[5552] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
What's a little spying between friends? (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Zombie Cow)
Tue Sep 7 20:39:13 1999
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 03:20:55 +0300 (EEST)
From: Zombie Cow <waste@zor.hut.fi>
To: cryptography@c2.net
http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/body/0,1634,89923-142316-981920-=
0,00.html
What's a little spying between friends?=20
Copyright =A9 1999 Nando Media
Copyright =A9 1999 Christian Science Monitor Service
From=20Time to Time: Nando's in-depth look at the 20th century.=20
By PETER FORD=20
(September 6, 1999 12:39 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - You are
not supposed to spy on your friends. As details emerge of U.S.
intelligence agencies eavesdropping on the e-mail, faxes, and phone
calls of European businesses, politicians in Europe are calling for
better ways to safeguard industrial secrets.
The most contentious source of trenchcoat contretemps among
trans-Atlantic allies: Internet encryption.
The United States is trying to persuade the European Union to allow
only Internet codes for which law enforcement and national security
agencies would have a "key." That would help to combat terrorists and
drug smugglers. But it would also give U.S. officials potential access
to the commercial secrets of foreign companies.
"Unless we have guarantees of safeguards, controls over who listens to
whom and what for, Europe is not going to leave the key under the
doormat so that the Americans can walk in and steal the family
silver," says Glyn Ford, a member of the European parliament.
But with no communist threat to occupy them, Western intelligence
agencies in the 1990s appear to be devoting more of their time and
resources to industrial espionage against each other. And, says
Michael Hershman, chairman of DSFX, the world's largest private
investigative agency, "Industrial espionage is going up steadily"
because of "globalization and increased competition."
Before the end of the year, the European Parliament is due to discuss
a series of reports detailing the manner in which the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA) intercepts international electronic
communications.
The operation, which uses an international network of listening posts
and supercomputers known as "Echelon," was described last year as "an
intolerable attack against individual liberties, competition, and the
security of states" by Martin Bangemann, outgoing European
commissioner for industry.
The latest report, issued earlier this summer, described how the
top-secret system scoops up electronic signals from satellites,
undersea cables, and microwave relay stations all over the world and
scans them for key words of interest to participating intelligence
agencies. Echelon includes Britain, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, as well as the United States, in a grouping called UKUSA.
"There is wide-ranging evidence" the report found, that Washington is
"routinely using communications intelligence to provide commercial
advantages to companies and trade."
The report cited a number of examples, including the NSA's
interception of phone calls in 1994 between the French firm
Thomson-CSF and Brazilian officials concerning a $1.4 billion
satellite surveillance system for the Amazon jungle. The eavesdropping
allegedly revealed that the company was bribing Brazilian officials.
Washington informed the Brazilian government, and Lexington,
Mass.-based Raytheon Corp. won the contract instead.
The U.S. government is also said to have used communications
intelligence to ferret out Tokyo's positions during past trade talks,
and to help Seattle-based Boeing beat out the European Airbus
consortium in a 1994 battle to sell $6 billion worth of airplanes to
Saudi Arabia.
"There are serious allegations in the report ... that need
investigating," says Ford.
The NSA refuses to comment on the claims. "We will not confirm or deny
the existence of any system called Echelon," says NSA spokeswoman Judy
Emmel. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) denies that it engages in
industrial espionage. "We are not in the business of spying for
private firms," said then-CIA director James Woolsey in January 1995.
"We assess international economic trends ... and support trade
negotiations."
That is presumably what CIA agents were doing in Paris a month later,
when they were expelled by the French government for spying. The
agents had been seeking information on the French position at
international telecommunications negotiations.
They also illustrated one of the major drawbacks to economic
espionage. "The main problem is you don't want to get caught with
accusations of espionage against your friends," says Adm. Stansfield
Turner, CIA chief under President Jimmy Carter.
A Turner launched a program to hand over to the Commerce Department
such CIA intelligence as might be useful to U.S. firms bidding for
international contracts - such as the value of opposing bids - but his
successors have insisted the agency now gathers only general economic
information with which to brief U.S. policy-makers.
Intelligence experts say that all major governments engage in economic
espionage of one sort or another. Some even boast about it: In his
1993 memoirs, a former French spy chief claimed his agents discovered
the United States was about to devalue the dollar in 1971, allowing
Paris to make a large profit by currency speculation.
Certainly, Washington is worried by the threat of foreign industrial
spies.
In 1996, President Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, the
first nationwide U.S. statute prohibiting the theft of trade secrets.
Eleven cases have been brought under the act so far, and a Taiwanese
businessman has been convicted. The Justice Department is preparing
other cases, some of them against foreign governments, according to
knowledgeable sources.
The Clinton administration has attached especial importance to
economic intelligence, setting up the National Economic Council (NEC)
in parallel to the National Security Council. The NEC routinely seeks
information from the NSA and the CIA, officials say. And the NSA, as
the biggest and wealthiest communications interception agency in the
world, is best placed to trawl electronic communications and use what
comes up for U.S. commercial advantage.
The European Parliament reports have sparked Continent-wide anger.
Questions have been raised by officials in Denmark, Germany, Norway,
and Holland, while the Swedish government has launched an
investigation into whether Swedish companies have been victims of
covert NSA surveillance.
In Italy, a Rome deputy district attorney has opened an inquiry to
determine whether NSA activities violate Italian privacy law.
More important, perhaps, the reports encouraged France and Germany to
lift their restrictions on the use and sale of strong encryption
software, which Washington has been trying to limit.
Arguing that strong encryption will allow international criminals to
conduct electronic business unhindered, Washington has long been
seeking to persuade European governments to regulate the use of such
software.
Specifically, the United States has demanded that Europe should adopt
a "key escrow" system, whereby a third party would have a "spare key"
to all code systems. The recent revelations of the NSA's activities
have only deepened European suspicions that this demand has more to do
with U.S. intelligence needs than law enforcement.
"The reports provide another argument to confirm our position that
high-level encryption should be freely allowed to protect perfectly
legal confidential messages," says Joachim Kubosch, spokesman for -
Bangemann.
"I am in favor of using all these technologies to catch people like
the Oklahoma bombers," adds Ford. "But we cannot allow the United
States to use them to steal tens of thousands of jobs from Europeans."
(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society
