Yes, Big Brother is watching, and he’s listening even more

How much surveillance of our private lives are we already undergoing from our government and its allies, and how much, for our own safety, do we want? What is the trade-off between liberty and security? These are the questions Patrick Radden Keefe raises for discussion in his book “Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.”

This is no abstract debate. Keefe focuses on the United States’ huge (with a budget said to be $6 billion a year and a workforce approaching 60,000) National Security Agency, the government agency in charge of electronic eavesdropping and code-breaking, and its close-tied counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These five Anglophone nations and close allies have for 50 years operated a global electronic eavesdropping system called Echelon. It is mostly secret, but what Echelon does has gradually become known. It listens to as much of the world’s electronic traffic, wireless and wired, as it can, then tries to decipher, as quickly as possible, what it picks up. That it picks up billions of bits of information makes its task the more difficult, and at times, if experts are to be believed, impossible.

But it tries because the stakes are so high. What are they? For starters, consider the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This endless talk Echelon tries to listen to is the “chatter” that color-coded states of alert are based on. By focusing on code words that might identify clusters of relevant information -- “bomb,” for example, or, we may suppose, “Los Alamos National Laboratory” -- the men and women who operate Echelon hope to learn of and forestall all sorts of threats to America and its friends.

Is Echelon effective? Keefe notes that it is hard to say. Even complaints about its ineffectiveness, he points out, may be diversionary. It could be that it is indeed effective and efficient in ways our imaginations can scarcely conceive of.

Keefe believes, though, that Echelon is probably not so wizardly. From what he has been able to discern, it probably suffers from the limitations of other human institutions, especially because of its great size, expense and reach.

If Keefe has indeed brought us just about all there is to know about Echelon at present, it’s not very much. His book is properly subtitled “Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping” because a word like “reports” would be too authoritative for what he has turned up.

In a typically impressionistic chapter -- he must deal with impressions because he can’t get anything more definitive from the governments involved -- he goes to one of Echelon’s principal stations, Menwith Hill in England’s North Yorkshire. It is a Royal Air Force base under the control of the Americans, about 1,200 of whom work there, manning antennas tuned to listening satellites and minding the billions of bits of information they collect each day. Although he was only able to eye the complex from outside its gates, he found a bit of America plunked down in the moors of Northern England, with houses, schools and stores.

In “Chatter,” Keefe is quite specific about his intentions. On the issue of drawing a line between privacy and safety, security and liberty, he wants his book to be “not ... the last word but the first.”

He writes that as he went after his elusive quarry, the one conviction he came away with “is that if we ignore this issue, put off by the level of secrecy or the technical complexity involved, we do so at our own peril. Communications interception will be a major feature of twenty-first-century life, in terms of how we construe our privacy and safety and in terms of how accountable we as citizens want our government to be.”

Keefe writes that he is not certain he knows “where that line between security and liberty should be” and asks, “Do you?”

With that provocative and challenging question he closes a most useful, challenging and provocative book.

Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.