October 29, 2006

Nothing is secret
Your cellphone calls may have many listeners …

By _JEREMY LOOME_ (mailto:jloome@edmsun.com) , EDMONTON SUN

On a typical evening, a man in Edmonton gets a phone call from a man
in Karachi, Pakistan.

The call is relayed through a series of stations via fibre optic cable
before bouncing off a satellite and back to the phone carrier’s
ground-based network. Near the man’s home in Pakistan – or perhaps
near the phone company relay station – a small but powerful antenna
array picks up the call. It streams the content to a second array,
which then bounces it back to another satellite, this time operated
not by the company, but by a branch of the Australian government.

They’ll probably never know it, but the two have just been caught in
the web of information gathering known as Signals Intelligence. Since
1947, a year before George Orwell penned his cautionary novel 1984 and
warned that Big Brother Is Watching, that’s what has happened across
the globe, to calls and messages of all sorts. If you’ve communicated
over distance with anyone, ever, there’s a chance someone listened in.

It’s frequently complicated by increasing security around
communications – particularly fibre optic lines – as well as laws
governing privacy. But if it’s transmitted through the air or
electromagnetically, someone can intercept it.

Canada has played a key role in that initial network, governed by a
top-secret agreement drafted in 1948 called UKUSA. Its contents have
never been revealed. In the years since the Cold War with the Soviet
Union prompted its creation, the original five nations operating
Signals Intelligence – which essentially amounts to the intrusion on
private communication from any nation but their own – have been joined
by dozens of others, each intent on both bolstering national security
and protecting national interests. It’s technically against
international conventions but nobody protests too loudly, because just
about everyone does it.

Along with surreptitious listening technology placed in other nations
and along the lines of communication that run between them, each
nation operates its own stations, chock full of an array of cutting
edge eavesdropping equipment.

In Canada, the most important sits in Leitrim, a sleepy community of
Ottawa that was just countryside when the station, codenamed CAF97,
was first constructed in 1941. Now, it sits a scant distance from the
end of Bank Street, where the city’s longest street turns into Highway
31, taking busy urbanites past the capital’s airport and subdivisions.
Although the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) never talks
about its operations publicly, Leitrim – a Canadian Forces base – is
long believed to have monitored Russian submarine and shipping
activities in the Arctic.

It’s been a decade since the network was revealed in Nicky Hager’s
book Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network
and it wasn’t until 1999, and the publication of a privacy report for
the European Union, that Signals Intelligence agencies admitted they
existed. By then, the end of the Cold War had left Signals
Intelligence -SigInt to those involved – adrift; they were relegated
in importance to the back of the bus, with efforts aimed at preventing
corporate and industrial espionage.

But Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. Now, Signals Intelligence is at the
forefront of the spy game, and Canada is up to its neck in it. Once
our neighbours came under direct attack, the needs of signals
intelligence came under scrutiny, with its budget rising from $140
million in 2000 to more than $220 million in same-year dollars by
2007.
– – –
That doesn’t, however, suggest that we now live in a world akin to the
film Enemy of the State, where rogue NSA agents chase down Will Smith
with technology that would make Bill Gates cry mercy. Legislation
prohibits our version of the NSA – the Communications Security
Establishment – from eavesdropping on our citizens, or even those with
dual nationality.

Of all the nations to employ SigInt, we have some of the most
stringently applied rules to protect our rights, says Bill
Robinson. The London, Ont., man runs an intelligence blog, Lux Ex
Umbra, and has become an expert on SigInts.

"The privacy concerns are legitimate and have to be balanced against
the requirements of intelligence gathering," says Robinson. "Certainly
we have been leaning heavily the other way, towards privacy
protection. We’re not being listened to all of the time, if only
because the SigInts community does not have the people or technology
to waste listening in on everyone, everywhere.

"We get the odd whistleblower from Canada with concerns but we tend to
have fairly marginal complaints levelled.”
From: Baghdasarian