Part 2 of Scottish Newspaper Article

Dear All,

Here's the second installment of the article about TETRA from the West
Highland Free Press Newspaper. It's taken ages to scan in, please don't
waste it. Read it, and pass it on.

Regards,

Chris

Behind-the-scenes battle for control of the airwaves

West Highland Free Press
3rd March 2006.

Last week, MICHAEL RUSSELL looked at the health concerns surrounding
TETRA -
the UK's new police microwave communications system, which was due to be
switched on in the Highlands and Islands last month. This week he
concludes
his two-part investigation with a look at the corporate and political
manoeuvrings behind the technology.

In her book "The Silent Takeover - Global Capitalism and the Death of
Democracy" Cambridge University's Dr Noreena Hertz details trie
workings and
history of a global surveillance network known as ECHELON. Set up after
World War Two, ECHELON was and still is an intelligence-gathering
partnership involving the five English-speaking countries. Originally,
the
system was designed to defend the West against the spread of communism.

One of ECHELON'S biggest operations centres is the Menwith Hill listening
post in north Yorkshire, which is run by the Government Communications
Headquarters in Cheltenham and the US National Security Agency. Menwith
Hill, along with GCHQ itself, has the ability to intercept and monitor
much
of Europe's email and phone traffic.

Dr Hertz - now likened to a British Naomi Klein, but formerly an economic
adviser to the Russian Government of Boris Yeltsin - goes on to
describe how
ECHELON, once used to monitor communications within the Soviet Union, has
been misused since the early 1990s as a tool of industrial espionage. Its
main beneficiaries have been American multinationals.

"Within days [of the February 2000 revelations] the European Parliament
released a report containing serious allegations," Dr Hertz wrote.
"American
corporations had, it was said, 'stolen' contracts heading for European
and
Asian firms after the NSA intercepted conversations and data and then
passed
them on to the US Commerce Department for use by American firms.

"The Europeans were stunned to discover that Big Brother was no longer
communist Russia or Red China, but its supposed ally and partner,
America,
spying on European consumers and business for its own commercial gain."

The Parliament's five-part report was released in February 2000. Part
Two -
Interception Capabilities 2000 - was authored by Scottish investigative
journalist Duncan Campbell, whose expose of the Zircon spy satellite was
pulled by the BBC in January 1987 after pressure from the Thatcher
Government. A Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was
then set up by the Parliament, delivering

its one and only report in September 2001.

Following the European Parliament's reports, the NSA admitted the
existence
of ECHELON, though they denied that it had been used for industrial
espionage. But the concerns persisted. Then, in April 2003 - just a month
after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - the European Parliament
turned
its focus on fresh allegations of American spying. This time the concern
centred on the the UK's new data-access and communications system for the
police, TETRA, which was switched on in the Northern Constabulary area
last
month.

According to the Parliament's new report "Motorola played a crucial
role in
defining the Tetra European standard, with the collaboration from the
National Security Agency, in order to guarantee for the US government the
possibility that TETRA networks could be eavesdropped".

Lastly, the document pointed to Poland, which proposed a Motorola network
for its police force in the wake of the fighter contract awarded to US
defence giant Lockheed Martin. "It is urgent that the future members
of the
Union carefully evaluate the risks of too large a reliance on a
technology
for which they have no guarantee," the report concluded. Poland was
one of
the 10 accession states to join the European Union in May 2004.

These concerns were rearticulat-ed last week, when I spoke to Dr Franz
Niederer, President of the TETRAPOL Users' Club. TETRAPOL is a rival
system
to TETRA and is used by Governments and emergency services across Europe.
Until he assumed his current position, Dr Niederer was head of defence
communications for the Swiss government.

So concerned was he by US snooping, that Dr Niederer organised a special
conference entitled "TETRAPOL as a tool for the European Security
Architecture", sponsored by Franco-German arms giant EADS, in Brussels in
October 2004. Much of it was devoted to ECHELON and the consquences for
closer European integration of the so-called special relationship between
the UK and US.

During his presentation to the conference, Dr Niederer said: "A set of
global interception infrastructures and procedures in favour of the US
administration was realised and continues to be exploited. This is the
reason why a purely European, not US-infested, technology is needed to
guarantee EU security architecture for the next generations of networks."
One of those networks is Project MESA - basically super-fast broadband
for
spy satellites - which the US military is itching to get off the ground.

Why and how the UK chose TETRA over TETRAPOL, it seems, goes right to the
heart of the problems which now beset the whole pan-European project. A
single political entity, designed to put an end to internecine warfare,
looks as far away as ever. Perhaps that suits America just fine.

"There is going to be increased emphasis on intelligence, reconnaisance,
surveillance, precision strike - all manners of the use of, basically,
brain
over brawn..."

As Dr Hertz puts it: "The ruthless-ness of the Anglo-American form of
capitalism never sat well with most European politicians, who still value
the underlying principles of the social model. They see the UK as a
Trojan
horse, infiltrating Europe with American pro-business ideology-"

BUT just how did American companies come to dominate the UK TETRA market?

TETRA evolved from research conducted in the 1980s into Extremely Low
Frequency sonar. The intention behind ELF - a British version of which
was
planned for Glengarry Forest - was to enable communication with submerged
submarines. Much of the work on ELF, which was conducted in the UK by the
Admiralty Research Establishment and Defence Research Agency, took place
while Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. However, the end of the "evil
empire"
was still, at the time, far from certain. Yet ELF disappeared.

While Secretary of State for Defence between 1986 and 1989, George
Younger
presided over much of the research into ELF. When he suddenly quit the
Cabinet, that seemed to spell the end of Britain's aspirations to
match the
US and USSR in this field. The companies involved in the research,
however,
continued to investigate the avenues opened up by their work - avenues
which
included TETRA.

Over the next decade or so, a murky game of corporate chess, involving
trans-Atlantic players, was fought out to dominate this emerging
technology.
Did the eventual winners have a little extra covert help from ECHELON?

One company that carried on after ELF was Sussex-based Rediffusion Radio
Systems, which was split in two in 1988. One half was bought by American
aircraft manufacturers Hughes, whose various arms were themselves
gobbled up
by US defence giants Raytheon and Boeing within a few years. The other
half
of Rediffusion Radio Systems was acquired by French defence firm
Thomson CSF
in 1994. Thomson CSF also acquired Racal, whose mobile phone arm
demerged in
1991 to become Vodafone.

Crucially, Thomson CSF was highlighted by Dr Niederer and the European
Parliament as one of those firms spied upon by ECHELON in the 1990's.
Motorola acquired its TETRA expertise at the the same time as Thomson CSF
was busy developing actual TETRA products, which it now sells as part of
Thales.

Covert surveillance reared its head again last month when Greek Prime
Minister Costas Karamanlis ordered an inquiry into a phone-tapping
scandal
in Athens. The investigation will focus on how spy software was inserted
into Vodafone's mobile network installed in the city for the 2004
Olympics.
Interestingly, Motorola and another US IT firm Science Applications
International Corporation also installed a TETRA network in Athens for
the
2004 games. Among SAIC's directors are two former US deputy defence
secretary's and a former director of defence research for the Pentagon.
Congress was also poised last month to investigate attempts by President
Bush at domestic surveillance through the NSA. There's a lot going on
in the
world of the spook.

Dr Niederer told me that the loss of the mobile phone (GSM) market in the
1990s to foreign competitors such as Nokia, Vodafone and Orange (all
European companies) made the US determined to "maintain one stronghold
under
any circumstances: TETRA" using less-than-open means.

Regarding the political decision to adopt TETRA in the UK, that was
initiated by the Home Office under John Major's Tory Government in
1995. The
following year the Quadrant Consortium, comprising Motorola and TRW (both
US) Nokia and BT (Finnish and British) was set up to drive the project
forward - an astonishing six years before Northern Constabulary was
"asked"
to apply for TETRA! This rather makes a mockery of Treasury testimony
before
the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in February 2003 that
TETRA
was "initiated and led by the police service and not the Home Office".
Despite putting this point to the Association fo Chief Police Officers
some
weeks ago, they have so far refused to confirm or deny the Treasury's
statement.

In October 1997, following the General Election and a change of party,
TETRA
marched on. New Labour's Home Office Minister Alun Michael made the
public
announcment that TETRA was to be the UK's system of choice, much to the
annoyance of French firm Matra. Shortly after Mr Michael's
announcement, the
company issued a writ against the Home Office on the grounds that the
procurement exercise to fulfil the UK's needs - originally termed as the
Public Safety Radio Communications Project - was biased in favour of
American suppliers of TETRA.

In July 2000, just after the NSA confirmed the existence of ECHELON, the
European Commission referred the UK to the European Court of Justice for
this breach of procedure. Almost six years later, the UK has still not
been
punished for this transgression. What happened to that court case? The
only
thing the EC's office in Edinburgh could tell me was that the case was
settled out of court in December 2001. "If you need any more
information go
to the Home Office," a spokeswoman said.

Apart from Motorola, which has had a UK presence for nearly 40 years, the
other US firm of note in the TETRA market is arms giant Northrop
Grumman. In
2002, one of the original Quadrant Consortium firms chosen to develop
the UK
system - aerospace and IT specialists TRW - was bought for $8 billion by
Northrop Grumman. As well as a way into the global TETRA market, Northrop
Grumman also acquired TRW's network of communications satellites, vital
components in the ECHELON surveillance system. The company then joined
forces with the NSA and Nokia spin-off Innovent in 2004 to set up the
Chesapeake Innovation Centre in Maryland for "organizations that
create and
purchase homeland and national security-related high technology".

Indeed, as recently as 1st February, Northrop Grumman Chief Executive
Ronald
Sugar said during an interview in London that was broadcast on the
company'
s website: "You know, the Quadrennial Defense Review will be released
very
shortly. There are not a lot of secrets in Washington, as you know. From
everything we understand, the direction in which the Government is
going is
very similar to what we have been expecting for some time. And, in
fact, it
is very similar to the way we positioned our company.

"There is going to be increased emphasis on intelligence, reconnaissance,
surveillance, precision strike - all manners of the use of, basically,
brain
over brawn going forward."

Instead of selling TETRA products, Northrop Grumman acts as the systems
integrator for the whole UK TETRA network, responsible for "developing
the
network that integrates PSRCP (TETRA) components

and linking it with existing and future national and Force
information-technology systems". One of those future systems is the
IDENT1
biometric palm and fingerprint capability.

The company was chosen by Home Office quango the Police Information
Technology Organistion - which also signed the TETRA contract on
behalf of
the Home Office and Scottish Executive - early last year to develop this
system.

"Through IDENT1, Northrop Grumman will integrate and develop the
successful
automated fingerprint recognition services used by police in England,
Wales
and Scotland since 1991," said a press release on the company's website.
"These services have allowed forces to search their local fingerprints
and
crime scene marks against their own national databases. Now IDENT1 will
enable these marks to be searched against a combined database in
excess of 6
million records, or 12 per cent of the UK adult population, in a
matter of
minutes.

"PITO's Identification Programme will also use the IDENT1 platform to
enable
the development of further national identification services in
partnership
with the police service."

The infiltration of the UK's criminal justice system by American arms
and IT
multinationals must be causing a few headaches in Brussels. If so,
perhaps
sufferers should ask Kevin Sharer for a cure. As well as being a
director of
Northrop Grumman, Mr Sharer (a British citizen) is also director of
medical
research company Amgen Incorporated, which sponsors the Department of
Headache at University College London. Sufferers could then talk to
Motorola, which has three representatives from multinational drug
companies
on its board of directors. Illness is certainly big business. Perhaps the
reverse is true as well.

Thanks Chris.

~ Snoshoe
--- In [hidden email], "Chris" <avbook@...> wrote:
>
> Dear All,
>
> Here's the second installment of the article about TETRA from the
West
> Highland Free Press Newspaper. It's taken ages to scan in, please
don't
> waste it. Read it, and pass it on.
>
> Regards,
>
> Chris