Prof.Dr. Ghada Ammer
Professor of Electrical Power Engineering
Fellow of the Faculty of Defense – Nasser Higher Military Academy
People in most of the world were shocked by the massive scope of secret spying on their private contacts, after documentary evidence leaked to the media by the former US NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, where Edward Snowden revealed reports related to the National Security Agency ( NSA) and the illegal and immoral US surveillance program, called Echelon or Five Eyes, is a top-secret surveillance program with a signaling network to collect and analyze emails, text messages, tweets, Google searches, financial records, and a participants in Facebook, YouTube clips, metadata, telephone conversation, professional geographic information, travel credit card purchases, and even medical records, captured by a combination of satellites, terrestrial stations, submarine cables and microwave towers, using high-speed computers running complex algorithms , signals intelligence ( SIGINT), it Sorts and ranks the keywords and texts that are collected, this program is run by the United States with the help of four countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, all of which are signatories to the security agreement ( UKUSA) . This program was created in the late of 1960 to monitor military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, and it was formally established in 1971. By the end of the 20th century the system referred to as “ECHELON” had evolved beyond its military and diplomatic origins into a “global system for the interception of private and commercial communications” (mass surveillance and industrial espionage). ).
But how and why this alliance?
The close cooperation between Britain and the United States began when they waged war against Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire , and by the end of the war , this cooperation was turned into a permanent alliance between military intelligence pre the foundation NATO alliance , and this was the beginning of the new world order .
By 1946, there was a so-called war economy that later became known as the Military Industrial Complex, a semi-oriented economy for companies that support the military sector, and high-tech industries supported by US government investment are emerging from taxpayer money.
While the extraction of resources and the domination of global markets remained the main objective of successive American administrations and in order to ensure that the USA in especial , and all the countries in this coalition in general , to achieve this dominance and control over the resources and the global economy , there was a need for advanced technology , especially in the field of telecommunications in order to collect and analyze this flood of electronic signals that carry a lot of information, news, agreements and secrets roaming across the planet. The result was the development of partnership between the USA and UK in war time to become a wide agreement to exchange intelligence signals.
In 2013, the US National Security Archive published a series of previously classified documents obtained from the NSA under the Freedom of Information Act that disclosed the agency’s programs from global surveillance to cyber warfare, and also revealed that Bush authorized the NSA to monitor International electronic communications of “hundreds, maybe thousands, of people inside and outside the United States”, via telecommunications and satellite networks, so that every day millions of communications are scanned searching for addresses and keywords.
Also in 2013, the US National Security Agency spent more than $ 300 million to build the world’s largest listening center, about 130 miles north of Savannah, Georgia, to collect intercepted communications from spy satellites and then transfer data via fiber-optic cables to analysts in their offices of the US National Security Agency everywhere.
This center specifically targets countries in Asia and the Pacific ocean and the Middle East.
The director of the US National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, said the facility’s goal is “to produce intelligence data on foreign signals to decision-makers, as global terrorism is now exposing the lives of our citizens, our military forces and our international allies! to the danger ”
As published in these documents, the agency routinely intercepts illegal intersections of millions of phone calls and e-mails from Arabs and Palestinians to be sent to Israel and this information may be used to blackmail and harm the relatives of individuals being spied.
In 2015, the Guardian reported on January 27 that 43 members of the Israeli 8,200 unit had resigned from their posts in a moral protest. They publicly accused Israel of using intercepted communications, such as those sent by the US National Security Agency, to cause “political persecution” against Palestinians. They said data on sexual orientation, infidelity, money problems, family medical conditions, and other special matters were collected and then used as instruments of coercion – to force targets to become collaborators with Israelis, the same as General Keith Alexander said in a highly secret memo dated October 3, 2012, the possibility of using vulnerabilities discovered in the collective data – “displaying sexually explicit material online”, for example to destroy the reputation of the target person and defame him to reduce his influence or to kill him morally !!!
Translated by : mudhaffar al-kusairi
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies