BY ALISON DELLIT
The February 12 revelation that communications between Australian residents and the MV Tampa were spied upon has focused attention on the role of Australia's secret police agencies.
Many people are uneasy at the thought that private phone calls, emails and faxes could be monitored. The Tampa "breach of guidelines", however, looks quite mild when compared to "business as usual" for Australia's spies.
The monitoring agency was the Defence Services Directorate (DSD), one of Australia's three intelligence agencies. The others are the Australian Intelligence Security Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. The three have defined duties: ASIO is responsible for "domestic" spying — infiltrating and monitoring Australian organisations and individuals. ASIS is responsible for "external" spying — basically on other countries' activities.
The DSD, however, is the most highly funded and staffed agency of the three. It is responsible for recording communications between countries throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Unlike ASIO and ASIS, the DSD does not need a warrant to record private communications. That is its job.
As the US pursues its global "war on terrorism", funding to agencies like the DSD is being stepped up, exacerbating a long-term trend. In 2001, the phone-tapping capabilities of the Australian Federal Police jumped by 25%. Funding to communications-surveillance equipment (across all agencies) was $111 million in 1992. In 1999, it was $371 million.
The DSD describes itself as a "semi-public" institution — it has a web site with extensive recruitment propaganda on it. It publicly provides advice to public and private organisations and departments on security, encryption and checking into workers' "security clearance". But this (relatively) benign front hides a much more sinister organisation.
The DSD was set up just after World War II, probably as Australia's contribution to the UKUSA agreement, made around the same time. The UKUSA agreement — between the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — committed participating countries to create a single network of information collection. This network is commonly referred to as Echelon, the code name initially used to refer to the satellite network that it operates.
Since then, the DSD has not released a single intercept recorded by it into the public domain. Because of "national security concerns", it has an exemption from the normal rule that government documents be released after 30 years.
As part of the Echelon system, the DSD probably records all email, telephone calls and faxes between particular countries, then electronically sorts and stores any material containing particular keywords in a vast database. This database, with restrictions, is accessible by all members of Echelon.
Australia was the first country to admit, in a 1999 letter from then DSD director Martin Brady to Channel 9 reporter Ross Coulhart, to being a member of Echelon. New Zealand subsequently followed suit. The US government, however, still denies that Echelon exists.
In a report published by the European Parliament in July 2001, a sub-committee concluded that Echelon did exist, and recommended that European Union governments use encryption to avoid it. While the EU is highly critical of Echelon, it is widely suspected to operate a similar program. In June 2001, Spain conceded that it had a data-sharing arrangement with Echelon.
Much of the information on Echelon has been obtained from reports produced from the Scientific and Technical Options Assessment (STOA) program office of the European Parliament, and from the research of New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager. Hager has interviewed more than 50 ex-staff members of security organisations participating in Echelon, in a slow and thorough attempt to build a picture of Echelon's activities.
The picture these researches paint goes beyond any Orwellian nightmare. The equipment believed to be utilised by Echelon includes: massive ground-based radio antennae to intercept satellite transmissions (including one at Pine Gap), internet and email interceptors, "microwave interceptors" (often located within embassies in foreign countries), underwater-cable taps and satellite installations such as the one at Geraldton, in Western Australia.
Rather than try to selectively intercept individual communications, Echelon systems are designed to record everything — from diplomatic messages to personal email — passing between countries. In Espionage Revealed, journalist Kevin Poulsen estimated that Echelon intercepts three billion communications every day.
The information is fed back into computer databases in five regional headquarters — one in Australia.
According to Hager, the databases work by category, each headquarters searches by different combinations of keywords, deletes those containing no relevant information and codes the remaining interceptions according to what keywords appear. Although all five Echelon members share one database, they each code information separately. Access to other countries' codes has to be applied for.
Not surprisingly, the US equivalent of the DSD, the National Security Agency, appears to get ready access to a vast number of codes, while Australia and New Zealand find it difficult to access information the US has recorded.
Australia represents a key chain in the Echelon network, being responsible for monitoring the Asia Pacific region. According to Coulhart, Brady told him that Australia has almost sole responsibility for monitoring North Korea. Indonesia is an obvious target for Australian surveillance.
In September 2001, the Australian parliament passed the Security Services 2001 bill, which defined ASIO, ASIS and the DSD's powers for the first time. The DSD is forbidden from communicating "intelligence information concerning Australian persons, except in accordance with the rules". "The rules" are guidelines drawn up by the minister responsible for the intelligence agencies. They are not public.
In the 1999 letter, Brady argued that any communications intercepted involving Australians was immediately deleted unless it included: a serious criminal offence, a threat to the life and safety of Australian citizens or an implication that an Australian was acting as an agent of a foreign power. It is generally assumed these form part of the guidelines.
On February 15, defence minister Robert Hill admitted that the DSD had breached its guidelines four times in recording the Tampa transmissions. On February 13, the government announced that the inspector general of intelligence and security, Bill Blick, will oversee an inquiry into the incident. It seems likely, given that DSD head Ronald Bonighton said on February 13 that he reported to then-defence minister Peter Reith, that such an inquiry will lay the blame on the now-departed minister.
This inquiry, however, should not reassure Australians that communications between private citizens couldn't be recorded.
Firstly, as the Australian's foreign editor Greg Sheridan pointed out on February 14, the guideline breach occurred because the responsibility for tapping belonged to ASIO, not the DSD. ASIO could have legally obtained a warrant to monitor such communications, justified by a "threat to national security".
Secondly, according to Coulhart, it is routine for Echelon participants to circumvent domestic laws against spying on their own citizens, by spying on each-others. It is perfectly legal for the DSD to access tapes of conversations between Australians recorded by other countries' security agencies and stored on the Echelon database.
The crucial question however, should not be on whom the DSD spies, but in whose interests. In 1975, the DSD intercepted phone calls that implicated senior Indonesian officials in the murder of Australian journalists in East Timor, but did nothing with the information, because it deemed it not in the Australian "national interest".
In 1999, similar phone calls were intercepted detailing Indonesian military complicity in crimes against humanity committed in East Timor. Again, the DSD did nothing, because Australia's "special relationship" with Indonesia was considered too sensitive, according to an article by Scott Burchill in the February 15 Australian.
A 2000 STOA report found that Echelon was being used to stifle political dissent, including monitoring Amnesty International activities, and for industrial espionage. It concluded that Echelon primarily targeted civilians.
In 2000, the French government accused the US of using Echelon to give US firms commercial advantage over French ones. Far from denying it, R. James Woolsey, former CIA head, charged in a March 17 article in the Wall Street Journal that such espionage was necessary because French companies used bribery to win contracts.
The US National Security Agency's close relationship with the Israeli secret service Mossad, is an open secret. While in public, leaders of the UKUSA countries give lip-service to the peace process in the Middle East, it is highly likely that their secret services are involved in giving information, directly or indirectly, to Mossad to undermine the Palestinian struggle for national independence.
These are not isolated incidents. "Secret" agencies provide the opportunity for governments to pursue a pro-corporate agenda without winning public support. This is why they are organised in secret, and there are penalties for revealing the identity of anyone who works for those bodies (two years imprisonment in Australia).
"The secrecy is not for the Russians", a British secret agent told Hager in the early '90s. "It is for the general public. If they knew what the bureau does, it would not be allowed to continue."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 20, 2002.
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