Spy in the sky hears secrets

SURVEILLANCE

By SUELETTE DREYFUS

Page 1 Tuesday 03/14/2000 Tuesday, 14 March 2000

THE increase in the use of e-mail and mobile phones has left Australian
businesses more exposed to economic espionage by foreign governments,
according to an Australian National University academic.
Dr Michael McKinley, a senior lecturer researching a book assessing the
alliance between American and Australian intelligence agencies, says:
“Most Australians don’t fully understand ... just how much of their
private life is open to government.”
His warning follows recent revelations in a report commissioned by the
European Parliament that the US military engaged in economic espionage
and fed vital information to a US corporation, McDonnell-Douglas, which
was competing with a European company, Airbus Industries, for the same
contract based in Saudi Arabia.
The American firm won the bid after obtaining the European firm’s
financial terms. The US military obtained this information through its
international web of electronic listening stations.
Several of those stations are in Australia, which is part of a
five-country partnership of communications-based spying headed by the
US. The group of spy bases is commonly called the Echelon network. The
network stretches from Pine Gap to Bad Aibling, in Germany, and Waihopai
in New Zealand.
Some of these bases, such as Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, and Menwith
Hill, in Yorkshire, have been subject to noisy protests.
Dr McKinley says the US had wanted to move the Pine Gap base to American
soil on the North Pacific island of Guam in the mid-1980s. He says that
in 1986, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the retired director of US Central
Intelligence, told him that he (Turner) had made a case to the then US
President examining the possibility of moving Pine Gap at a cost of
$US2billion. The US was willing to pay the price, the director told Dr
Mckinley.
However, changing the direction of the spy satellite’s broadcast from
Pine Gap to Guam created a security hole. The satellite’s broadcast
footprint was larger than the island of Guam. The director said he was
worried about “Soviet fishing vessels” - a euphemism for spy boats. A
hostile nation could station a ship fitted with its own electronic ears
off Guam to spy on the spies.
The US abandoned the idea and eventually upgraded the Pine Gap spy base.
Pine Gap has now taken on the responsibilities of the recently closed
US-Australian Nurrungar military base, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide.
Nurrungar was responsible for detecting infra-red signatures generated
from missile launches.
Dr McKinley said that Australian governments had a history of being a
willing, silent accomplice in US policy.
In the 1970s and 1980s this involved a key role for Australia in the
US’s nuclear weapon strategy. In the 1990s, this role began to change.
In 1993, when the Geraldton base in WA become operational, Australia’s
capabilities for intercepting communications increased, leading to “a
greater scope for Australia’s contribution for intelligence sharing”, he
says. “The history of the euphemistically called ‘joint facilities’ is
one of dishonesty and deception. There were three nuclear targets
located in Australia without the Australian people being apprised of the
ramifications. Clearly, Australia became hostage to US global policy.”
With the end of the Cold War, the risk of a nuclear attack on Australia
has decreased significantly, he says. However, there are other types of
risk.
“Pine Gap is still something that compromises Australia because
Australia is hosting an espionage function against a number of countries
with which it claims to have friendly relations, for example, India and
the ASEAN countries,” he says. “In the post-Cold War world, it could be
argued (this) should be reduced.”
The electronic eavesdropping conducted on Australian soil is insidious
because they are more automated and less discussed, he says. “It’s not
visible. It’s part of the espionage wallpaper.”
In an recent article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, senior
fellow Jeffrey Richelson of the US National Security Archives says
Australia’s eavesdropping base at Geraldton searched intercepted
communications for Japanese trade ministry plans.
To do this, Geraldton aimed its four intercept dishes towards Intelsats
in orbit above the Indian and Pacific Ocean areas.
Dr McKinley says Australia would be disadvantaged if the US penetrated
confidential communications created as part of daily business in
Australia.
“I don’t believe you can trust any other country’s intelligence agency,”
he says. “The US has always collected commercial information in other
countries; the practice is not a new one. But the volumes might have
changed. It would strike me as odd if some form of this information was
not shared, for example, with your leading American corporate producers
of security hardware in the US.”
Dr McKinley says all Australian communications transported by satellite
(e.g. some international phone calls) and microwave relay (e.g. mobile
phone calls) are vulnerable. However, he says, the data has to be
screened in some way. “They can’t all be picked up and downloaded
because the volume would overwhelm even the US - unless you had a
filtering process.”
Judging from papers released by the US Patent Office, the American spy
agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), may just have found that
filtering process.
The NSA has designed and patented a technology for automatically
scanning text for specific topics.
“Topic spotting” allows the spy agency to find the most important text
from a large pool of documents without relying on simplistic keyword
searching.
The NSA specifically aimed the technology at “machine transcribed
speech”, which includes, for example, the text produced by a computer
transcribing telephone conversations. The NSA originally lodged the
patent application on 15 April 1997. The US Patent Office (which keeps
all applications secret until it issues a patent) granted patent number
5,937,422 on 10 August 1999.
The US Department of Defence (DoD) has built a prototype of the
technology and tested its performance. Two US DoD academic papers,
published as part of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1997 and
1998, reveal successful testing of Semantic Forests software.
Named for its use of an electronic dictionary to make a weighted “tree”
of meanings for each word in a document, Semantic Forests was designed
to “work with imperfect speech recognizer transcripts”.
The papers came from the speech research branch of the DoD, which is
located in Fort Meade, Maryland - the headquarters of the NSA.
One of the authors, Patrick Shone, also appears as an inventor on the
NSA patent application.
The Australian cryptographer Julian Assange, who moderates the online
Australian discussion forum Aucrypto, discovered the NSA patent and US
DoD papers while investigating NSA capabilities.
There is reasonably sophisticated voice-transcription software in the
commercial market. Compaq’s experimental Speechbot software “listens” to
radio shows and indexes them automatically, effectively allowing someone
to type in a keyword and search through hours of voice communications.
Assange says: “If a couple of Compaq researchers have had this on the
Web for free today, is there any doubt that the NSA has had the same or
better technology for years?”
The company’s state-of-the-art speech recognition technology has
transcribed more than 3800 hours of content from at least 3535 radio
programs thus far.
The computer transcripts are not perfect and contain many errors that
make reading the text difficult.
However, the software does have a high success rate in finding relevant
transcripts, which can then be studied more closely.
The Australian Defence Signals Directorate declined to answer questions
for this story.
LINKS
Compaq speechbot.research.compaq.com
TREC papers
trec.nist.gov/pubs.html trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec7/papers/nsa-rev.pdf.gz
(1998)
trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec6/papers/nsa-rev.ps.gz
Atomic Scientists
www.gwu.edu/ nsarchiv

CAPTION: Two photos: Listening post: The Royal Air Force base Menwith
Hill, in Yorkshire, is said to be part of the Echelon network, a
five-country partnership  of communications-based spying headed by the
US. Picture: AFP; All ears: Balloon-like structures, said to be
intelligence-gathering antennas, dot the Menwith Hill skyline. Picture:
AFP/ P

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