Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-027"
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"en.20010905.2.3-027"2
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"Mr President, it is fortunate that the report, which most of the members of the temporary committee voted in favour of, acknowledges the existence of the Echelon network, despite American authorities maintaining a guilty silence. I myself did not vote in favour due to the poor quality of the report’s conclusions.
Echelon is, in fact, one of the essential parts of the NSA, a sprawling global espionage network which employs approximately 90 000 people and which has the technical capacity to carry out hundreds of millions of interceptions each day. This system is a real instrument of war against individual freedoms, and is controlled by only eight people, one of whom is the President of the United States, cynically called the ‘gang of eight’ by the chairman of the Congress monitoring committee.
The industrial and political espionage system was set up during the Cold War and its role is to defend what some dare to call the free world. The people who hold these views met us in Washington, in this state of mind and not without a degree of annoyance. They asked us why we had come to try to cause trouble for them, when the money, armies and secret services of both the United States and Europe are defending the same values. These are values that mean, for example, that on entry visas to the United States, the question ‘Are you involved in Communist activities?’ has been replaced by ‘Are you involved in terrorist activities?’ It is now clear why no state or company has ever complained about the workings of Echelon – it is obviously to acknowledge the debt for services rendered.
It is now known that the United Kingdom and Germany act as intermediaries in this system, despite being members of the European Union and signatories of all the conventions on human rights. Other countries, however, such as France, have similar practices. Our response to Echelon will not be fine sounding speeches or technical measures such as encryption. We will respond by providing accurate information to the public about the choices it has in terms of society and by strictly applying the basic rights enshrined in the conventions on human rights.
Industrial espionage is the lot of a society motivated by profit and competition; political espionage is the by-product of an undemocratic society and this is the basic problem posed by the Echelon system. We must respond to the global policing of interceptions with vigilance and popular intervention on a global scale and I maintain that European laws of today are better equipped to protect people against industrial espionage than against individual espionage. This is one perception of Europe, but it is one that I do not support."@en1
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