Governments all over the world have suddenly become embroiled in controversy about electronic surveillance of the internet. In the United States, a political storm has arisen over a new FBI internet tapping system code-named Carnivore. In Britain, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act (RIP) has just extended telephone-tapping powers to cover internet service providers (ISPs), and allows the government to arrange indiscriminate tapping or email intertception for foreign police forces and security agencies.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch security service BVD admitted two weeks ago that it has been collecting emails sent abroad by companies. In the Hague, laws are being prepared to allow the Justice Ministry to tap into email and subscriber records, scan messages and mobile phone calls and track users' movements.

The Australian government has passed laws allowing security agents to attack and modify computers secretly to obtain information. Many other governments have similar schemes in the pipeline. These developments are no coincidence but the direct result of secret planning over seven years by an international coordinating group set up by the FBI, after Congress twice refused to extend its telephone tapping powers for digital networks. Under the innocuous title of the International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminar (ILETS), the group has met annually to plan for and lobby to make telecommunications systems "interception friendly". 

ILETS excluded lawyers and industry specialists who might have advised on the arrangements to protect privacy and human rights, or on the feasibility and cost of the intelligence officers wish list of interception requirements. As a result, the laws based on their recommendations have repeatedly caused controversy.

The work of ILETS first came to light in 1997, when a British researcher, Tony Bunyan, revealed collaboration between EU staff and the FBI for many years. Details of plans to compel ISIs all over the world to install secret internet interception "black boxes" in their premises appeared in Online last year. www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3859496,00.html

A month ago, the European Parliament appointed 36 MEPs to lead a year-long investigation into Echelon - the codename for a mainly US system for monitoring traffic on commercial communications satellites. Echelon has become common parlance for the worldwide electronic eavesdropping or signals intelligence (Sigint) network run by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) together with the US National Security Agency (NSA). The inquiry will ask if the rights of European citizens are adequately protected and ascertain whether European industry is put at risk by the global interception of communications.

French politicians and lawyers have taken the lead in accusing the US and Britain of using their electronic intelligence networks to win business away from foreign rivals. US politicians have riposted that france runs a worldwide electronic intelligence system of its own - "Frenchelon", based at Domme, near Sarlat in the dordogne, and includes and eavesdropping station in New caledonia in the Pacific. see: www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/25/ns-16207.html

Electronic eavesdropping has become a battleground between the US and Russia. The Russian-American Trust and Cooperation Act of 2000, passed on July 19, stops president Clinton rescheduling or writing off billions of dollars of Russian debt unless a Russian spy base in Cuba is "permanently closed".

This base at Lourdes, located on leased land near Havana, was the former Soviet Union's most important intelligence facility. It uses Echelon type systems to collect data from telephone calls and satellite links covering the US. Lourdes allegedly provides "between 60% and 70% of all Russian intelligence data about the US". A defector has said that spying from Lourdes has grown dramatically following an order by Boris Yeltsin to step up economic and technological espionage against the west.

The White House wants to stop the campaign to close Lourdes because other countries might then ask the US to close down its identical bases. Documents suggest the US would particularly fear the Lourdes effect spreading to Britain, Germany and Australia, where the NSA operates large sites. Its station at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, is the largest electronic intelligence base in the world.

The US is not alone in this spying. By the end of the year, the Government Technical Assistance Centre (GTAC) will have begun operations from inside MI5s headquarters at Thames House, Millbank. Its primary purpose will be to break codes used for private email or to protect files on personal computers. It will also receive and hold private keys to codes which British computer users may be compelled to give to the government, under the RIP Act.

Development of GTAC has been pioneered by the Home Office's Encryption Coordination Unit, which says that the centre will "provide the capability to produce plain text/images/audio from lawfully intercepted communications and lawfully seized computer media which are encrypted". The Home Office has not confirmed reports that GTAC will also be the collecting point for intercepted internet communications relayed from the "sniffer" boxes to be installed inside British ISPs.

The cost of building GTAC, said to be £25m, is likely to include the price of ultra-fast super-computers, of the type previously used only to break Soviet codes and attack other special military targets. Code breakers from the communications intelligence agency GCHQ will be seconded to work at GTAC. GCHQ has used sophisticated computers for many years to examine foreign or "external" messages and phone calls, as part of the worldwide intelligence network operated with other English-speaking countries. The key part of this system utilises computers called Dictionaries, which hold lists of thousands of target names, addresses and key words. They are used to select messages of interest, while discarding the majority of communications.

GCHQ was not normally permitted to encroach on domestic communications. Now the RIP Act says that as many domestic internet communications travel on the same "trunks" as external communications, GCHQ will be allowed to trawl through these messages without restriction.

Another limitation which had prevented the direct targeting of people in Britain by GCHQ without specific authorisation has also been dropped. The Home Secretary has been given powers under Section 16 (3) of the Act to sign an "overriding" warrant every three months. This will allow general surveillance without the need for individual warrants.

This will apply to "serious crime", which can include organising demonstrations that may affect public order. The government has offered no justification for its willingness to allow GCHQ to intrude on domestic political and policing matters. The RIP act will also allow any agency nominated by the Home Secretary to tap into the addresses of emails sent and received (though not their content) without a warrant.

Caspar Bowden, whose lobbying organisation, the Foundation for Information Policy Research, FIPR, helped to bring some important changes to the RIP Act, believes that letting Dictionary type computers carry out broad-ranging surveillance on much internal UK traffic will break the new Human Rights Act, see www.fipr.org

The Fbi has just been granted funds to an $85m electronic surveillance programme called Digital Storm. This forsees the quadrupling of telephone tapping in the US over the next decade, because of the convenience of digital processing and the automated delivery of intercepted messages and conversations to FBI agents.

The FBI hopes to build in automated transcription and translation systems. According to its budget application for the next US fiscal year, a related programme called Casa de Web will include central computer archives for intercepted audio and data reports. It will also provide "analytical tools for automated speaker identification, text key word spotting, and voice key word spotting".

The existence of Carnivore, the FBI tapping system, was revealed three months ago as the result of a lawsuit between a US ISP and federal marshals, who demanded that the ISP wire a Carnivore box into its network. The FBI initially wanted to install its own version of a commercial "sniffer" programme called Etherppek. Then it turned up with Carnivore and a court order to install it.

The FBI claims there are only 20 Carnivores, and that they have been used only 25 times in the last 18 months.see www.fbi.gov/programs/carnivore/carnivore.htm But the system is so controversial that the US congress held special hearings two weeks ago. A judge has ordered the FBI to answer requests for details made under the Freedom of Information Act.

Carnivore consists of a laptop computer and communications interface cards. It runs a packet sniffer programme to select data it wants from inside the ISP local network. According to Marcus Thomas, head of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section, they are PC's using proprietary software and acting as a "specialized sniffer".

The bureau claims that although Carnivore's hardware sees all the traffic passing through the ISP where it is installed, its software looks only at the origin and the destination of each internet packet. If the addresses correspond with those specifically authorised in a court order, then the information and/or the contents are extracted and forwarded to the FBI. The agency claims no other data is recorded or examined. But US computer experts do not believe this is possible. for example, many ISP's dynamically allocate internet addresses to their customers. This means that every time you dial in to your ISP, you will use a different internet address. Unless Carnivore is also intercepting this type of data it cannot work.

The experts have asked the FBI to reveal the source code of Carnivore. The FBI has refused, but says it will arrange a "privacy audit". US Attorney General Janet Reno has publicly regretted the woodenheaded selection of the codename Carnivore. she says it will soon be changed to a less threatening name.

Electronic bloodhounds sniff out your emails

Systems like Carnivore and the black boxes, which MI5 and the police want to install soon in British ISP's, are based on internet technologies used every day by network managers and trouble-shooters. Packet sniffers utilise the fact that all the traffic being handled by an ISP will travel on one or more very high-speed data links. These typically handle fundreds or even thousands of megabits of data every second.

Everyone's data travels on these shared links, in the form of datagrams, or packets of data. Each packet contains details of the sender and the intended destination of the data packet. In principle, this information can be used to select only the data being sent to or received by the target of the government approved warrant.

But the ISP has no way of knowing how much data is being extracted from their clients private messages. It all depends on how the software is programmed, and this is kept decret. One programme used by the FBI to tap email is Etherpeek, which can be programmed to selct any type of data from an internet data stream. Its manufacturers say it can "capture all conversations on a network segment , much like a telephone tap". It costs less than $1,000 to buy and may be the proprietary software used for Carnivore.

Another commercial packet sniffer modified for internet surveillance is Wirespeed, which can analyse more than 300 different network types. The Wirespeed analyser, developed by a US corporation, Radcom, was recommended for use in a recent Home Office report, which noted that ii was " a major component of another country's interception solution - it would enable the user to view the content portion(s) of electronic messages".

Industry and civil liberties critics in Britain and the US say that packet sniffing technology is so powerful and undetectable, that it poses a threat to civil liberties and privacy that could not have existed previously. As even the ISP to whose equipment it is connected will not know what it is doing, there can be no means of verifying that surveillance is being limited to what is legally allowed.

LINKS
WireSpeed Internet Analyser www.radcom-inc.com/products/wire-spec.htm
Etherpeek packet sniffer www.aggroup.com/products/etherpeek

How to take cover

Despite the power of systems such as Echelon or Carnivore, they face many practical difficulties in conducting the type of extensive surveillance that some people fear. The risk they pose to civil liberties has often been questioned because of the simple techniques that criminals or terrorists can use to outrun surveillance.

Setting up new internet accounts and email addresses to use for a few days or weeks takes barely a minute to do, yet can limit or defeat law enforcement or intelligence targeting. for the ordinary computer user who wants their email and web surfing activities to regain at least the same level of privacy enjoyed by ordinary letters, the best and probably the only tool to use is a system called Freedom.

Pioneered by the Canadian based Zero Knowledge company, Freedom uses multiple encrypted links to carry every kind of internet traffic. The first step is a secure connection to a local ISP running a Freedom server. Several are now operating in Britain. Your message, re-encrypted each time it travels, is passed among one or more Freedom servers before being inserted onto the internet at a distant location.

The system used means that no one, including Zero Knowledge itself and the ISPs you use, knows what messages are being sent or who is sending them. For those less worried about intelligence agencies but infuriated by the privacy-destroying habits of some websites and internet companies, the American based Junkbusters group offers an excellent free tool which stops unwarranted data collection and also limits the time-wasting effects of downloading of advertising material.

LINKS
Freedom internet privacy protection system www.zeroknowledge.com
Junkbuster www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/ijb.html