Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 13:30:13 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: European Parliament: Echelon Lives!
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,28890,00.html

European Parliament: Echelon Lives!
By Paul Meller - IDG
Sep 05 2001 09:43 AM PDT
The governmental body votes to adopt a report asserting the existence 
of the global electronic surveillance network.

BRUSSELS - The European Parliament Wednesday adopted a report that 
says the global electronic surveillance network known as Echelon does 
exist.

Some 367 members of the European Parliament voted to support the 
report - several years in the making - while 159 voted against, and 
34 members abstained at the Parliament's plenary session in 
Strasbourg, France.

"This is a big step forward," said Ole Schmidt, a member of the 
European Parliament from Sweden. "This is a damned important exercise 
in democracy. Now that a political body has revealed the existence of 
Echelon, we can put an end to the years of rumors upon the subject."

The report, which was published earlier this year, failed to produce 
hard evidence that the U.S. is using the global 
telecommunication-tapping network to conduct industrial espionage. 
"It is frequently maintained that Echelon has been used in this way 
but no such case has been substantiated," the report says.

However, the document lists several examples in which intelligence 
officers are believed to have interfered in a commercial contract. It 
claims that European aircraft maker Airbus Industrie had its lines 
tapped in 1994 while negotiating a $6 billion contract with the Saudi 
Arabian government and national airline.

The European Parliament committee leading the Echelon investigation 
concludes that the spying network is limited mainly to satellite 
communications, so that it is unable to tap most of the 
telecommunication signals that are distributed terrestrially in 
Europe.

"Echelon states have access to only a very limited proportion of 
cable and radio communications, and, owing to the large numbers of 
personnel required, can analyze only a limited proportion of those 
communications," the report says. Echelon was set up by the U.S., 
along with the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, according to 
the report.

Despite Echelon's limitations, the European Parliament believes that 
by reading or listening to Europeans' e-mail, fax and telephone 
messages, the U.S. is breaching the European Convention on Human 
Rights. U.S. National Security Agency officials in the U.K. and 
Germany are believed to be listening to messages. The Parliament 
urges the U.S. to comply with the convention.

It also recommends that all e-mail be encrypted, and calls for 
national European governments and the European Union to "support 
projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption 
software, as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors 
are built into programmes."

The European Parliament endorsement of the report will help speed 
efforts by the European Commission and member states of the E.U. to 
tighten telecom security, Schmidt said.

"Although national governments in Europe and the U.S. are not obliged 
to respond to this report, I think many will. The power of the 
European Parliament is limited, but in some areas it is growing," he 
said. "In terms of forming public opinion we are a strong political 
body - this report is an illustration of that."

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