- From the National Security Agency's imposing headquarters
at Fort Meade, Maryland, ringed by a double-chain fence topped by barbed
wire with strands of electrified wire between them, America "bugs"
the world.
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- Nothing politically or militarily significant, whether
mentioned in a telephone call, in a conversation in the office of the secretary
general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, or in a company fax or e-mail,
escapes its attention.
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- Its computers - measured in acres occupied by them rather
than simple figures - "vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum",
homing in on "key words" which may suggest something of interest
to NSA customers is being conveyed.
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- The NSA costs at least $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year to
run. It employs at least 20,000 officers (not counting the 100,000 servicemen
and civilians around the world over whom it has control). Its shredders
process 40 tons of paper a day.
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- Its junior partner is Britain's Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation
for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation.
Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with
spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ's
real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without
a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating
security.
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- Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it;
a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch
police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by
the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a
World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ's staff at Cheltenham,
about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring
stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere.
Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel.
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- Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year.
A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right
to run NSA listening stations in Britain - Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell,
Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales - and on British territory
around the world.
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- The collaboration between the two agencies offers many
advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier,
it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister's
statement yesterday that all Britain's bugging is lawful. The two agencies
simply swap each other's dirty work.
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- GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and
the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government
plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens' calls, as they do. The
NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls
made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone
conversations interest the NSA.
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- The NSA request to GCHQ for help in bugging the diplomats
from those nations who were holding out for a second Security Council resolution
to authorise an attack on Iraq is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that
both organisations wanted to provide their political masters with recordings
of private conversations of high-ranking international diplomats.
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- It is not difficult. Listening "bugs" can be
planted in phones, electrical plugs, desk lamps and book spines. Given
a clear line of sight, one device enables someone to detect and and interpret
sound waves vibrating against the glass window panes of an office.
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- Bugging the world is not the problem. The problem is
avoiding drowning in a sea of information. We should not be surprised that
GCHQ and NSA eavesdrop on us. We pay them to do it. We should be asking:
"Do they earn their keep?" And, unless we get a few more whistle-blowers
like Ms Gun, we will not know, because both agencies surround themselves
with a wall of secrecy.
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- WHO DO WE BUG?
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- Although under domestic law GCHQ needs a warrant from
the Home Secretary to tap telephones in Britain, it can do so abroad without
such authorisation.
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- But the United Nations headquarters in New York is considered
sovereign territory, and placing a bug there would be illegal under international
law.
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- Intelligence services spy on hostile and friendly countries,
the latter mainly for commercial reasons, but also to gain an edge in diplomatic
negotiations. Nato allies are not always immune from intelligence operations
by Britain.
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- Staff working for the UN inspection teams in Iraq were
convinced they were under surveillance.
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- France, Germany and Russia complained of a rise in espionage
against them. There was intense activity directed at Jordan and Syria,
as well as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Egypt.
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- Officials say the only shock about Katharine Gun's discovery
of an e-mail from the National Security Agency is that she was surprised
by it.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=495514
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