The secret is out. Two powerful intelligence gathering tools that the United States created to eavesdrop on Soviet leaders and to track KGB spies are now being used to monitor Americans. One system, known as Echelon, intercepts and analyzes telephone calls, faxes and e-mail sent to and from the United States. The other system, Tempest, can secretly read the displays on personal computers, cash registers and automatic teller machines, from as far as a half mile away. Although the inner workings of both systems remain classified, fueling exaggerated claims about their capabilities on Internet sites, credible detail has at last begun to emerge. It comes chiefly from foreign governments that began investigating American surveillance activities after discovering that the Echelon system had been used to spy on their defense contractors. From those documents it is possible to obtain the first accurate view of the threats high-tech spying poses to our right to privacy. We think you will agree it also creates a real and present threat to our freedom.

No Such Agency

Echelon is perhaps the best known and least understood spy tool. Although it is run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and paid for almost entirely by American taxpayers, it is a multinational spying effort that involves the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser degree, Italy and Turkey. It wasn't until 1957, five years after NSA was created, that the federal government would admit that it even existed.

Simply put, the agency's job is to eavesdrop and share its notes. On a day-to-day basis, this means intercepting radio signals, unscrambling encrypted messages, and distributing the resulting information to a host of espionage organizations. Its chief "customer" is the Central Intelligence Agency.

The intelligence gathering network that captures the electronic signals that NSA needs to do its work is popularly called Echelon. NSA does not use this term, and it is generally believed the word Echelon is part of a two-word code name for the space-based part of the system. Whatever the terminology, Echelon, like NSA itself, is the outgrowth of a World War II British-American intelligence sharing agreement. During the Cold War the United States and its allies began to eavesdrop on overseas phone calls in an effort to catch Soviet spies. This was done by intercepting the signals from the microwave relay stations that formed the backbone of long-distance telephone systems.

When the telecommunications satellite industry took off, NSA followed it into space by building ground-based and orbiting listening posts, hence the need for participation by Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Turkey. Based on what isknown about the location of Echelon bases and satellites, it is estimated that there is a 90 percent chance that NSA is listening when you pick up the phone to place or answer an overseas call. In theory, but obviously not in practice, Echelon's supercomputers are so fast, they can identify Saddam Hussein by the sound of his voice the moment he begins speaking on the phone.

The power to eavesdrop on specific individuals nearly proved to be NSA's undoing. A commission organized by President Gerald Ford discovered that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were unable to resist the temptation of using NSA to amass files on more than 7000 U.S. citizens and 1000 organizations, mostly those opposed to the Vietnam War. In 1975, Congress decided it had had enough, and created the Select Intelligence Committee to keep watch over NSA activities.

With the Cold War over, and fearful of being embarrassed by revelations about Echelon's espionage excesses, high-ranking officials in Australia and New Zealand began going public with details.