Chatter

by:

Keefe, Patrik Radden

Publisher:

Random House

Location:

2005

Cover:

Rick Schwab

Type:

Hardcover

reviewed by:

Lynard Barnes

8/5/2005

Comment:

Must Read

According to Patrick Radden Keefe, the United States spends 5 billion dollars a year just to administer the various information classification systems (“Secret”, “Top Secret”, etc.) employed to control information under the government’s purview. We also learn that the digital information that flows through one transponder on an Intelsat (International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium) satellite “can handle up to 155 million bits of information per second”, or about fifteen thousand pages per second. Each satellite has between twenty-four and seventy-two transponders each. There were twenty-six satellites being operated by Intelstat, a publicly traded company, in 2003. The Intelsat satellite program was started in August 1964 and the first satellite launched on April 6, 1965. Five years later, in 1970, the Rhyolite satellite program was started. The Rhyolite satellites, the spy satellites, can identify objects as small as six inches across. The United States has roughly one hundred spy satellites in orbit.

Hear the word “chatter” and the first thought to come to mind is the hype surrounding intelligence gathering and 9/11 and the presumed spike in communications conducted by terrorists just before a major attack. (For the record, let’s say there have been three since 9/11). The title of Keefe’s book is a masterpiece of marketing. As far as content is concerned however, it’s another story. The focus of CHATTER is on a previous intelligence-gathering flap which occurred in the mid-1990s. The Parliament of the European Union (EU) stirred itself into a tizzy over a United States spy system called ECHELON, managed by the National Security Agency (NSA) . The EU put together a committee to study the implementation, implications and possible economic consequences of an Anglo-American super-spy communication system that could pluck any form of telecommunications out of the ether and deliver it into the eager ears of the American spy apparatus who, in turn, could deliver trade secrets and methods to American corporations participating in the global competitive economy. The committee eventually arrived at the conclusion that there was no evidence that America’s electronic eavesdropping was being used for commercial purposes. The EU report forms the backdrop of Keefe’s book.

ECHELON, Keefe points out, “is nothing more than a secret code name for a specific computer program used to sort through intercepted satellite communications.” The spy satellites and the downlink stations themselves are the core of the British-American telecommunications surveillance system and Keefe devotes a couple of chapters to naming and describing them. The first stations making up the Echelon network were located in

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Cornwall, England, and Sugar Grove, West Virginia and the Yakima Training Center in Washington State. Keefe reports that there are dozens of other stations which are a part of the network. While British Telecom’s Goonhilly Earth Station on Lizard Peninsula is the largest commercial satellite earth station in the world, Menwith Hill in England’s North Yorkshire moors has become the anchor for the stations making up the Echelon system.

After the site location tour, Keefe latches on to the subject or privacy and the capability of technology to define it in the negative. He quotes from Alan Westin’s, 1967, PRIVACY AND FREEDOM, to make the points that there really is no clear definition or meaning of privacy. He provides an excellent treatment of the subject however, bringing up the secret police of the German Democratic Republic, the Stasi. Their aim was ” to be everywhere and see everything”. By counting “part-time” informers, Keefe estimates that the Stasi had one informer for every 6.5 citizens of the communist regime. One can only imagine what they could have done with today’s technology.

Keefe waits until near the end of the book–the very best part--to introduce the fly into this irritating ointment of super-spy technology.

Relying upon James Bamford (the first author to penetrate the secrecy of NSA), Keefe effectively dilutes the omnipresent cloud of telecommunication spy technology (or Siginit). He starts by recapping the February 5, 2003 briefing Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Stations Security Council in New York in which he presented evidence supporting the need for an invasion of Iraq. The extraordinary thing about the briefing was that it was saturated with intelligence analysis and practically no facts. In turn, most of the intelligence, certainly the most dramatic components, were culled from telecommunications intercepts and satellite imagery. Keefe states that “ten different intelligence services, from both Europe and the Middle East, signed off on the presentation”. It was an impressive display of Sigint capabilities. The display came with a cost. Keefe quotes one former high-ranking NSA employee saying that there was a sense of shock, “a sense of that great sucking sound as all the business goes south.”

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but at least two words are needed. Someone--an informer, a spy, a knowledgeable source-- has to be able to say that what you are seeing is real. Without that, the picture becomes a swirl of ideograms. The same can be said of intercepted communications. Siphoning data out of the atmosphere is like pumping air into a vacuum with the only advantage being that you are able to label it. Keefe provides a fascinating example of the noise surrounding surreptitious information gathering from Francis Ford Coppola’s movie THE CONVERSATION. He sums it all up in the statement, “If the task of intelligence is . . to see the future, then American intelligence has an abysmal track record.” He cites thirteen examples, starting with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and ending with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001.

It is not only the absence of intelligent sources of intelligence information that makes Sigint questionable as a source of policy or actionable intelligence, it is the inability–lack of resources, lack of skill–to examine and analyze relevant data. Keefe quotes from an article by a DIA analyst at DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) named Russ Travers. The 1997 article was published in the CIA journal, STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE, and was titled “The Coming Intelligence Failure”. ( The article is available online at: www.cia.gov/csi/studies /97unclass/failure.html ). It was, as Keefe states, a prescient article covering the reactions to a major failure of America’s intelligence operations.

Perhaps the most salient observation Keefe makes in CHATTER is a quote he makes from Michael Scheuer. Scheuer wrote in his 2004 book, IMPERIAL HUBRIS: Intelligence

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community leaders have little regard for unclassified information. . . It cannot be important if it is not secret, after all.” And therein lies the problem with American intelligence operations: form over substance.

While the first part of CHATTER is essentially a rehash of other works on the National Security Agency, Keefe obviously put a lot of research, thought and judicious weaning into the last part of the book. His effort makes everything which came before worth the trip. This is a must read book.

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