Origins of global surveillance

The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s, when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, whose close cooperation eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON", in 1971.[1][2]

In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Senator Frank Church,[3] it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Benjamin Spock.[4] Decades later, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA's role in economic espionage in a report entitled "Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information", in 1999.[5]

However, for the general public, it was a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents in June 2013 that first revealed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Most of these were leaked by an ex-contractor, Edward Snowden. Even so, a number of these older global surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, and Tempora were referenced in the 2013 release of thousands of documents.[6] As confirmed by the NSA's director Keith B. Alexander in 2013, the NSA collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens.[7] Much of the data is kept in large storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center, a US$1.5 billion megaproject referred to by The Wall Street Journal as a "symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess."[8]

Clandestine surveillance in the United States

Main article: Mass surveillance in the United States

Wartime censorship of communications during the World Wars was paralleled by peacetime decipherment of communications by the Black Chamber (Cipher Bureau, MI-8), operating with the approval of the U.S. State Department from 1919 to 1929.[9] In 1945 the now-defunct Project SHAMROCK was created to gather all telegraphic data entering into or exiting from the United States.[9][10] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the U.S. government in the latter's attempt to gain access to international message traffic.[11]

In 1952, the NSA was officially established.[9] According to The New York Times, the NSA was created in "absolute secrecy" by President Truman.[12] Six weeks after President Truman took office, he ordered wiretaps on the telephones of Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a close advisor of Franklin D. Roosevelt.[13] The recorded conversations are currently kept at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, along with other sensitive documents (~233,600 pages).

Under J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carried out wide-ranging surveillance of communications and political expression, targeting many well-known speakers such as Albert Einstein,[14][15][16] Frank Sinatra,[17][18] First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,[19][20] Marilyn Monroe,[21] John Lennon,[22] and Daniel Ellsberg,[23][24] Through the illegal COINTELPRO project, Hoover placed emphasis on civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. (amongst others),[25][26] with one FBI memo calling King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."[27]

Some of these activities were uncovered when documents were released in 1971 by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, followed by the information revealed in the investigations of the 1972 Watergate scandal.[28] Following the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, and in light of the cumulative revelations, the U.S. Senate Church Committee was appointed in 1975 to investigate intelligence abuses by federal agencies. In a May 1976 Time article, Nobody Asked: Is It Moral?, the magazine stated:

It did not matter that much of the information had already been released—or leaked—to the public. The effect was still overwhelming: a stunning, dismaying indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies and six Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, for having blithely violated democratic ideals and individual rights while gathering information at home or conducting clandestine operations abroad...[29]

• 
  Due to his alleged ties to communism, the German-born physicist Albert Einstein was placed under surveillance after emigrating to America. The FBI monitored his mail, intercepted his telephone calls, and searched his trash.[14]
• 
  The American boxer Muhammad Ali, a self-declared Vietnam War conscientious objector, was targeted by the NSA's Project MINARET.[30]

Mass surveillance in a global context (1940–2001)

Main article: ECHELON

During World War II the U.K. and U.S. governments entered into a series of agreements for sharing of signals intelligence of enemy communications traffic.[31] In March 1946, a secret agreement, the "British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement", known as BRUSA, was established, based on the wartime agreements. The agreement "tied the two countries into a worldwide network of listening posts run by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s biggest spying organisation, and its U.S. equivalent, the National Security Agency."[32]

In 1988, an article titled "Somebody's listening" by Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman, described the signals intelligence gathering activities of a program code-named "ECHELON.[33] The program was engaged by English-speaking World War II Allied powers Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States (collectively known as AUSCANNZUKUS). Based on the UKUSA Agreement, it was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s.[34] Though its existence had long been known, the UKUSA agreement only became public in 2010. It enabled the U.S. and the U.K. to exchange "knowledge from operations involving intercepting, decoding and translating foreign communications." The agreement forbade the parties to reveal its existence to any third party.[32]

By the late 1990s the ECHELON system was capable of intercepting satellite transmissions, public switched telephone network (PSTN) communications (including most Internet traffic), and transmissions carried by microwave. A detailed description of ECHELON was provided by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book "Secret Power". While the existence of ECHELON was denied by some member governments, a report by a committee of the European Parliament in 2001 confirmed the program's use and warned Europeans about its reach and effects.[35] The European Parliament stated in its report that the term "ECHELON" was used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicated it was a signals intelligence collection system capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally. The report to the European Parliament confirmed that this was a "global system for the interception of private and commercial communications."[34]

Echelon spy network revealed

Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet. It sounds like science fiction, but it's true. Two of the chief protagonists - Britain and America - officially deny its existence. But the BBC has confirmation from the Australian Government that such a network really does exist..."

— The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), November 1999[36]

• 
  South Africa's anti-apartheid President Nelson Mandela was closely watched by British MI6 agents.[37][38]
• 
  Princess Diana's phone calls were monitored and recorded by the NSA right until she died in a 1997 Paris car crash.[39][40]

9/11 and its implications on global surveillance (2001–2009)

Further information: NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–07)

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the scope of domestic spying in the United States increased significantly. The bid to prevent future attacks of this scale led to the passage of the Patriot Act. Later acts include the Protect America Act (which removes the warrant requirement for government surveillance of foreign targets[41]) and the FISA Amendments Act (which relaxed some of the original FISA court requirements).

In 2005, the existence of STELLARWIND was revealed by Thomas Tamm. On January 1, 2006, days after The New York Times wrote that "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,[42] the President emphasized that "This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited."[43]

In 2006, Mark Klein revealed the existence of Room 641A that he had wired back in 2003.[44] In 2008, Babak Pasdar, a computer security expert, and CEO of Bat Blue publicly revealed the existence of the "Quantico circuit", that he and his team found in 2003. He described it as a back door to the federal government in the systems of an unnamed wireless provider; the company was later independently identified as Verizon.[45] Additional disclosures regarding a mass surveillance program involving U.S. citizens had been made in the U.S. media in 2006.[46]

You Are a Suspect

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual, centralized grand database. To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you—passport application, driver's license and toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance—and you have the supersnoop's dream: a Total Information Awareness about every U.S. citizen.

— The New York Times, November 2002[47]

• 
  The 7th U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was placed under surveillance by British intelligence agents, who bugged his office in the lead up to the Iraq War.[48]
• 
  The 8th U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was placed under surveillance by U.S. diplomats, who also collected iris scans, fingerprints and DNA of foreign diplomats, according to leaked documents released by WikiLeaks.[49][50]

Acceleration of media leaks (2010–present)

On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks and five major news outlets in Spain (El País), France (Le Monde), Germany (Der Spiegel), the United Kingdom (The Guardian), and the United States (The New York Times) began publishing the first 220 of 251,287 leaked U.S. State department diplomatic "cables" simultaneously.[51]

On March 15, 2012, the American magazine Wired published an article with the headline "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)",[52] which was later mentioned by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson during a congressional hearing. In response to Johnson's inquiry, NSA director Keith B. Alexander testified that these allegations made by Wired magazine were untrue.[53]

In early 2013, Edward Snowden handed over 200,000 top secret documents to various media outlets, triggering one of the biggest news leaks in the modern history of the United States.[54]

See also

• History of surveillance

References

1. "Q&A: What you need to know about Echelon". BBC. 29 May 2001.
2. Nabbali, Talitha; Perry, Mark (March 2004). "Going for the throat". Computer Law & Security Review. 20 (2): 84–97. doi:10.1016/S0267-3649(04)00018-4. It wasn't until 1971 that the UKUSA allies began ECHELON
3. Pre-Emption - The Nsa And The Telecoms | Spying On The Home Front | FRONTLINE | PBS
4. Cohen, Martin (2006). No Holiday. New York: Disinformation Company Ltd. ISBN 978-1-932857-29-0.
5. Peggy Becker (October 1999). DEVELOPMENT OF SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY AND RISK OF ABUSE OF ECONOMIC INFORMATION (Report). STOA, European Parliament. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
6. Snowden has ‘thousands’ of damaging NSA documents, says Greenwald
7. "Senators: Limit NSA snooping into US phone records". Associated Press. Retrieved October 15, 2013. "Is it the goal of the NSA to collect the phone records of all Americans?" Udall asked at Thursday's hearing. "Yes, I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it. Yes," Alexander replied.
8. Siobhan Gorman. "Meltdowns Hobble NSA Data Center". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 19, 2013. The Utah facility, one of the Pentagon's biggest U.S. construction projects, has become a symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess, which gained broad attention in the wake of leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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20. "Eleanor Roosevelt". History (U.S. TV channel). Retrieved September 18, 2013. J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, considered Eleanor Roosevelt's liberal views dangerous and believed she might be involved in communist activities. He ordered his agents to monitor Roosevelt and keep what became an extensive file on her.
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23. "'Life Lessons' From a White House Plumber". NPR.org. NPR. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit him. Among other things, Nixon loyalists burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
24. "The Watergate Story". The Washington Post. Retrieved September 17, 2013. The White House "plumbers" unit - named for their orders to plug leaks in the administration - burglarizes a psychiatrist's office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
25. "Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI File". Pickler Memorial Library (Truman State University). Retrieved September 17, 2013.
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32. Norton-Taylor, Richard (June 25, 2010). "Not so secret: deal at the heart of UK-US intelligence". The Guardian. London. Retrieved June 25, 2010.
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34. Schmid, Gerhard (July 11, 2001). "On the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system), (2001/2098(INI))" (PDF). European Parliament: Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System. p. 194. Retrieved September 16, 2013.
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40. David Hencke and Rob Evans (August 6, 1999). "US holds secret files on Diana". The Guardian.
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47. William Safire (November 14, 2002). "You Are a Suspect". The New York Times. Retrieved September 20, 2013.
48. "UK 'spied on UN's Kofi Annan'". BBC. February 2004.
49. Paul Richter and Ken Dilanian (November 29, 2010). "U.S. diplomats ordered to gather data on counterparts, WikiLeaks releases show". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 17 December 2013.
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53. Greenberg, Andy. "NSA Chief Denies Wired's Domestic Spying Story (Fourteen Times) In Congressional Hearing". Forbes. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
54. "Ex-CIA employee source of leak on PRISM program". France 24. 9 June 2013. Retrieved September 17, 2013. Snowden's decision to reveal his identity and whereabouts lifts the lid on one of the biggest security leaks in US history and escalates a story that has placed a bright light on Obama's extensive use of secret surveillance.