Menwith Hill, July 2006.

Probably the most advanced “Listening Station” in the world, ironically overlooking the beautiful scenery of the Yorkshire Dales.

JUNE 2001 – The E.C. Parliament has confirmed (admitted?) the existence of the communications intelligence and information exchange network called ECHELON.
This global network of wiretaps, data-sniffing and general eavesdropping systems enables the U.S. government (and probably the U.K.) to intercept digital communications. In effect this means that , amongst other activities, ECHELON is capable of recording all email messages and all telephone conversations – regardless of who is making them. ECHELON is based at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire U.K – rumours of its existence have circulated for years.
ECHELON does not require a suspicion element to monitor any communications and can ,therefore, snoop into innocent peoples personal data. An E.C. spokesman stated that there is good reason to believe that information has been obtained by ECHELON by illegally monitoring private emails.
Amongst other things the French government is sure that commercial contracts have been lost to the U.S. (Including an Airbus contract with Saudi Arabia) despite U.S. denials. Unless encrypted ,any persons communications ,from any location can be snooped upon – in fact it is suspected that all European emails and telephone communications are automatically recorded at Menwith Hill.

Menwith Hill – near Harrogate North Yorkshire (UK).

JULY 18TH – 2001 The residents of North Yorkshire are registering a strong protest against the Menwith Hill Listening Station [ right ] following the closure of its sister station in Bavaria (Germany).
Despite U.S. denials the German base was not closed due to a cost cutting exercise (millions of dollars have recently been spent on improved electronic eavesdropping equipment) but protests from the German public forced the U.S. agencies to transfer their activities to Menwith Hill.
It is likely that Menwith Hill will become the most important covert listening station in the world and also an integral component in the new Star wars Defense system.
It is understandable that the people of the North of England want no part of this “skulking and covertly dangerous ” element of U.S. military World dominance.

In a report produced by the United States Space Command ,entitled “A Vision for 2020”, General Howell M. Estes 111 states “Globalization of the World Economy will continue with a widening between the “haves ” and the “have nots”. The aims of the U.S. Space Command – dominating the space dimension for Military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into War fighting capabilities across the full system of conflict”.

The following article was published in “The Independent (UK)” 27th February, 2004

How Britain and the US keep watch on the world

By Phillip Knightley

From the National Security Agency’s imposing headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, ringed by a double-chain fence topped by barbed wire with strands of electrified wire between them, America “bugs” the world.

Nothing politically or militarily significant, whether mentioned in a telephone call, in a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, or in a company fax or e-mail, escapes its attention.

Its computers – measured in acres occupied by them rather than simple figures – “vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum”, homing in on “key words” which may suggest something of interest to NSA customers is being conveyed.

The NSA costs at least $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year to run. It employs at least 20,000 officers (not counting the 100,000 servicemen and civilians around the world over whom it has control). Its shredders process 40 tons of paper a day.

Its junior partner is Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation. Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ’s real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security.

Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ’s staff at Cheltenham, about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere. Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel.

Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year. A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right to run NSA listening stations in Britain – Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales – and on British territory around the world.

Chicksands – always listening? [ right ] click on image for larger size

The collaboration between the two agencies offers many advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier, it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday that all Britain’s bugging is lawful. The two agencies simply swap each other’s dirty work.

GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens’ calls, as they do. The NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone conversations interest the NSA.

The NSA request to GCHQ for help in bugging the diplomats from those nations who were holding out for a second Security Council resolution to authorise an attack on Iraq is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that both organisations wanted to provide their political masters with recordings of private conversations of high-ranking international diplomats.

It is not difficult. Listening “bugs” can be planted in phones, electrical plugs, desk lamps and book spines. Given a clear line of sight, one device enables someone to detect and and interpret sound waves vibrating against the glass window panes of an office.

Bugging the world is not the problem. The problem is avoiding drowning in a sea of information. We should not be surprised that GCHQ and NSA eavesdrop on us. We pay them to do it. We should be asking: “Do they earn their keep?” And, unless we get a few more whistle-blowers like Ms Gun, we will not know, because both agencies surround themselves with a wall of secrecy.

WHO DO WE BUG?

Although under domestic law GCHQ needs a warrant from the Home Secretary to tap telephones in Britain, it can do so abroad without such authorisation.

But the United Nations headquarters in New York is considered sovereign territory, and placing a bug there would be illegal under international law.

Intelligence services spy on hostile and friendly countries, the latter mainly for commercial reasons, but also to gain an edge in diplomatic negotiations. Nato allies are not always immune from intelligence operations by Britain.

Staff working for the UN inspection teams in Iraq were convinced they were under surveillance.

France, Germany and Russia complained of a rise in espionage against them. There was intense activity directed at Jordan and Syria, as well as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Egypt.

Officials say the only shock about Katharine Gun’s discovery of an e-mail from the National Security Agency is that she was surprised by it.

UFO’s Menwith Hill & One Man’s Stand In His Local Community For Truth.

Tony Topping lives in Selby, a market town in North Yorkshire approximately 50 miles from Menwith Hill. Tony has had a number of UFO experiences and maintains that he has been persecuted by the staff of Menwith Hill.

A strange story – perhaps but before passing judgment why not take the time to read “MK Ultra” on this site. Then, perhaps, Tony’s story will become increasingly credible.

Tony submitted the following article which has been published in Selby local newspapers.

High Drama Behind The Scenes In A Small Town.

Menwith Hill in the rolling hills of North Yorkshire, a facility housing some of the most sophisticated electronic listening devices in our world, proud to be a defender of national security, however as a resident of Selby Tony Topping discovered if you put up a web site about UFO’s on the internet, you will get what is commonly known as a visit from “The Police of The Silence”.

Selby resident Tony Topping has had a long history of paranormal experiences from childhood, for him it really kicked off in 1996 where having moved back to Selby from London he began to have strange lights and objects flying over his home. Commonly known as UFO’s. It has taken him on a journey and engaged him in a one man war against a highly classified intelligence unit that is based at Menwith Hill Harrogate. Tony comments:

“Having placed my site on the internet, some very strange going’s on began, it has been a journey to see my web site transform from what it was to what it is, and it is a stand against the unelected powers at work in my nation who seek to harm the population. In order for such crime’s to succeed one needs a compartmentalized security structure many levels deep, a structure of complete denial it is going on, and of course for the victim to be labelled as someone who has lost his mind. Plus a base to operate from. In the UK the suppression of silence regarding the existence of life in other worlds upon the population comes under the heading of the shadow government, and Menwith Hill has the ideal cover to execute such operations. Of course for such corruption to succeed this has to be formally denied by the facility while all the time knowing such operations are going on, this her Majesty the Queen may have seen in operation in her remarks to the butler of the Princess of Wales. Despite numerous complaints to the base commander Colonel Randy Roberts no letters have been answered, that is quite intentional and comes as no surprise, a lot of organisations know this going on but are looking the other way, this has consequences for my nation.”

In fact Tony spent a few years maturing like a good wine watching very carefully the going’s on of his harrassers. He comments again.

“I was being awoken night and day by strange noises, and banging sounds coupled with threats, it was scary in fact very scary, they; it appeared, did not want me to talk about my experiences and so a deployment was made upon me using a technology known as Remote Mind Control Technology also known as Voice To Skull Technology, they became very nasty, and it was common to be awoken at 0300 suddenly by them using this equipment, I traced it to Menwith Hill, via a process of gradual elimination and observation, I believe a campaign was instigated by them to send me insane, as they are nasty pieces of work and it is possible that others may have been victims of them with the technology I speak of. A report was made to the local police who of course have never come across anything like this before, for the harassed the system works well in covering all tracks.

I was at one point subjected to a serious assault by them in January 2001 using this equipment and you can read all about it and my stand at “www.etlife.co.uk/”

“Having walked back from the gym I walked onto Ouse bank at Selby on the Holmes estate and felt the silence before the comings of a UFO. From nowhere two jets appeared one of which made a beeline for me and intentionally flashed it’s lights above me. The Tornado handles like a small propeller driven craft at low speed, and so it trundled over to the farmers field where another jet was circling, there was a huge white flash, all of us must have wondered what was happening, and sure enough the aircraft that was circling chased a ball of light upwards towards Osgodby, at one point they were level and at the same speed. Enquiries to RAF Leeming have been met with denial, as have enquiries to AS2 and the Air Chief Marshall, but the pilots knew what they had seen. Very dramatic going’s on over the skies of Selby”.The dramatic flash (artist’s impression) in a farmers field Holmes bank Selby in front of Tony and two RAF jets. Feb 2001

But what does Tony know about the UFO question?

He has some fascinating observations

“The silence upon the population and the subsequent offer to join the people responsible for it stains my nation like a cancer, and yes for ulterior motives I was asked to join them, having found out the truth a bit like Neo in the Matrix they now know I will never bow to them. The conduct of Menwith Hill and what they have done to me in pursuit of covering up the activities of what is going on remain. The biggest single draw to this subject area is because of technology procurement, anything at all gleaned from UFO’s is deemed as essential to the security and business of a nation. Indeed the story of the technology gleaned from Roswell and back engineered into large companies

like Bell Labs and AT & T, as an example are common, the fascinating story of the head of American Computer Company and the Roswell background to ACC’s transistor development in conjunction with Bell is incredible, and it is a fact that life in other worlds exist. The UK and the US have had contact for a very long time with ET’s, considered highly classified, but it is the oppressors of this knowledge that I have crashed head on into. The ET contact in dimensional area’s of existence remain denied but are a fact. The on going battle behind the scenes against the silent unelected junta rages on in this small market town, where I as member of this community continue a campaign of open defiance against them.

My web site is quite shocking and of great interest I knew a stand needed to be made. For in the rolling hills of Harrogate there is more going on than simply the tapping of a phone in the interest of national security. I believe it is in the interest of national security to speak out against the men and women at Menwith Hill who continue these shameful acts. I was a closely guarded secret for a very long time”.

A strange story – perhaps but before passing judgment why not take the time to read “MK Ultra” on this site. Then, perhaps, Tony’s story will become increasingly credible.

Tony submitted the following article which has been published in Selby local newspapers.

High Drama Behind The Scenes In A Small Town.

In fact Tony spent a few years maturing like a good wine watching very carefully the going’s on of his harrassers. He comments again.

I was at one point subjected to a serious assault by them in January 2001 using this equipment and you can read all about it and my stand at “www.etlife.co.uk/”

To date the culture of denial and silent conspiracy over what has been going on continues. As an example such was the interest that his web site provoked upon this hidden machinery within our security services, that Tony in the early days was filmed by a military helicopter over Selby and he was later to have an incident over the river Ouse with two RAF jets and a UFO. Tony will never forget this.More drama as a helicopter having just come over the former Yorkshire Chemicals Factory at roof top height has just circled over Bawtry Road and is making a turn to film Tony. In turn, Tony is filming them. This was during the early years.”Having walked back from the gym I walked onto Ouse bank at Selby on the Holmes estate and felt the silence before the comings of a UFO. From nowhere two jets appeared one of which made a beeline for me and intentionally flashed it’s lights above me. The Tornado handles like a small propeller driven craft at low speed, and so it trundled over to the farmers field where another jet was circling, there was a huge white flash, all of us must have wondered what was happening, and sure enough the aircraft that was circling chased a ball of light upwards towards Osgodby, at one point they were level and at the same speed. Enquiries to RAF Leeming have been met with denial, as have enquiries to AS2 and the Air Chief Marshall, but the pilots knew what they had seen. Very dramatic going’s on over the skies of Selby”.The dramatic flash (artist’s impression) in a farmers field Holmes bank Selby in front of Tony and two RAF jets. Feb 2001

But what does Tony know about the UFO question?

He has some fascinating observations

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

The following article was published in The New York Times, December 25th, 2005.

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

By James Bamford

Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country’s largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a “radio quiet” zone, the station’s large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima, Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people,” he said in 1975, “and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. “could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person’s mind.
The N.S.A.’s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala – and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents’, former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.’s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, “The match begins tomorrow,” and the second said, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not “targeted” but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands,” General Hayden said.
Still, the N.S.A. doesn’t have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the
administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.

In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. “FISA is for long-term monitoring,” he said. “There’s a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring.”
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration’s only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to “increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude.” According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program “would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists.” After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. “Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining,” the report said, “shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational.” Of these uses, the report continued, “the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts.”
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush’s secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
“As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face,” he wrote, “John Poindexter’s T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.”
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,”
Senator Church said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

UFO News

Menwith Hill – near Harrogate North Yorkshire (UK).

The following article was published in “The Independent (UK)” 27th February, 2004

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

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