establishment. Some industry insiders say they believe that some US machines approved for export contain NSA back doors (also called trap doors ).

The United States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it back-door access to encryption pro-grams, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement agencies. However, a report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserts that Washingtons plans for controlling encryption software in Europe have nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial espionage.

The NSA has also dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials. 15

And yet more license?

The US Justice Department as well has been pressing Congress to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to obtain search warrants to secretly enter homes or offices and disable security on personal computers by ascertaining passwords and installing devices that override encryption programs, this as a prelude to a wiretap or a further search.16

Meanwhile, federal agencies are running anonymous remailers , the Internet entities which allow people to send email without revealing their true email address. Worldwide users of these particular remailing services have no idea that their partner in privacy protec-tion is an American government spook of some kind. This might in fact cause problems for some of the users, whose number probably includes dissidents and human-rights activists in nations with repres-sive governments, whistle blowers in companies or government agen-cies, those wishing to report crimes and war atrocities, and gay Web surfers who anonymously chat in online communities without fear of retribution by neighbors or employers. Moreover, NSA reportedly concluded agreements several years ago with Lotus, Microsoft, and Netscape aimed at preventing other anonymous email; i.e., some of what was beyond NSAs control. These companies have further bent to the pressure of their government by secretly inserting a back door in their software sold abroad to defeat cryptographic methods. Lotus has admitted to this.17

And the FBI is now enjoying its newest Big-Brother toy: roving wiretaps , which allows the tapping of any phone physically near the targeted subject, including those of friends, neighbors, business associates and strangers; be it pay phone, cellular phone or borrowed phone; regardless of whos speaking on the phone, as long as the targeted subject might use it. 18

Cowardly new world

Its as if the national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept

the personal communications of citizens. And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged.

The worst possible scenario

When pressed on moral, legal, privacy or any other grounds to justify their electronic fishing expeditions, which are expanding like the universe after the Big Bang, the anti-privacy police invariably fall back on some version of: What if terrorists are planning a terrible act and communicating the details to each other over the telephone (email/fax)? Through tapping, we could find out their plans in advance and stop them.

If they can resort to the worst possible scenario-which in all likelihood has never happened and never will unless the terrorists were all born yesterday, on Mars, and the authorities are outrageously lucky in the extreme-then others can paint their own worst scenarios. For example, in the course of the countless eavesdrops, information is bound to be picked up about people cheating on their spouses. Imagine each time this leaks out- great arguments at home, depression, spousal abuse, divorce, murder, suicide...and think of the children. Not to mention the possibility of blackmail or forcing the person to engage in espionage or treason. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON dictionary - He lives in a lovely old white house on Clinton Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes.

The greatest intelligence scam of the century

For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the worlds most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them-including prime US intel ligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia-confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their embassies, military missions, trade offices and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio and fax. And all the while, because of a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments might as well have been hand deliver ing the messages to Washington, uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being sold to them, so that when they used them the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could the morning newspaper. German intelligence was in on it as well and may even have been the actual owner of Crypto AG.

In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten with Crypto AGs machines and switched to another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libyas,

and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known and the scam began to unravel in earnest. 19

Microsoft Windows

NSA has done something similar with computers. In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special keys into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun- Microsofts developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called KEY . The other was called NSAKEY . Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users knowledge. Fernandez says that NSAs back door in the worlds most commonly used operating system makes it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer. 20

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration. The report stated that there had been a strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates development teams. The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsofts biggest client in the world. 21

CHAPTER 22 : Kidnapping and Looting

In 1962, the United States kidnapped about 125 people from the Dominican Republic, and took them to the US and elsewhere.

A suspected drug smuggler was spirited out of Honduras and taken to the US in 1988, although the Honduran constitution prohibits the extradition of Honduran citizens for trial in other countries. Presumably, in this case, it was carried out with the approval of the Honduran government under US pressure.

In December 1989, the American military grabbed Manuel Noriega in Panama and hustled him off to Florida.