Paper 1: Echelon and its role in COMINT

One irony of “Jam Echelon Day” was that it displayed a deep misunderstanding of how Echelon and similar systems operate. The key component of such intelligence systems is filtering software intended to throw away most of the messages that are intercepted. Any standard message intended to “jam” the system by including a long list of supposed key words would in fact be readily identified as noise of no value, and could easily be discarded automatically.

Nicky Hager, “Secret Power”, Craig Potton Publishing, New Zealand, 1996.

Auditor-General of Canada, Report on the Canadian Intelligence Commuinity - Control and Accountability”, Ottawa, November 1996.

Statement by Martin Brady, Director of DSD, Canberra 16 March 1999. Issued to and broadcast on the Sunday Programme, Channel 9 TV (Australia), 11 April 1999

“Terms/Abbreviations/Acronyms”, published by the U.S. Nave and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Centre (NMITC), available at www.cnet.navy.mil/nmitc/training/u.html

Duncan Campbell and Mark Hosenball, “The Eavesdroppers”, Time Out, London, 22 May 1976

James Bamford, “The Puzzle Palace”, Sidgwick and Jackson , 1982.

Nicky Hager, “Secret Power”, Craig Potton Publishing, New Zealand, 1996, pps 61-62.

Jeffrey Richelson, “The U.S. intelligence establishment”, 4th edition, Westview Press, Colorado, 1999, p 293

Christopher Andrew, "The Making of the Anglo-American SIGINT Alliance," in “In the Name of Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Walter Pforzheimer”, eds. Hayden B. Peake and Samuel Halpern, NIBC Press, Washington D.C., 1994, pps 95-109.

"The BRUSA Agreement of May 17, 1943," Cryptologia, Vol 21, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 30-38.

These arrangements are sometimes called “TEXTA Authority”. TEXTA stands for “Technical Extracts of Traffic Analysis” and is a voluminous listing of every communications source identified by each agency. It is catalogued and sorted by countries, users, networks, types of communications system and other features, such as cryptosystems in use.

Jeffrey Richelson, “The U.S. intelligence establishment”, 4th edition, Westview Press, Colorado, 1999, p 293.

Alf Jakobsen, “Scandinavia, Sigint and the Cold War”, in Conference on “Importance of Sigint in Western Europe in the Cold War”, Amsterdam, 27 November 1999.

Ibid.

At Rota, near Cadiz. Rota is not believed to be an Echelon site.

Annual report of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, 1997-1998, Ottawa, May 1998, p. 2.

Annual report of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, 1997-1998, Ottawa, May 1998, p3.

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