[Infowarrior] - MoD patrols stop 2100 people at US phone tap site

[Richard Forno]

(c/o DE)

MoD patrols stop 2100 people at US phone tap site
IAN BRUCE, Defence Correspondent     June 26 2006
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/64687-print.shtml

Armed Ministry of Defence police have stopped more than 2100 civilians and
body-searched 941 in the last five years to help protect the secrets of
America's main phone-tapping and surveillance site on British soil, The
Herald can reveal.
The American government has also paid more than £1.7m to the MoD since 2003
to fund security patrols on the approach roads to the Menwith Hill facility
in north Yorkshire because it cannot legally deploy its own armed troops
outside the perimeter of what is still officially an RAF base.
The MoD has admitted both the stop-and-search and funding figures in answers
to private parliamentary questions.
The Menwith Hill site, on moorland eight miles from Harrogate, is the
biggest American intelligence-gathering centre outside the US. The bulk of
its staff are 1200 employees of the US National Security Agency plus a
handful of British military intelligence personnel and analysis and liaison
teams from the UK government's GCHQ monitoring centre outside Cheltenham.
Its job is to scan telephone, fax, e-mail and microwave communications
throughout Europe, including diplomatic signals from embassies and
commercially sensitive exchanges between major companies.
One intelligence source said: "Menwith Hill deals with hundreds of millions
of communications and signals packages a day. These are filtered through
banks of computers pre-programmed with a list of key words which allows
analysts to home in on items of interest.
"Siting the base on British soil allows the NSA to neatly circumvent US
human rights legal restrictions which might hamper domestic or foreign
intelligence-gathering.
"This has become ever more important since September 11. Why risk judicial
refusal for a wire-tap on a terrorist suspect in New York or Miami when you
can eavesdrop on him from North Yorkshire without anyone back home knowing
or being able to interfere?
"Because it can hide behind the official though patently false cover of
being an RAF facility, it lies outside US jurisdiction.
"It also suits Whitehall to turn a blind eye, given the levels and quantity
of shared intelligence plucked from the ether. Menwith Hill works very
closely with GCHQ and its outstations in Cyprus and elsewhere round the
globe. Between them, they've got a very big ear to the sky."
Menwith Hill could theoretically tap into 250,000 domestic telephone lines
simultaneously within the UK and is linked directly to the Hunter's Stone
Post Office Tower, the pivotal point for more than a million miles of
British microwave connections.
It is also the key reception and analysis site for the Echelon electronic
surveillance system, a worldwide satellite-based intelligence-gathering
network whose findings are shared between the US, the UK, Canadian,
Australian and New Zealand intelligence services.
Echelon monitors every signal passing through the world's communications'
satellites and has 120 satellites of its own to capture other microwave
communications, including all known mobile telephone and pager systems.
The NSA, America's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, lists
Menwith Hill as "Field Station 83".