A European Parliament report made public Feb. 23 says a U.S.-led communications monitoring network, Echelon, is intercepting billions of messages an hour from private e-mails, telephone calls, and fax transmissions.
"We are not talking about a trivial thing here ... we cannot stop them, they will continue," says Ducan Campbell, author of the special parliament-commissioned report on the Echelon spy network, to the Associated Press. He tells the AP the network monitors and intercepts "sensitive" European-wide commercial communications.
"The level of use is getting out of control," he told a Committee for Justice and Home Affairs hearing, saying Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are also involved in the Echelon network. Germany and France, he added, participate at a lower level.
"The capacity of the filtering systems is enormous," Campbell told the hearing, adding most international Internet communications are routed through the U.S. and nine known U.S. National Security Agency intercept sites. He says intelligence facilities in the five countries can intercept fax, telephone, and e-mail communications easily, and urged the European Union to act to protect against such violations of human rights.
Campbell says Microsoft, IBM, and an unidentified large American microchip maker have been providing certain features which aid the information interception. He says he doesn't know whether the American corporations benefited from it, but previous commercial espionage ended up with several large European contracts in the airline industry collapsing.
