#ELECTRONIC SPY NETWORK PASSWORD#
The person receiving your encrypted message must have access to a key or password allowing them to decode and read it. It would also help to encrypt your emails - in other words, translate them into a secret code. If it is any comfort, the European parliament report said "only a very small portion" of global telephone, email and fax communications were being tapped into, mostly those done via satellite. The MEPs have warned the government that Britain could be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights because of its participation in Echelon.Īs National Security Agency expert James Bamford explains in his book Body of Secrets: "The real issue is whether Echelon is doing away with individual privacy, a basic human right."
The worry is that Echelon could become a cyber secret police, eroding individuals' right to privacy. The report says that in the process of industrial spying, Echelon is eavesdropping on millions of daily communications between ordinary people. The European commission will now investigate whether Britain's use of the system is illegal. Although it has no legal clout, the MEPs' findings raise questions about how discriminating a global electronic spy system can be. The report concluded that the worldwide spy network does exist, but provides no firm evidence that the Echelon system has been used for commercial espionage. The European parliament issued a report on Echelon today, following a year-long inquiry into allegations that the spy system is being used to gather Europe's sensitive industrial secrets and pass them to British or American rivals. These transmissions are recorded and transcribed for future analysis. Agencies from the five countries exchange intercepted transmissions, using supercomputers to flag up any messages containing key words listed in the so-called Echelon 'dictionaries'. The Echelon operation is based at Fort Meade in Maryland, America, and at GCHQ in Cheltenham. But increasingly sophisticated computers mean Echelon can monitor industrial targets and private individuals. The five countries divided up the world to share the product of global eavesdropping.ĭuring the cold war, Echelon's attentions were focused on military and diplomatic communications. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand created Echelon as part of an Anglo-Saxon club, set up by secret treaty in 1947. Although evidence of Echelon has been growing since the mid-1990s, America flatly denies that it exists, while the UK government's responses to questions about the system are evasive. Officially, however, Echelon doesn't exist.
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