In the course of his professional life in the world of
national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous
probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed
background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully
designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington
Post (June 10) reported that “several officials said the CIA will now
undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been
hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he
might one day betray national secrets.”
Yes, there was a sign they missed – Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.
It was the same with me. I went to work at the State
Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best –
the most patriotic – of intentions, going to do my best to slay the
beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on
a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of
Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me
sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I
could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted
my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know of
the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could
have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was
to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to
be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to
know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1
So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well,
they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible
things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning
and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars,
the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of
dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things
that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American
terrorists, that compel the National Security State – in pure self
defense – to spy on the entire world.
Eavesdropping on the planet
The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in
2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the
World’s Only Superpower. Here are some excerpts that may help to put the
current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective …
Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater
invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they
merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.
Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National
Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone,
cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic
communications traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images …
captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed
by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is
there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions
of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime
ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England,
embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena …
if God has a phone, it’s being monitored … maybe your dog isn’t being
tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been
attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.
Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the
1970s, the NSA and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada operate a network of massive, highly automated
interception stations, covering the globe amongst them. Any of the
partners can ask any of the others to intercept its own domestic
communications. It can then truthfully say it does not spy on its own
citizens.
Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and
institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting
huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and
extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every
intercepted message – all the embassy cables, the business deals, the
sex talk, the birthday greetings – is searched for keywords, which could
be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to
flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of
the key words in the ECHELON “dictionary” – “He lives in a lovely old
white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two
minutes.” Within limitations, computers can “listen” to telephone calls
and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and
recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of
specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one
point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.
ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment
of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or
legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The
extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of
intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget –
far from being greatly reduced – was increased, and the network has
grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the
Cold War was not a battle against something called “the international
communist conspiracy”.
The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to
wake up to this intrusion into the continent’s affairs. The parliament’s
Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998
and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing
power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: “The
European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for
making private messages via the global communications network [Internet]
accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report denounced Britain’s
role as a double-agent, spying on its own European partners.
Despite these concerns the US has continued to expand
ECHELON surveillance in Europe, partly because of heightened interest in
commercial espionage – to uncover industrial information that would
provide American corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals.
German security experts discovered several years ago
that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims
included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon.
In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention,
enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper
rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its
invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival,
Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical
development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban
the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an
NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on
German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by
tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s
research laboratory and its production unit some 12 miles away.
Detailed plans of the company’s invention were then passed on to
Kenetech.
In 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus
Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative
contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by information
covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped
on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United States
in 1995 over auto parts trade.
German industry has complained that it is in a
particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its
security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. “German
politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies
should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and the British
do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist
in European industrial espionage, in 1999.
That same year, Germany demanded that the United
States recall three CIA operatives for their activities in Germany
involving economic espionage. The news report stated that the Germans
“have long been suspicious of the eavesdropping capabilities of the
enormous U.S. radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near
Munich”, which is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The Americans tell
us it is used solely to monitor communications by potential enemies, but
how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces of
information that we think should remain completely secret?” asked a
senior German official. Japanese officials most likely have been told a
similar story by Washington about the more than a dozen signals
intelligence bases which Japan has allowed to be located on its
territory.
In their quest to gain access to more and more private
information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of the US national
security establishment have been engaged for years in a campaign to
require American telecommunications manufacturers and carriers to design
their equipment and networks to optimize the authorities’ wiretapping
ability. Some industry insiders say they believe that some US machines
approved for export contain NSA “back doors” (also called “trap doors”).
The United States has been trying to persuade European
Union countries as well to allow it “back-door” access to encryption
programs, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement
agencies. However, a report released by the European Parliament in May
1999 asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling encryption
software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything
to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI
agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities
in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign
communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to
veteran intelligence officials.
For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company
Crypto AG sold the world’s most sophisticated and secure encryption
technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of
its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The
purchasing nations, some 120 of them – including prime US intelligence
targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia – confident that their
communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to
their embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens
around the world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because
of a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments
might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington,
uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being sold
to them, so that when they used them the random encryption key could be
automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered
message. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could
the morning newspaper.
In 1986, because of US public statements concerning
the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect
that something was rotten with Crypto AG’s machines and switched to
another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had
that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious
circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion
similar to Libya’s, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on
a business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became
well known and the scam began to unravel in earnest.
In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had
arranged with Microsoft to insert special “keys” into Windows software,
in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist,
Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts
of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun – Microsoft’s
developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this
software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for
two keys. One was called “KEY”.
The other was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez
presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers
were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key
was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the
key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge.
Fernandez says that NSA’s “back door” in the world’s most commonly used
operating system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US
government to access your computer.”
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic
Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense
Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had
helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to
the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was
largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was
made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same
administration.” The report stated that there had been a “strong
suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the
existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA
personnel in Bill Gates’ development teams.” The Pentagon, said the
report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the world.
Recent years have seen disclosures that in the
countdown to their invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States had
listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in
Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period
when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.
It’s as if the American national security
establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if
there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire
world, stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of
the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.” And
the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons shall be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or
alleged.” 2
The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee
Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and
Thomas Drake … before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and
Jesselyn Radack … there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the
most startling and important information about US foreign policy that
any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.
Philip Agee spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case
officer, most of it in Latin America. His first book, Inside the
Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 – a pioneering work on the
Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences – appeared in about
30 languages around the world and was a best seller in many countries;
it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover
Agency operatives and organizations.
Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their
payroll, were past and present presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay,
and Costa Rica, “our minister of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my
police”, journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and
many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist
propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy
personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present
them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and –
presto! – instant scandal.
Agee’s goal in naming all these individuals, quite
simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue
doing its dirty work.
A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and
phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media
with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media.
The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being
picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate
it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of
these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or
heard by unknowing North Americans.
Wooing the working class came in for special
treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than
names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and
new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right
combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take
national leadership away from them.
In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for
many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not
quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what the New
York Times had reported.
“As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be
published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or
British ‘case officer’ operates … All of it … presented with deadly
accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent
foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer more hated by members of the
intelligence establishment than Agee; no one’s even close; due in part
to his traveling to Cuba and having long-term contact with Cuban
intelligence.)
In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of
hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents it
released.
In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing”).
While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside
the Company – at times literally running for his life – Agee was
expelled from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain, France, West
Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually gave him
asylum because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.) Agee’s
account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book On
the Run (1987). It’s an exciting read.
Notes
1. To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002)
2. See Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without
permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to
this website are given.
William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire www.williamblum.org
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