The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

Further Reading

Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code, 1997

BIG BROTHER: INFRAGARD AND ECHELON

George Orwell in his novel, 1984, described a society in which civil liberties had gone out of the window and the government—with the help of snitches and electronic surveillance—monitored every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The said citizens were constantly reminded “Big Brother is Watching You”. In 1948, when the story was written, it was pure science fiction.

It may have taken a little longer than he envisaged, but Orwell’s Big Brother dystopia has arrived. According to the latest studies, Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras—one for every fourteen people in the country. The average British citizen is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Surveillance cameras, however, are obvious and overt. Much of what government and big corporations is using to watch you is not.

In the summer of 2002, US President George W. Bush posited the setting up of a corps of civilian informants as a means of helping the War on Terror. Under “Operation TIPS” (Terrorism Information and Prevention Systems), Americans would be recruited to spy on Americans at work and in the neighbourhood. Dubya planned to have a million civilian snitches. Even TIPS backers, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, could see the flaw in the system—there was no way for the public to know if they were being observed, or if any information gathered was accurate. Such a snoopers’ charter also opened the door to people laying false charges to settle personal grudges. Although straight from the pages of the training manual of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, the Bush government ploughed ahead with TIPS until Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ritt Goldstein reported on the operation, which then shrivelled and died in the light of public disquiet.

The demise of TIPS, however, did not leave the US Government unable to eavesdrop on its citizens, because it already had the InfraGard and ECHELON projects.

A private non-profit group, InfraGard was founded in 1996 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Cleveland, Ohio, in an attempt to co-opt industry and academia as crime-busters in cyberspace. The scheme really took off after 9/11, when InfraGard’s brief was broadened to protect America from physical as well as cyber-attack. InfraGard does this by, in the programme’s own words, promoting “ongoing dialogue and timely communication between members and the FBI. InfraGard members gain access to information that enables them to protect their assets and in turn give information to government that facilitates its responsibilities to prevent and address terrorism and other crimes.”

InfraGard is organized into individual, geographically based chapters, which meet with the local G-man. Members have access to an Eyes-Only InfraGard website that provides members with the hottest information on what domestic enemies are doing, the latest research on protective measures, and the ability to communicate securely with other members.

And who are the citizens who make up the secret, non-accountable InfraGard chapter? There’s the rub. Of the 32,000 InfraGard members the identities of few are known, although the best guess is that the majority are suits from Fortune 500 companies. In return for participation in InfraGard, its members receive extraordinary benefits. According to one InfraGard whistle-blower, members

get privileges, special phone numbers to call in times of emergency. They can get their family out maybe in times of an emergency or their friends, so they know about these threats. They’re getting secret intelligence on almost a daily basis that the American public isn’t getting, so they’re in the know in a way that we aren’t in the know.

Paranoid? You will be. InfraGard, however, is but the little brother of ECHELON.

ECHELON is the name given to the system of signal-collection and analysis networks run by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ECHELON was created in 1947 during the Cold War to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Initially, the project eavesdropped on wireless and telephone communications, but with the advent of the World Wide Web it covered email and chat rooms too; with the ending of the Cold War, the focus of ECHELON turned to terrorism and crime. The centrepiece of ECHELON is a “virtual dictionary”, a vast resource of keywords, names and telephone numbers. The billions of daily communications around the world are automatically scanned by ECHELON, and matches are referred to a human analyst. Estimates suggest that ECHELON can sift through a billion emails an hour. Although the US and UK are barred from spying on their respective citizens without court warrants, ECHELON cleverly avoids national law by enabling each country to monitor each other’s citizens. Then swap the information.

Countries excluded from ECHELON have alleged that the system is used in commercial and industrial espionage. The French press have claimed that Boeing was provided with information by ECHELON to deprive Airbus, Boeing’s European competitor, of contracts. A 1998 report prepared by the European Parliament cited “wide ranging” evidence that ECHELON information was used to provide certain companies with “commercial advantages”. The French press named names, claiming that Boeing was prioritized in contracts over Airbus, its European rival. Similarly, the US Raytheon company was able to muscle in on a radar deal between a French company and Brazil courtesy of ECHELON intercepts. Meanwhile, journalist Patrick Poole speculated that AT & T took a cut of a $200 million deal between Indonesia and Nipponese satellite-manufacturer NEC due to ECHELON- obtained intelligence.

Manifestly, InfraGard and ECHELON have a role to play in fighting crime and terror; ECHELON is said to have played a “key role” in nabbing 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. But the state’s invasion of privacy, the use of citizens as spies, the misuse of information for financial ends are perils to citizens. Big Brother is watching you. You need to watch big brother.

Further Reading

Nicky Hagar, Secret Power, 1996

OSAMA BIN LADEN

“Got Him!” trumpeted the New York Post. “Rot in Hell!” urged the Daily News.

Relief, revenge and jubilation came to New York in equal measures on Monday, 2 May 2011, following the announcement that a US Navy SEAL team had just killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. However, the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death raised the big question: Had the US really got its man? Although US officials said DNA testing proved the al-Qaeda leader was killed in the villa in Pakistan, as did a facial recognition test, they refused to release photographs of his corpse. This contrasted absolutely with US policy when Uday and Qusay Hussein—the sons of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein—were killed in a firefight with US troops, after which the US relied on photographs of their bodies to convince people they were dead. And when Saddam himself was executed, video footage of his death and subsequent photographs were offered up as final proof of the tyrant’s demise.

The lack of documentation offered by the White House was pure fodder for a conspiracy that bin Laden wasn’t offed on the morning of 2 May 2011. The conspiracy was only pumped by the US Government’s choice of burial site for bin Laden: the middle of the trackless ocean.

Two main conspiracies centre on bin Laden’s death:

1) bin Laden died years before in the Tora Bora mountains (either from a US bomb or kidney disease), but the US and Allies hushed this up to justify the continuance of the War on Terror. Barack Obama announced bin Laden’s death for the bragging rights, and as a poll boost. Against this, most al-Qaeda websites have since claimed that