading position on the
commercial
markets," according to the report.
The system, which is operated by the National Security Agency in
partnership
with the intelligence services of Britain, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand,
intercepts "billions of messages per hour," said Duncan
Campbell, the
report's principal author, in Brussels. "We are not talking
about a trivial
thing here."
The inquiry's findings precipitated a flurry of comment from
European
politicians.
"In effect, democratic states and a member of the European Union
could have
organized large-scale espionage operations in order to reinforce
their
economic interests to the detriment of Belgium and other
European countries,"
said Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel.
"The Anglo-Saxon Echelon eavesdropping network constitutes a
serious
infringement on national security and on the freedoms of all
French people,"
said Rene Galy-Dejean, a French legislator.
U.S. officials routinely have dismissed European alarm over
Echelon as
unwarranted, saying the system is strictly for national security
use.
Intelligence officials also dispute the economic espionage
charge on
practical grounds, claiming that the sheer volume of intercepts
makes targeted
industrial spying all but impossible.
"U.S. intelligence agencies are not tasked to engage in
industrial espionage,
or obtain trade secrets for the benefit of any U.S. company or
companies,"
State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said today. He
declined to
acknowledge the
existence of the Echelon program.
The surveillance network dates to 1947 but has aroused deep
concern among
Washington's European allies in recent years as the scope of the
surveillance
of foreign telephone calls, faxes and e-mail became more
apparent.
Echelon was created in the mid-1970s and grew in complexity and
reach in the
last years of the Cold War.
Using artificial intelligence methods and a global network of
eavesdropping
dishes and relays, Echelon sifts through voice and data
communications in
search of key words that its overseers suspect may represent
security
threats.
Many Europeans wary of U.S. economic prowess are convinced that
the system is
being used to collect information on behalf of U.S. companies
bidding against
European competitors for lucrative contracts.
The report cites two cases in which Echelon intercepts
supposedly clinched
deals for American companies locked in bidding wars with their
European
rivals. But the report cites only news accounts to buttress that
claim.
The committee's inquiry was assisted by the declassification of
NSA
documents, through Freedom of Information Act requests and by
scholars at the
National Security Archive at George Washington University.
One of the archive's senior fellows, Jeffrey Richelson, said in
a telephone
interview that Echelon posed "a potential for abuse both in the
areas of
privacy and economic espionage."
But, he added, "the problem with the Echelon hysteria is that it
doesn't look
at what other countries are doing. The U.S. and its allies are
hardly the
greatest offenders. The countries doing the most whining about
[Echelon],
like France, are into this major league."
Today's report is the latest and harshest in a recent series on
the
monitoring network by the European Parliament.
The report is critical of the enormous power wielded by the
United States in
the surveillance system, but it is equally critical of the role
of the
European Commission, the executive body of the 15-member
European Union. The
report insinuates that EU member countries have been weak in
standing up to
U.S. initiatives that facilitate the network.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked today if Britain had
betrayed its
EU allies by participating in the surveillance program. " 'No'
is the short
answer," he told reporters in Brussels. "These things are
governed by
extremely strict rules, and those rules will always be applied."
