(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". _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list [email protected] https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
