<nettime> Echelon and NSA

[Alain Kessi <kessi@bitex.com>]

>From Antifa Info Bulletin No. 227,  December 5, 1999
http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib.html

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INTELLIGENCE
ISSN 1245-2122
Editor, Olivier Schmidt
E-mail: adi@ursula.blythe.org
Web: http://www.blythe.org/Intelligence
Tel/Fax: 33 1 40 51 85 19
Post: ADI, 16 rue des Ecoles
75005 Paris, France
Publishing since 1980
- N. 107, New Series, 29 November 1999 -

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____________________________________________________________________

HOW ECHELON WORKS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF NSA ACTIVITY
____________________________________________________________________

Most intelligence specialists are rather surprised by the recent media
coverage and public interest in the NSA Echelon dictionary system.
Detailed information has been publicly available since 1967 when David
Kahn published "The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing"
(Macmillan) with 60 pages on the NSA. The major book on the subject
remains James Bamford's, "Puzzle Palace - Inside the National Security
Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization" (1982,
Penguin). Besides these and other books, various articles have covered
aspects of NSA use of key word for "tagging" and analyzing collected
intelligence. As one specialists stated, "I covered this story more than
a decade ago in the computer and electronics trade press and as a
researcher for a feature done by Germany's [weekly] 'Stern' on NSA
activities in Germany. I did not know the code name at the time." The
code name, Echelon, became known in August 1996 when a New Zealand
anti-nuclear activist, Nicky Hager, researching the New Zealand
Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), came up against the
NSA and published his book, "Secret Power" (see "New Zealand - Echelon
System Sigint Network Revealed", INT, n. 42 50). The rest is recent
media and political developments.

While the dictionary aspects of Echelon have captured public attention,
they are rather secondary part of NSA's work. "Tagging" key words serves
no purpose without powerful analysis to use it. Like information
scientists, NSA has very likely been using combinatory analysis and
cooccurrence mapping. The former consists of watching the frequency of
selected key words, or specific combinations key words, in international
telecommunications traffic. Any significant change in frequency can
indicate something is happening and target the "tagged" communications
for more in-depth analysis. This is often referred to as the "top down"
approach for managing vast amounts of information. The "bottom up"
approach is to construct cooccurrence mappings of information where
"units" -- be they reports, articles, emails, or even single paragraphs
-- are "tagged" according to the key words they contain. The
cooccurrences of key words are used as a measure of similarity between
"units" which are mapped out so that more "similar" units are closer
together on the mapping.

Copyright ADI 1999, reproduction in any form forbidden without explicit
authorization from the ADI. A one year subscription (18 issues with full
index) is US $290.


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