Europe Angered by Allegations of U.S. Spying

Is there any privacy left in the Internet Age? Not according to some Europeans, who fear that the U.S. government regularly eavesdrops on their phone calls, reads their e-mail, checks their pagers and scans their faxes.

The suspected snoops mostly work for America’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy service, the National Security Agency. Responsible for providing U.S. policymakers with foreign “signals intelligence,” the NSA intercepts millions of electronic communications around the world each day in a search for threats to national security.

Just whom the NSA listens to--and why--is increasingly a matter of international dispute. Critics, especially in Europe, say a computer network built during the Cold War and code-named “Echelon” is used to indiscriminately spy on civilians and to conduct economic espionage on behalf of U.S. companies.

“How the United States Spies on You” was the alarming headline Wednesday in the French newspaper Le Monde. The same day, a committee of the 15-nation European Parliament heard a British physicist and journalist, Duncan Campbell, claim that Echelon was used to help Boeing Co. and Raytheon Co. beat out European competitors in foreign markets.

Campbell has made the charge before but has offered no evidence. NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel denied the allegation in a telephone interview from agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., adding that such collusion would be illegal.

“We’re not authorized to provide intelligence information to private firms for their economic advantage,” she said.

Independent experts, at least in the United States, tend to agree. Still, because Echelon’s inner workings remain shrouded in secrecy, even an unproven allegation that it has helped U.S. companies in the global marketplace could evolve into a major source of friction between the United States and Western Europe, often-testy partners in the world’s largest trade and investment relationship.

Actually, the NSA runs Echelon jointly with Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. And European experts acknowledge that France, Germany and Russia routinely engage in industrial espionage to ferret out the commercial secrets of other countries. But it is Echelon’s vacuum-cleaner effectiveness that many here find alarming.

“You have a feeling you are in some kind of James Bond film,” a Spanish member of the European Parliament gasped Wednesday as Campbell, equipped with graphics controlled from his laptop computer, addressed the committee about Echelon.

James Bamford, a U.S. journalist now writing his second book on the NSA, said Echelon’s supposed omnipotence has become an “urban myth.” He said it makes “no sense” that the NSA would risk scandal and censure by illegally feeding secret intercepts to U.S. corporations.

“The NSA’s targets are on the front pages of the newspaper every day--Osama bin Laden, North Korea, missile transfers to Iran, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India,” Bamford said. “They don’t care about [European consortium] Airbus, they don’t care about Boeing, they don’t care about the Acme Shoe Co. in Des Moines.”

By most accounts, Echelon works like an Internet search engine. Powerful computers are based at ground stations in the five countries and search for key words, specific phrases, voices or other target information in data taken from civilian communications satellites overhead. Only a tiny fraction of the vast data stream is thus intercepted.

“The NSA doesn’t come in in the morning and twist its dials and say, ‘Let’s see what we can find,’ ” said a U.S. official familiar with its operations. “We have government requirements and we have priorities, from terrorism to proliferation.”

Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group in Washington that often is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community, said the idea that Echelon literally taps every telephone call, fax and e-mail in every language around the world is “utter nonsense.”

The NSA has never publicly confirmed Echelon’s existence, but it has been written about since the early 1980s. It only became controversial in January 1998 after a report by the European Parliament claimed that “within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted” by the NSA.

Partly in response, anti-Echelon activists dubbed last Oct. 21 “Jam Echelon Day.” They urged e-mail users around the world to send as many messages as possible containing words like “bomb” and “terrorist” in an attempt to overload the NSA computers. It’s unclear if they had any effect.

A 1978 U.S. law prohibits the NSA from deliberately eavesdropping on Americans at home or abroad unless the agency can establish probable cause that they are agents of a foreign government committing espionage or other crimes.

Moreover, if the NSA does intercept communications from, to or about a U.S. citizen, the information cannot be disseminated and must be destroyed within 24 hours unless it contains a threat of death or serious bodily harm to someone.

NSA officials also deny that the Echelon partners trade information that they can’t legally collect themselves. “We can’t go to the Brits and say, ‘Do this for us because we can’t do it legally ourselves.’ And they can’t ask us,” said a Defense Department official familiar with the U.S. intelligence community.

The NSA isn’t the only target of French ire. French politicians lambasted London and its GCHQ spy service this week for allegedly using Echelon to gain unfair economic advantage. But British Prime Minister Tony Blair denied Wednesday during a visit to Brussels that Britain spied on its European Union partners.

“These things are governed by extremely strict rules, and those rules will always be applied properly,” Blair said.

But French hackles rose when Campbell told the European panel that intelligence from Echelon played a role in two commercial successes for U.S. companies in 1994.

In one, Airbus Industrie, the jetliner-building consortium, allegedly lost out on a $6-billion sale to Saudi Arabia after U.S. officials alerted Saudi authorities that Airbus was offering bribes. Boeing got the contract instead.

In a similar case, U.S. firm Raytheon beat out Thomson-CSF of France for a $1.4-billion deal to build a radar to keep watch over Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. Le Monde’s lengthy articles about Echelon cited these two examples as evidence of inappropriate spying by the U.S.

Despite the lack of proof, Nicole Fontaine, the European Parliament’s French president, accused Echelon of violating European citizens’ “fundamental rights.”

“We cannot stop them, and they will continue,” Campbell concluded.

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Dahlburg reported from Brussels and Drogin from Washington.