Continued from previous page:
Governments Silent
Still, despite all the suspicions, no European government has, at least publicly, protested UKUSA's suspected eavesdropping.
Were the issue to be raised at the national level, it would likely occur through the European Union, says Simon Davies, UK director of the watchdog group Privacy International.
"If the level of commercial espionage is as it has been suggested in the European Parliament's report, then both the [European Union's] Maastricht and the Amsterdam treaties are being fundamentally violated by Great Britain, and possibly Germany," he says.
But because the United States shares some intelligence with other governments, it is not clear what country would bring a case, says Davies. "The Catch-22 is that governments aren't going to take action on ECHELON or any of the other NSA programs, because they are in such collusion with the NSA."
Other countries outside the UKUSA alliance, such as Russia, Germany and France, also are believed to operate their own, albeit less sophisticated, eavesdropping facilities around the globe, and so also may be reluctant to point fingers.
Another problem, observers say, is that the ECHELON program has never been acknowledged by the United States or Britain. "France can't ask for an assurance on something that is not official," says a French government official.
Exaggerated Concerns?
By the nature of National Security Agency's technology which sweeps in all manner of communications from commercial satellites, spy satellites and other meansit is inevitable the agency will intercept messages European companies and citizens consider confidential, experts say.
But some are not convinced the agency is extracting, analyzing and sharing with U.S. companies such information to any significant degree, if at all.
"The concerns of the European community are a bit overblown," says James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, the definitive book on the NSA.
"The [NSA is] not worried about some company in Brussels. They're worried about the things you see on the front page of The Washington Post and The New York Times, terrorism, Kosovo."
Steve Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, agrees. "I don't know that to be the case, namely, that industrial espionage is a policy of the U.S. intelligence community."
The United States does collect "various kinds of photographic, signals, political and other intelligence," Aftergood says, but he asserts the economic intelligence collected by U.S. spy agencies focuses more on "what is going on in markets, emerging markets, where resources are being identified and discovered."
However, Duncan Campbell, the author of the European Parliament's April report, doesn't believe any of that for a minute. "Everybody does this. It's a surprise to me that anybody thinks it's a surprise," he says.
"Yes, [U.S. spying] includes market trends but it doesn't stop there. If you are going to determine economic trends in a fast moving economic situation other than reading The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, how are you going to do it? By spying on contractual negotiations as they happen." ---David Ruppe
