(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)  | |||
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Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World
James Bamford,
London: Century, 2001, £20
Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)
Rapporteur: Gerhard Schmidt
European Parliament, 11 July 2001
Colin Challen
In liberalised free markets, the successful nation or company is the one which has a competitive advantage. In the 'knowledge-based' economy, one might reasonably expect to find intelligence agencies playing a leading role in securing that advantage. As with the supermarket shelf, where things can literally be stacked in one manufacturer's favour, so too with everything else. The 'stacking' under the guise of free markets clearly cannot be obvious or overt, but will continue nevertheless. Why else would the government feel compelled to publish a new Competition White Paper to combat cartels? And why else would the European Parliament, in defence of the single market, want to hold an inquiry into the United States' (and others') intelligence role in alleged state-sponsored industrial espionage?
But much of the evidence unearthed by the European Parliament's Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System and in Bamford's Body Of Secrets suggests that state-gathered intelligence is not used to help private companies gain advantage over competitors. That is to say, the evidence has not been conclusively found. It was hardly to be expected that it would be. Industrial espionage aided by government is not meant to exist in liberal democracies; or, more to the point, amongst friends. According to Bamford, the industrial information that is picked up by the National Security Agency (NSA) is only used by the US government for general intelligence purposes, One is given to assume that this applies to GCHQ too. Bamford quotes from a manuscript written by Jock Kane, a former GCHQ employee, who wrote:
'From [the] intercepts pours a wealth of industrial intelligence information.............that would have been a tremendous asset to British industrialists, but British industry has never had access to this information because GCHQ chiefs, not the Cabinet, took the decision that British industry, which to a large extent finances this vast bureaucracy, should not be one of their "customers".' (p. 427)Poor old British industry! It has to pay for this vast bureaucracy, and indeed is sometimes press-ganged into working for it (e.g. Matrix Churchill, Astra) but is not allowed to benefit from a few crumbs off the table. Doesn't this strike one as being a little unfair? Our opponents, that is to say our competitors, of course abide by the same gentlemanly rules. Or perhaps not. Another view from GCHQ has it that:
'There were no rules. If you take the right decision you get all the credit. If you make the wrong one you'll get all the blame. If you play golf with the chairman of [a major public company] for example, and you think there's something he should know, then you take that decision, but the protection of future intelligence is paramount.' (1)What evidence there is that the US has indulged in industrial espionage is presented with a pinch of salt in the European Parliament's Temporary Committee's report. Cited sniffily as a main source regarding NSA's industrial espionage role, Duncan Campbell found the information in 'newspaper reports'. According to these, the NSA obtained information which was passed to US companies on four or five occasions. Not all of these could be described as 'offensive', but might be 'defensive' (that is, ensuring that US companies did not fall prey themselves to external industrial espionage). On the offensive front, it was alleged that in 1994 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, with NSA's help, won a contract over Airbus worth $6bn. (No mention of Airbus, Boeing or McDonnell Douglas appears in the index of Body of Secrets.) Another case was of an American firm able to use illicitly obtained details of an invention in order to patent the invention itself. On the defensive front, information had been passed on to individual companies to neutralise the impact of their foreign competitors' recidivist tendency to win contracts through bribery. It is not clear in these circumstances whether the winning strategy in return was simply to up the ante.
The scale of the damage of industrial espionage is put at $100 billion in the US alone, where it is said 6 million jobs were lost between 1990 and 1996. Auditors Ernst and Young are quoted as estimating that 7% of industrial espionage is carried out for secret services. In this world of round figures, my arithmetical conclusion is that the few reported cases in the American press hardly do justice to the contribution made by state agencies in pursuit of competitive advantage. The world of industrial espionage is a curiously under-reported place.
Reading Bamford's work proves the point. He appears to accept the proposition, made by James Woolsey, a former CIA director, (quoted in the Euro-report) that:
'Even if espionage yielded economically usable intelligence, it would take an analyst a very long time to analyse the large volume of available information, and that it would be wrong to use their time spying on friendly trading partners.'A former NSA employee, Wayne Madsen, however, is of the opinion 'that economic intelligence gathering has top priority and is used to the advantage of US companies' - although it's not clear whether he means US companies collectively or individually. Nevertheless, spot the difference? One view comes from a former CIA employee, the other from a former NSA employee. Just as in the reporting of the World Trade Centre atrocity, where the press have consistently conflated all of US intelligence into one agency, the CIA, the distinction between the CIA and the NSA is crucial.
At least in this regard Body of Secrets leaves little to the imagination. The book seeks to be the authoritative source on the NSA, just as Bamford's Puzzle Palace was in the 1980s. In the process of becoming, if you will, the unauthorised authorised historian of the NSA, Bamford seems to have acquired a remarkable degree of access to America's 'most secret' intelligence gathering agency. In what becomes a rather unnecessary guided tour of NSA headquarters, Crypto City, the reader gains a very clear understanding of where the barber's shop is, what colour passes different staff wear and the location of various senior staff members' offices (and their loos). I assume this level of banal detail to be genuine, for otherwise Bamford would have little reason to reveal it (Listen everybody, I've gotten real access here!)
This level of detailed but useless knowledge may provide the internal evidence we need to substantiate the veracity of his claims about the computing power available to NSA. Bamford talks about their plans to harness sufficient power to 'read' the whole content of the Internet in half an hour. That would be an incredible proposition were it not for the fact that that the reader is assailed at length about how the NSA arrived at this juncture. The NSA is, it would seem, the world's most advanced commissioner of new computing technology.
The subtext of course, is that it is the NSA and not the CIA who are the real guarantors of American security in a technologically advanced world, and inter alia, the deserved beneficiaries of funding coups in Congress. So when James Woolsey, the former CIA director talks about the lack of US intelligence capacity in the field of industrial espionage, he may well have inspired a few belly laughs in Crypto City. The CIA is passé, history, cold war.
In the wake of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon terrorist atrocities, the slight lifting of the curtain on state intelligence-inspired economic espionage will be quietly ignored. While economic espionage was asserted by a former NSA employee to have been a 'top priority', the unforeseen new world order so cruelly introduced on 11 September 2001 will ensure a rather predictable and early death for the efforts of the European Parliament to protect rights to privacy, better encryption, the integrity of communications etc.
The irony is, that for all its computing power, the NSA has not yet been able to spot which face on the video tape is that of a suicide bomber, and it is unable to bug a conversation conducted, metaphorically speaking, over a string and two cans. The bigger irony is that it seems to be, publicly at least, the CIA that is carrying the can for that.
But the biggest irony of all is that some clearly conscientious elected representatives serving on the European Parliament's Temporary Committee produced a minority report which included the following statement:
'It is a matter of regret that the European Union is more preoccupied with industrial espionage than it is with individual monitoring.'They rather miss the whole point. At least some of their colleagues are more honest when they direct their ire at the Anglo-American conspiracy to undermine honest, continental business values. They know where their interests lie.
For NSA buffs there is much in Bamford's book to recommend it, but it is too admiring of the bricks and mortar and less keen to probe into what NSA does with all its hi-tech gear. The European Parliament's Committee on ECHELON has tried to find the answers, but its conclusions are partial. It might have asked, for example, about ECHELON's capacity to join the fight against money laundering; or even how it is that some well-known companies pay so little tax.
Notes
1 Mark Urban UK Eyes Alpha, London: Faber and Faber, 1996. p.236
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