For civil liberties advocates, September 11 unleashed the perfect storm. The United States had just been attacked from within; unfounded reports by government agencies warned of more deadly attacks; a secrecy-obsessed president and vice president occupied the White House; and a high level of fear permeated the country. They were the perfect conditions to quietly do away with years of hard won intelligence reforms and replace them with expanded and intrusive authorities for the eavesdroppers and the spies.
Nowhere is the danger greater than in the area of wholesale electronic espionage, the kind performed by the ultrasecret giant ears in Britain and the US - the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and America's National Security Agency (NSA).
The pair are key players in the highly secret UKUSA Communications Intelligence Agreement. Signed on March 5, 1946, the partnership links the major English-speaking nations of the world, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a worldwide and highly secret eavesdropping network known by the codename Echelon. Since the late 1980s, there has been barely a corner of the earth that is not covered by a listening post belonging to one of the Echelon members - or an American eavesdropping satellite.
Echelon has morphed into an eavesdropping superpower with its own laws, language, and customs. It occupies close to 11m square miles of territory extending deep into outer space. In the same way mighty navies once ruled the high seas, Echelon's goal is to rule the airwaves and cyberspace.
This enormous intelligence-gathering power has caused grave concern among non-Echelon states, especially among Britain's and America's European allies. Last year, the European Parliament investigated allegations that Echelon was being used for industrial espionage.
But the issue is not whether the network is stealing trade secrets from foreign businesses and passing them on to their competitors. Based upon all indications it is not. The real issue is far more important: is Echelon stealing individual privacy?
Despite Echelon and all its supercomputers, signals intelligence analysis is like attempting to solve a puzzle where the pieces are difficult to see, contain only small bits of the much larger picture, and are constantly changing. Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle lead to dead ends and sometimes they lead to great discoveries. Occasionally they may lead to serious consequences for innocent, unsuspecting citizens of friendly countries. One such case took place in 1997.
At the time, NSA was closely monitoring the help China was giving to Iran's missile program. Of particular worry was the C-802, a shark-like, anti-ship cruise missile that could also serve as a delivery vehicle for a chemical or biological payload. With a range of 120km, these missiles, said James Lilly, the former US ambassador to China, posed a "clear and present danger to the United States fleet". At the time, more than 15,000 US servicemen were stationed in the Gulf.
For years Iran had purchased the weapons from China but officials in Tehran were becoming increasingly troubled about the prospects for future sales as China nudged closer to Washington. The key to the missile was its complex, precision turbojet engine, built by Microturbo, a French firm based in Toulouse. Few believed that Iran would be able to successfully build such a machine on their own.
But in November 1997, NSA delivered some bad news. Its electronic vacuum cleaner intercepted information indicating that Iran was attempting to go it alone.
Tehran planned to reverse engineer the engine by acquiring one and then peeling it back, layer by layer, until they knew enough to build it themselves. It then intended to obtain engine parts for as many as 100 missiles from Microturbo by disguising the ultimate destination.
The first indication of a deal between Iran and Microturbo came when GCHQ intercepted a series of faxes. Among them was a letter of credit valued at over $1.1m, issued by Iran's defence ministry to the French company. It said that the "goods" were to be shipped by December 3, less than a month away. The items were to be loaded on an Iranian ship in Antwerp which would take them to the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran.
At the White House there was outrage over the NSA report, and a series of demarches - diplomatic protests - were sent to France complaining about the sale of Microturbo engines to China. Nevertheless, the French would only say informally that the Microturbo contract simply involved "generators", not missile engines.
What employees of Microturbo did not know was that they had become entangled in Echelon's electronic web. So when F. Rossi (a pseudonym), the sales and marketing area manager of the company, faxed a message to R. Heidari, an Iranian defence official, it was intercepted by GCHQ's Morwenstow antenna, several hundred miles away.
Transferred to the agency's headquarters at Cheltenham, it arrived on the desk of an analyst who specialised in weapons systems and had been following the C-802 closely. The analyst concluded that Microturbo was attempting to "mask involvement in Iranian anti-ship [C-802] cruise missile component deal".
In his report, the GCHQ analyst wrote that Rossi had informed the Iranian military officials "that he would advise them in the next few days of Microturbo's position".
"To avoid any faxes being mis-sent to Microturbo's US subsidiary, Rossi requested that in future the headers of faxes should not show the name of the US subsidiary, and he also asked them to use a specific French fax number".
Echelon's worldwide eavesdropping web had allowed NSA and its partners to peek behind the heavy curtain and learn of the missile deals. Without it, Washington would have been left in the dark. No other intelligence source - human, military, diplomatic, photo - provided the answers produced by Echelon.
Once GCHQ intercepted the fax from Rossi, it was sent on to NSA, the Canadian CSE, and Australia's DSD as well as to MI6 and Customs. It was not sent to New Zealand's GCSB, possibly because of continued bitterness over the country's declaration of New Zealand as a nuclear free zone.
At NSA the information on Rossi went to W9P3, the Missile Proliferation section of W Group - the Global Issues and Weapons Group. NSA in turn sent the report on Rossi to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and Bonn, as well as to the US Commerce Department and to Customs. Thus within a few days of Rossi's fax, there were likely hundreds of people in at least four countries reading it and possibly putting Rossi's name on a black list, turning him into an enemy of the state.
The question, however, was whether the analysts were correct. Was Microturbo sending an engine to Tehran, as they suspected, or was it simply an innocent generator, as France was claiming? As with many cases in this grey, shadowy world, little is strictly black and white.
To finally resolve the issue, French export inspectors flew to Antwerp as the ship containing the "special items" was preparing to sail. Upon opening the crates, they later told US authorities, they confirmed that what was being sent were generators.
This forced the US authorities to conduct a "reevaluation" of the NSA and GCHQ transcripts. In light of the French information, NSA concluded that some of the intercepts were more ambiguous than originally reported. They admitted that the equipment could have been a generator, but one with potential military uses. "It doesn't mean we were necessarily wrong" in the earlier reports, said one US official. "But if we'd known of the doubts before, we wouldn't have done things that way." The chairman of Microturbo, Jean-Bernard Cocheteux, flatly denied the generator could be used as a missile engine."Microturbo SA never assisted Iran in any way" on any missile, he said.
The issues involving Rossi are central to the debate as to the potential harm caused by Echelon. If he were a member of one of the Echelon member nations, his name would have been deleted before the report was ever sent out. But because he was not, he made it into the computers and watch lists of intelligence, customs, and other secret law enforcement agencies around the world. It is unknown with whom those organisations might have then shared the information. Maybe nothing would come of it, or maybe the next time he tried to enter the US or Britain, although apparently innocent, he would be denied entry without being given an explanation why. Maybe he could even be arrested.
Also, following the "reevaluation," were the new conclusions casting doubt on the earlier reports sent to everyone who received the original information? Or were they left only with the damning original reports? Complex issues involving innocent non-UKUSA persons are likely to occur hundreds of times a week throughout the Echelon network.
As government surveillance technology becomes even more pervasive, the risks to individual rights grow proportionally. One former member of the Canadian intelligence service, the CSE, told the European parliament's investigation that the name and phone number of one woman had been added to the CSE's list of potential terrorists after she used an ambiguous word in an innocent call to a friend.
For thousands of people like Rossi and the Canadian woman, caught like characters from a Hitchcock film in an invisible electronic web, the results can be serious. Disembodied snippets of conversations get snatched from the ether, perhaps out of context, and are misinterpreted by an analyst who then secretly transmits them around the world.
The erroneous information gets placed in NSA's near-bottomless computer storage system - a system capable of storing five trillion pages of text, a stack of paper 150 miles high. Unlike information on US citizens, which cannot be kept longer than a year, information on foreign nationals can be held eternally. Like indian ink, the mark will likely remain with the person forever. They will never be told how, when, or why they were placed on a customs blacklist, turned down on a contract - or worse.
Unchecked, the Echelon eavesdropping network could become a cyber secret police force without courts, juries, or the right to a defence. It is a prospect made thinkable as the perfect storm of security concerns continues to blow away more and more civil liberties.
· James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World (Arrow), is a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.