Paris Weekly Details French Electronic 'Espionnage' Abilities

EUP20010406000153 Paris Le Nouvel Observateur (Internet Version-WWW)
in French 05 Apr 01

[Article by Vincent Jauvert: "Espionage -- How France Listens to the
Whole World"]

[FBIS Translated Text]

It is one of the largest tapping centers in the world. At this
secret base protected by watchtowers, police dogs and electrified
barbed wire, 13 immense parabolic antennas spy day and night on all
the international communications transiting through the satellites
they monitor.

Where is this base whose photo Le Nouvel Observateur has
published here? In the United States? In Russia? No, in the Perigord
region, on the Domme plateau, next to Sarlat airport. The site is
officially (and modestly) referred to as the "radio center." Here,
the French spy service, the DGSE [General Directorate for External
Security], monitors hundreds of thousands -- millions? -- of
telephone calls, e-mails, files, and faxes on a daily basis. This
is the main site for the French Republic's "big ears."

It is not the only one. Like the United States and the English-
speaking countries with close ties to it, France has over the
past ten years set up a global interception network. Le Nouvel
Observateur can confirm the existence -- and publish photos -- of
three other DGSE "satellite" tapping bases. One -- code-
named "Fregate" -- is hidden in the Guyanese forest, at the heart of
the Kourou space center.
The other, completed in 1998, is attached to the side of the Dziani
Dzaha crater on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.
Both are managed jointly with the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), the
German secret service. The third center is located in the western
suburbs of Paris, on the Orgeval plateau, at Alluets-le-Roi. A
total of about 30 antennas "cover" nearly the entire globe, with the
exception of the Siberian North and a part of the Pacific.

There will soon be other stations. Expanding its "satellite"
tapping network is one of the DGSE's "priorities," the rapporteur for
the 2001 defense budget, Jean-Michel Boucheron, writes. The French
secret service has more resources available every year for this purpose.

A new station is being built on the Albion plateau, where nuclear
missiles were stored before the silos were dismantled; a fifth is
planned for the Tontouta naval air base in New Caledonia.

Of course, this network is -- and will remain -- much less
powerful and efficient than the US system on which it is modeled,
one which has often been discussed in recent months and is commonly
referred to as "Echelon." The American NSA [National Security
Agency] is 30 times richer than its French counterpart, the
technical directorate of the DGSE. The former employs 38,000
people, the latter 1,600. The smaller Frenchelon," as the Americans
and their partners call it, is no less of a threat to privacy.
Including that of the French. Here is why: When they are
transmitted by one of the satellites monitored by the Domme, Kourou,
or Mayotte bases, our communications with other countries or the
DOM-TOM [French Overseas Dominions and Territories] may be
intercepted, copied, and disseminated by the DGSE, without any
monitoring commission having any say in the matter. None! A
situation that is unique in the West.

Every democratic country that has equipped itself with satellite
tapping services has set up safeguards -- laws and monitoring
bodies -- to protect its citizens from the curiosity of the "big
ears." Every one, led by Germany and the United States. But not
France.

Nonetheless, our country has been spying on communications
satellites for 30 years. The SDECE [Foreign Intelligence and
Counterintelligence Service] set up its first parabolic antenna at
Domme, at the site of a small radio interception center, in 1974.
The antenna measured 25 centimeters in diameter and still exists.
Another followed soon afterwards. "At the beginning, there were
only a few satellites, the Intelsats," explains a veteran of the
technical directorate. "We were able to 'suck up' a large portion of
international traffic." However, in 1980, as the explosion in global
telephony began, more and more satellites were put into orbit:
Eutelsat, Molniya, Inmarsat, Panamsat, Arabsat. "We were quickly
overwhelmed," recounts a former senior official. "The Domme center
found itself under-equipped, ridiculous -- and we at the DGSE were a
laughingstock for our American and British colleagues."

In 1984, the head of the secret service, Admiral Lacoste, pressed
Francois Mitterrand: "We need another interception station." France,
he claimed, had an ideal site for this type of operation: the Kourou
space center. Ideal? It was located very near the Equator, that is,
in the best possible spot for listening in on communications
satellites, nearly all of which are geostationary. The base would
be located a few kilometers from the Ariane launching pad, meaning
that its antennas would not attract attention. And moreover,
economic espionage was the French secret service's new priority, and
the United States its main target. And the satellites "covering"
the United States were in orbit precisely above Guyana.

To share the costs and reinforce the Franco-German alliance,
Lacoste proposed bringing the BND into the adventure. The joint
effort would be all the easier, the admiral explained, because the
two services were already working together closely in interception
stations in West Berlin and elsewhere in the FRG. The president
gave the go-ahead in late 1984. The Rainbow Warrior [Greenpeace ship
sunk by the DGSE in New Zealand] scandal, which arose a few months
later, delayed the operation. The "Fregate" base would be
inaugurated secretly in 1990 by Claude Silberzahn, the new director
of the DGSE, and his German counterpart.

Silberzahn wanted to go even farther. In his view, to reclaim
its place among the major players, the DGSE needed new stations.
The Gulf War gave him new arguments. American spies' technical
exploits in Iraq were breathtaking. Francois Mitterrand and Prime
Minister Michel Rocard were convinced. Silberzahn was authorized to
launch a wide-ranging ten-year investment plan. He modernized the
Domme center, bought a Cray supercomputer, and had the first
parabolic antennas installed at Alluets-le-Roi, at a base previously
reserved for the interception of radio waves. Finally, with the
BND, he launched the site on Mayotte. This French territory in the
Comoros archipelago is also close to the Equator. The tapping
center would be located on Petite-Terre, a miniscule island where
the Foreign Legion already had a base. From Mayotte, the DGSE's
technical directorate could better "cover" Africa, the Middle East,
and Asia, the up-and-coming continent. Completing the project would
take five years. Sordid stories of cheated-on husbands are said to
have slowed down the work.

Today, the Republic's "big ears" have, as we have already said,
30 antennas on three continents. These mobile antennas can change
direction several times a day, depending on the schedule or
objectives of the service. All countries are subject to tapping,
even allies. Member countries of the European Union too? "Of
course," says the official. "Thanks to these satellites, we can spy
on everyone where they live. No crazy plots, no risk of diplomatic
incidents. This is why we invested so much."

Which satellites are priority targets? "The ones that can
provide us with the most political and economic information," says
an expert. The Inmarsats, for example. Thanks to these satellites,
anyone can telephone or send an e-mail or fax to (almost) anywhere
on earth. All it takes is a little suitcase weighing two kilos. At
its beginnings in 1982, subscribers to this service were mainly
professional sailors and oil companies. Then the customer base
expanded to include wealthy yachtsmen. "What a windfall for
economic espionage! You cannot imagine the things these businessmen
say 'in clear' over their boat telephones," a specialist
explains. "They think they are safe in the middle of the
ocean. They talk about contracts, projects, discoveries." And that
is not all. The Inmarsat company has signed contracts with most
major airlines and 650 business aircraft. When a passenger makes a
telephone call in flight, it transits via one of these
satellites ... to the satisfaction of the "big ears." Inmarsat is
also used on the ground, most often in the earth's "hot spots,"
where telephone equipment is poor. The company has a total of
200,000 subscribers: journalists, diplomats, international civil
servants, NGO officials, etc. "No very powerful computer is
necessary to spy on this choice clientele," says an expert. "A
maximum of 2,000 messages pass through an Inmarsat satellite
simultaneously. This is ten to 50 times fewer than for the others."

The others are the giants of global telephony: Intelsat,
Eutelsat, PanAmSat. Several billion messages from every continent
transit via these satellites every day. "It is impossible to ignore
them," says an expert, "but difficult to process them as a whole.
We have to choose the segments of the beam that interest us." And in
particular, to identify the channels leased by the military,
diplomats, or companies. Some companies use a new, inexpensive
service known as VSAT: This network enables them to keep all their
establishments throughout the world connected on a permanent basis.
In Domme and Kourou, the DGSE "sucks up" traffic from Intelsat 801,
which provides thousands of VSAT links between America and Europe.

The big satellites also transmit the Internet. They have become
highways -- backbones -- for the Web. Says one specialist, "10
percent of the traffic passes through them. This is not much, but
we can intercept this 10 percent: The rest, which transits via optic
fiber cables, is something else." Staff at the Mayotte center are
impatiently awaiting the new Intelsat 902, which within a few months
will be furnishing "backbones" in Africa, in Asia, and part of
Russia. It will be positioned at 62 degrees east, just above the
French island in the Indian Ocean.

Other types of satellites targeted: Regional satellites, which
"cover" only a portion of the planet. Like the Arabsats for the
Middle East and North Africa. "Ah, the Arabsats!" sighs a former
listener." "The information they provided us in the 1980s! On Qadafi
during the Chad conflict or on Israel during the invasion of South
Lebanon."

Finally, there are the national satellites. Some countries are
too poor and too large to set up a network of telephone cables
throughout their territory. For internal communications, they use
satellites: the Raduga in Russia, the Mabuhay in the Philippines, or
the Dong Fang Hong in China.

But the increase in the number of satellite operators -- there
are more than 100 today! -- poses a problem for the DGSE. "Each one
codes its beam and does not make the code for deciphering it
public," says a former official. Obtaining the key requires all the
secret service's resources. "Several methods exist, not all of
them 'clean'," the expert continues. "You can negotiate with the
operator. You say: 'France will give you part of its international
traffic; in exchange, you give us this confidential protocol'."
Another technique: "Bribe a company executive or promise him a
medal." Yet another: "If you learn that a foreign secret service has
this software, trade it for something else."
You can also discreetly enter the operator's facility and steal the
precious diskette. "The DGSE has a division that is very good at
this type of burglary," says the expert. There remains the homemade
solution: Discover the code yourself. "But that can take a long
time. In the meantime, you miss a lot of things."

For several months, one satellite has been a particular thorn in
the side of French secret service engineers. It is Thuraya,
launched last October by an Abu Dhabi company that offered its
subscribers total coverage of mobile telephony in the Arab world.
Its service will be operational in April. Its customers: senior
Syrian officials, Libyan businessmen, Egyptian military officers.
So many targets for the DGSE. "There is a catch," says the
expert. "The Emirates are financing the operation, but Hughes, the
American aerospace giant, is managing the system. And as concerns
codes for the beam, Hughes knows a whole range of them. We have not
yet found a solution."

With greater or lesser difficulty, dozens of beams are thus
sucked up every day by the DGSE's parabolic antennas. What happens
afterwards? In cellars at the bases of these antennas, technicians
and operators with "defense secrecy" clearance work in air-
conditioned computer rooms. Grouped into day and night teams, some
200 work at Domme and Alluets-le-Roi, 40 or so at Mayotte and
Kourou.

The technicians scurry around in front of electronic control
panels. They control the powerful equipment (amplifiers,
demodulators, analyzers, decoders) that transforms satellite beams
into faxes, e-mail, files, or voice messages. Their primary
concern: deciphering encrypted communications, which is becoming
more and more difficult.

The operators, meanwhile, are seated in front of computer
consoles. They check the automatic sorting of traffic. Only a few
thousand intercepted messages reach secret service HQ on Boulevard
Mortier in Paris each day. They are sent by optical fibers or
protected radio links. The rest, the great majority, are thrown
into an electronic trashcan. Selection is conducted on the basis of
a dictionary of addresses and key words.

"Addresses?" These are telephone numbers and e-mail addresses
that the DGSE monitors constantly. Those of embassies, ministries,
international organizations, NGOs, multinational companies -- the
computer of the "big ears" holds several thousand from all over the
world. When one of these addresses appears in the beam of a
satellite being spied on, the communication is automatically
recorded and sent to Paris. This type of surveillance has a name in
tapping jargon: "routine."

Key words? Another method of filtering flows of data. "A key
word can be a proper name, a nickname, a chemical formula, a slang
term, or an acronym," an expert explains. "We enter them into a
file and wait." When one of these words appears, the computer goes
into reverse and records the communication from the beginning. At
the DGSE, this practice is known as "standby" or "trawling."

"For e-mails, this computer sorting is very efficient," says
another specialist. He adds: "Given the computers' capacities, we
can in this way filter several million electronic messages a
minute. A good search engine is all it takes. We need simply adapt
it to our needs." It seems highly like that the DGSE uses the search
tool developed by Lexiquest, a French company.

When it comes to faxes, the sorting process is less efficient.
Experts estimate the success rate at no more than 60 percent. Why so
many failures? Because the computer does not "read" the fax
directly. It must first be converted into bits by a character
recognition program. If this phase is disrupted by transfer problems
or illegible handwriting, the retranscribed fax will not make
sense. It is lost to the "big ears." Despite these difficulties,
the DGSE has always been one of the best spy services as concerns
automatic processing of faxes -- hence its success in economic
espionage.

The situation is entirely different as regards speech. The DGSE
has not developed techniques as effective as those of the NSA or
Israel's Mossad. One expert confides, "Contrary to popular belief,
it is very difficult to teach a computer to catch key words spoken
during a telephone conversation 'on the fly'." Explanation: "Some
people speak quickly, others slowly, some stammer, others have an
accent. Result: The failure rate is very high." The French service
is studying another sorting method that the Americans and Israelis
have already developed: automatic transcription. The computer
transcribes the entire telephone conversation, then a search engine
finds the key words in the file that has thus been
constituted. "Strange as it may seem, it is simpler to proceed like
this." The Defense Ministry has just asked the best French speech
processing laboratory, the Limsi in Orsay, to develop software
for this purpose.

After sorting comes listening. At the DGSE, several hundred
people -- 300, 500? -- spend their days wearing
headphones. "Keeping in mind that a good professional can process
50 to 100 conversations a day, you do the math!" says a veteran.
The total is more than 15,000 a day or at least 5 million a year.

Is the game worth the candle? This mass of information -- these
millions of intercepted conversations, e-mails, or faxes -- is it
really useful? The unanimous opinion is that "pearls," bits of secret
information worthy of being transmitted to levels as high as that of
the president of the Republic, are very rare. "A few dozen in the
space of 20 years," says the former senior official. "And even
then..." There were the cases, already cited, of Qadafi and Israel
in the 1980s. Later, instructions for voting in the UN Security
Council were intercepted. Recently, recordings of senior Serbian
dignitaries have been transmitted to the Elysee [president's
residence].

In fact, the real "gems" have other clients: several large French
industrial groups. For two decades, the DGSE has been working in
symbiosis with some 15 private or public firms. Between spies and
bosses, it is a matter of give and take. The former provide economic
and technological intelligence (the DGSE's specialized research
service employs about 50 people). The latter furnish cover stories
for agents on missions abroad.

Former DGSE staffers who have been recruited by the firms
involved serve as liaisons. At their former employer's HQ on
Boulevard Mortier, they regularly take delivery of copies of faxes,
e-mails, or draft contracts intercepted by tapping stations. The
yield is sometimes excellent. "We often receive thanks from
bosses," says the senior official. In 1998, the "big ears" enabled
the French industrialists concerned to follow developments in a set
of crucial negotiations on the merger -- which fell through in the
end -- of German aerospace manufacturer Dasa and its British
counterpart, British Aerospace.

But there are not just "pearls," far from it. There is the rest
of the work, the everyday routine, these thousands of reports of
interceptions, "raw" reports as they are referred to at the DGSE,
which pile up in the analysis department and are not always
read. "For one good piece of information, there is so much useless
bla-bla," says a secret service manager. "I wonder if all this is
worth it." Many would prefer to see the DGSE invest in human
intelligence services rather than technical systems. "With the
fortunes we spend every year, we could set up so many agents
abroad. After all, that is our real job."

Threat to privacy? Without a doubt. Some of the millions of
communications tapped could be yours. The risk is even higher if you
call a region with few cable connections, like Africa, Russia, or the
DOM-TOMs. Nothing prohibits the DGSE from intercepting your
conversations or e-mails if they are transmitted by satellite.
Worse, this type of espionage is implicitly authorized by a 1991 law
establishing the Commission on Monitoring of Wiretaps. Article 20 of
this law indeed stipulates that it is not within the powers of this
new commission to monitor "measures taken by the public authorities
to (...) monitor (...) transmissions via hertzian channels [Le
Nouvel Observateur editor's note: That is, via the airwaves]." In
other words, the body may monitor everything except "satellite"
taps.

"This exception was demanded by the highest state authorities,"
confides a former advisor to then Defense Minister Pierre
Joxe. "Why? You may remember that at that time, the DGSE was
launching a wide-ranging plan to modernize its 'big ears.'
Compromising it was out of the question." A former Elysee
staffer: "We wanted to give the secret service a free hand, not
enclose it in a quota of authorized taps."

The members of parliament could not make head nor tail of it.
They should have been more curious. They would have learned that
many democratic countries had already rigorously regulated the
activities of their "big ears." In Germany, eight independent
experts appointed by the parliament have monitored the BND's
wiretapping activities since 1968; they constitute the "G10"
commission. They have considerable power. They can interrogate all
employees of the BND and view the entire tap production
process. "The objective: to protect Germans' privacy," according to
Professor Claus Arndt, who served on this commission from 1968 to
1999. When, during random sorting, the name of a German citizen
or company appears, the BND must erase it, barring the express
consent of the commission. "By the same token," says Professor
Arndt, "the secret service must submit the entire list of key words
it intends to use. It is not allowed to include the name of a
German." By next June, a law should allow super-inspectors to visit
any of the German secret service's sites, including the Kourou
station. If France refuses to allow this, the president of the
commission could call for the BND's withdrawal from the Guyanese
base.

In Australia, the "big ears" are under the surveillance of an
inspector general designated by the government. He has the power to
verify that the DSD, the espionage service, applies highly
restrictive laws. For example, any information about an Australian
collected by tapping stations must be destroyed. A destruction
report must even be submitted to the inspector general. In Canada,
a commissioner designated by the parliament is responsible for this
task of monitoring. Each year, he drafts a public report. In the
United States, the NSA's activities are monitored by an inspector
general and the US attorney general.

When will France follow suit? In recent months, members of
Parliament have taken an interest in "big ears" ... belonging to the
Americans. The Defense Commission recently issued a spiteful report
about "Echelon" and the NSA (footnote: On the subject of Echelon, see
"Global Electronic Surveillance," by Duncan Campbell, Allia
Publishing). It is time for it also to study the practices of the
DGSE and propose ways of monitoring them. This is an opportune
time. A revolution in "tapping" is on the way. The secret service
is planning to invest massively in interception of undersea cables.
Before plunging into this adventure, could it not be subjected to a
few democratic rules?

[Description of Source: Paris Le Nouvel Observateur (Internet
Version-WWW) in French -- left-of-center weekly magazine featuring
domestic and international political news]