Page 175 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

ECHELON / FIVE EYES

The erasure of the lines between telecom corporations and military intelligence began decades
ago in secret with Echelon, now known as the “Five-Eyes” (“F-VEY”), the English-speaking
(American NSA, British GCHQ, Australian DSD, New Zealand GCSB and Canadian CSE)
intelligence agencies. Only recently has the fact that telecoms are defense contractors been
allowed to go public—for example, with Amazon’s agreement to provide the CIA with cloud-
computing services:

The sinister implications of Amazon’s new CIA role have received scant public attention so far. As the largest Web
retailer in the world, Amazon has built its business model on the secure accumulation and analysis of massive
personal data. The firm’s Amazon Web Services division gained the CIA contract amid fervent hopes that the
collaboration will open up vast new vistas for the further melding of surveillance and warfare. . .Amazon is now
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integral to the U.S. government’s foreign policy of threatening and killing.

Echelon/Five Eyes began in 1948 with a secret treaty called UKUSA. Besides the U.S.
(North and South Americas), there were First and Second Party UK (Europe, Africa, Russia west
of the Urals) and Commonwealth partners Australia (Southeast Asia, Southwest Pacific and
Eastern Indian Oceans), New Zealand (South Pacific island nations), and Canada (northern
Russia, northern Europe, and American communications), plus Third Party Germany, Japan,
Norway, South Korea, and Turkey. Only Echelon members had access to data captured by
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satellite, microwave radio relay, undersea cable, and the Internet.
Echelon’s primary downlink facilities are still at Menwith Hill in England and Pine Gap in
Australia, with various fiber optic trunk lines for international calls and emails. Besides the U.S.
Navy-run receiving station at Sugar Grove, West Virginia in the Shenandoah Mountains
collecting SIGINT from civilian satellites, there’s Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico; Leitrim, Canada;
Morwenstow and London, UK; Bad Aibling near Munich, Germany; Kojarena near Geraldton in
Western Australia and Shoal Bay, Northern Territory; and Waihopai near Blenheim, South
Island, New Zealand.
Menwith’s SILKWORTH software with MAGISTRAND and PATHFINDER driving
keyword search programs based on complex algorithms were light years ahead of what the
public knew about VOICECST (voice recognition) and OCR (optical character recognition).
When British MP Bob Cryer spoke out about the status and role of Menwith Hill in 1994, he
ended up dead. Nineteen years before, in November 1975, the entire Australian Whitlam
government was dismissed for questioning the CIA’s three bases at Pine Gap, Nurrungar, and
North-West Cape, where staff earmarked for duty underwent brainwashing and implantation.
By 1995, the NSA had expanded Echelon/Five Eyes capabilities to intercept ever more
sophisticated and encrypted traffic, including microwave, cellular, and fiber optics. Under
“upstream” Operation Tempora, huge volumes of data are drawn from fiber optic cables and
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stored for sifting and analysis. Echelon/Five Eyes supercomputers vacuum everything up,
foreign and domestic, and military contractors like Lockheed Martin, TRW, Boeing, Hughes
(Raytheon), and Aerojet make out like bandits. 7
Once captured, phone calls, faxes, and emails are scanned by Dictionary computer programs
employing keywords that constantly shift (like the COWBOY dictionary at the Yakima facility
in Washington State and the FLINTLOCK dictionary at the Waihopai facility in New Zealand),
then cherry-picked as to what to save for analysis. Around the clock, millions of messages an
hour are processed, tagged, and filtered. Flagged messages get a four-digit code for the source or