Don't miss:
A detailed article, by Duncan Campbell, on the NSA/GCHQ's
signals
intelligence operations and capabilities, from World War 2 to
Echelon.
Entering Chicksands' Building 600 through double security fences and a
turnstile where green and purple clearance badges were checked, the visitor
would first encounter a sigint in-joke - a copy of the International
Telecommunications Convention pasted up on the wall. Article 22 of the
Convention, which both the United Kingdom and the United States have ratified,
promises that member states "agree to take all possible measures, compatible
with the system of telecommunication used, with a view to ensuring the secrecy
of international correspondence".
In 1996, shortly after "Secret Power" was published, a New Zealand TV station
obtained images of the inside of the station's operations centre. The pictures
were obtained clandestinely by filming through partially curtained windows at
night. The TV reporter was able to film close-ups of technical manuals held
in the control centre. These were Intelsat technical manuals, providing
confirmation that the station targeted these satellites. Strikingly, the
station was seen to be virtually empty, operating fully automatically.
Key word spotting in the vast volumes of intercepted daily written
communications - telex, e-mail, and data - is a routine task. "Word spotting"
in spoken communications is not an effective tool, but individual speaker
recognition techniques have been in use for up to 10 years. New methods
which have been developed during the 1990s will become available to recognise
the "topics" of phone calls, and may allow NSA and its collaborators to
automate the processing of the content of telephone messages - a goal that
has eluded them for 30 years.
Under the rubric of "information warfare", the sigint agencies also hope to
overcome the ever more extensive use of encryption by direct interference with
and attacks on targeted computers. These methods remain controversial, but
include information stealing viruses, software audio, video, and data bugs,
and pre-emptive tampering with software or hardware ("trapdoors").