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UKUSA Community
Map of UKUSA Community countries with Ireland ; : Prime Minister John Howard; : Prime Minister Stephen Harper; : Prime Minister Helen Clark; : Prime Minister Gordon Brown; : President George W. Bush

The 'UKUSA Community' is an alliance of English-speaking nations led by the United States and United Kingdom for the purpose of gathering intelligence via signals intelligence.

Contents

Member States

Organization

ECHELON

See also

References

Member States

The constituent agencies are:

★ Australia - Defence Signals Directorate (DSD)

★ Canada - Communications Security Establishment (CSE)

★ New Zealand - Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)

★ United Kingdom - Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)

★ United States - National Security Agency (NSA)

Organization

The UKUSA Community is often associated with the ECHELON system. The members of the UKUSA intelligence alliance have maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Each member of the UKUSA alliance is allegedly assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern mainland China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern mainland China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

ECHELON

'ECHELON' is a name used to describe a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network said to be run by the UKUSA Community (comprised of intelligence agencies of five English-speaking nations), that has been reported by a number of sources including, in 2001, a committee of the European Parliament (EP report^[1]). Its existence was first revealed by Duncan Campbell in a 1988 article, "Someone's listening," published in the ''New Statesman''. According to some sources ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts.^[2] The EP committee, however, concluded that "the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed" (EP report, p. 11).

See also

★ Quadripartite Agreement ★ United States Intelligence Community ★ ★ Federal Bureau of Investigation ★ ★ Central Intelligence Agency ★ ★ National Security Agency ★ ANCHORY SIGINT intercept database ★ Carnivore ★ COINTELPRO ★ CALEA ''to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes'' ★ Counterintelligence Field Activity is a US Department of Defense (DoD) agency that has legal authority to spy on Americans.

★ Frenchelon ★ Magic Lantern ★ Mass surveillance ★ Oasis ★ Onyx (interception system), the Swiss "Echelon" equivalent ★ Policeware ★ Project MINARET ★ Privacy ★ Text mining ★ Room 641A ★ Cabinet noir

★ Anglosphere ★ Old Commonwealth

References

1. European Parliament Report on ECHELON
2. ECHELON; WORLDWIDE CONVERSATIONS BEING RECEIVED BY THE ECHELON SYSTEM MAY FALL INTO THE WRONG HANDS AND INNOCENT PEOPLE MAY BE TAGGED AS SPIES


★ Richelson, Jeffrey T.; Ball, Desmond (1985). ''The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countries''. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-327092-1

★ ''Secret Power, New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network''; Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, NZ; ISBN 0-908802-35-8; 1996 (ONLINE EDITION)

★ Bryden, John. ''Best Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War.'' Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1993.

★ Hamilton, Dwight. ''Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism.'' Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006.

★ Frost, Mike and Michel Gratton. ''Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments.'' Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1994.

★ Rosen, Philip. ''The Communications Security Establishment – Canada’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency.'' Ottawa: Library of Parliament Research Branch, 1993.

★ Rudner, Martin. ''Canada’s Communications Security Establishment: From the Cold War to Globalization'' in Intelligence and National Security. Volume 16 Number 1 (Spring 2001). 97-128.

★ Whitaker, Reginald. ''Cold War Alchemy: How America, Britain, and Canada Transformed Espionage into Subversion'' in Intelligence and National Security.