[iwar] [fc:Now.showing.on.satellite.TV:.secret.American.spy.photos]

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Date: 2002-06-13 05:16:58


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Now.showing.on.satellite.TV:.secret.American.spy.photos]
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Now showing on satellite TV: secret American spy photos

Security lapse allows viewers to see sensitive operations

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,736462,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,736462,00.html>

Duncan Campbell
Thursday June 13, 2002
The Guardian

European satellite TV viewers can watch live broadcasts of peacekeeping and
anti-terrorist operations being conducted by US spyplanes over the Balkans.

Normally secret video links from the American spies-in-the-sky have a
serious security problem - a problem that make it easier for terrorists to
tune in to live video of US intelligence activity than to get Disney
cartoons or new-release movies.

For more than six months live pictures from manned spy aircraft and drones
have been broadcast through a satellite over Brazil. The satellite, Telstar
11, is a commercial TV relay. The US spyplane broadcasts are not encrypted,
meaning that anyone in the region with a normal satellite TV receiver can
watch surveillance operations as they happen.

The satellite feeds have also been connected to the internet, potentially
allowing the missions to be watched from around the globe.

Viewers who tuned in to the unintended attraction on Tuesday could watch a
sudden security alert around the US army's Kosovan headquarters, Camp
Bondsteel in Urosevac. The camp was visited last summer by President Bush
and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

A week earlier the spyplane had provided airborne cover for a heavily
protected patrol of the Macedonian-Kosovan border, near Skopje. A group of
apparently high-ranking visitors were accompanied by six armoured personnel
carriers and a helicopter gunship.

Nato officials, whose forces in former Yugoslavia depend on the US missions
for intelligence, at first expressed disbelief at the reports. After
inquiring, a Nato spokesman confirmed: "We're aware that this imagery is put
on a communications satellite. The distribution of this material is handled
by the United States and we're content that they're following appropriate
levels of security."

This lapse in US security was discovered last year by a British engineer and
satellite enthusiast, John Locker, who specialises in tracking commercial
satellite services. Early in November 2001 he routinely logged the new
channels.

"I thought that the US had made a deadly error," he said. "My first thought
was that they were sending their spyplane pictures through the wrong
satellite by mistake, and broadcasting secret information across Europe."

He tried repeatedly to warn British, Nato and US officials about the leak.
But his warnings were set aside. One officer wrote back to tell him that the
problem was a "known hardware limitation".

The flights, conducted by US army and navy units and AirScan Inc, a
Florida-based private military company, are used to monitor terrorists and
smugglers trying to cross borders, to track down arms caches, and to keep
watch on suspect premises. The aircraft are equipped to watch at night,
using infrared.

"We seem to be transmitting this information potentially straight to our
enemies," said one US military intelligence official who was alerted to the
leak, adding: "I would be worried that using this information, the people we
are tracking will see what we are looking at and, much more worryingly, what
we are not looking at.

"This could let people see where our forces are and what they're doing.
That's putting our boys at risk."

Former SAS officer Adrian Weale, who served in Northern Ireland, told BBC
Newsnight last night: "I think I'd be extremely irritated to find that the
planning and hard work that had gone into mounting an operation against, for
instance, a war crime suspect or gun runner was being compromised by the
release of this information in the form that it's going out in."

· Duncan Campbell is a freelance investigative journalist and a member of
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and not the
Guardian correspondent of the same name 

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