Global Eavesdropping

You might think that the phone calls you make or the emails you send to your friends are private. In fact, someone is listening in all the time. Organizations, such as the American National Security Agency (NSA), continually eavesdrop on phone calls and emails. The NSA is sometimes jokingly called “No Such Agency” because its existence was long denied. Using a program called Echelon, this eavesdropping agency monitors electronic communications. The goal is probably to listen for terrorists and terrorist networks, but no one really knows. Here’s how they do it.

Email exchanges
When you send an email, the electronic signal carrying the email goes to your Internet Service Provider
(ISP). From there it is sent via an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) to your friend’s ISP, and then on to your
friend. To intercept your email without you knowing, the eavesdropper simply taps into the IXP. The NSA’s
computers also continually search through every website on the internet in order to locate anything suspicious.


Telephone cables
The cables that carried phone calls under the sea used to be made of copper wires. Eavesdroppers could listen in by sending divers down to wrap electric coils around the wire. This enabled listeners to hear the phone signals which “leaked” out from the copper. Today the cables are fiber optics, which are completely un-tappable... or are they?


Mobile signals
When you call someone on your cell phone, microwave signals travel through the air to an antenna, from where they are relayed through other antennae until they reach the cell of the person you are calling. All an eavesdropper has to do is intercept the microwave signal as it travels between antennae.


Tapping telephones
It is illegal to tap telephone calls in many countries, but eavesdroppers tap them anyway by connecting to major telephone exchanges. With the Echelon system, the security services are not listening in on particular
people; they are listening to all calls, then homing in on people when they hear something suspicious.


Satellites
Communications satellites allow telephone calls and television broadcasts to be bounced around the world almost instantly. But these communications can be intercepted from ground stations, which are often set up right next to the dishes that are sending the signals. Sometimes, the ground stations have intriguing codenames, such as the American NSA’s “Moonpenny,” which is located at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and intercepts all telecommunications between the UK and Europe.

TECHNIQUES USED:


Voice recognition
There are too many telephone calls for spies to listen to every call, so computers are used to scan millions every second. Some work by “voice recognition,” in which the computer analyzes voices on the phone to detect a particular “wanted” voice.


Data mining
Computers can be programmed to scan emails and look for suspicious words. In the 1990s, the Echelon program searched for the words “Greenpeace” and “Amnesty International.” It caused a scandal.


Tracing
Computers are used to trace the phone calls and emails of anybody considered to be suspicious. The computers also look for any “links” with other people who have been in touch with the suspect.