This week, the European Parliament published a report that finally offered official confirmation of the existence of Echelon: a shadowy worldwide electronic spying network set up by secret treaty in 1947. Echelon is a global spying network established by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and run by the US that uses supercomputers to intercept messages and store them according to key words. Originally, eavesdropping, or signals intelligence (Signit as it is known in the trade) was targeted at military and diplomatic communications, but it has now switched to industrial and commercial targets, to campaigning organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, and to private individuals.

The MEP's report was prompted by claims that Echelon has been used for industrial espionage, although it has failed to find conclusive proof for such allegations. But of equal concern is the threat Echelon poses to organisations and to individual privacy. There is clear evidence for the surveillance of individual communications for key words that are then analysed sometimes out of context and stored in the US National Security Agency(NSA) computer system. While the report concludes that Echelon's surveillance system is limited because it is based on monitoring satellite communications that account for a small proportion of global communications, states involved in Echelon and others also have access to radio and cable communications and are developing eavesdropping systems to cover email and the internet. In the UK, for example, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) allows authorities to monitor traffic through black boxes placed with ISPs, and gives the police authority to seize encryption keys. Last week, the London based group Statewatch published leaked documents saying the 15 EU member states are lobbying the European Commission to require service providers to keep all phone, fax, email and internet data in case they are needed for criminal investigations. Echelon is not only the tip of the iceberg, it seems, but its outing by MEPs may be little more than sour grapes: in the dirty game of global espionage, everyone is at it.

The power of states to intercept the communications of organisations and individuals has serious implications. Privacy, as the MEP's report makes clear, is a fundamental human right. Yet, although this is a right that we expect governments to respect and protect, they in fact continually breach it. Moreover, surveillance is an activity for which states remain fundamentally unaccountable, since the nature of their activities are clandestine, leaving citizens powerless to monitor and limit those very activities that represent a breach of their privacy. Individuals and groups thus effectively have no redress if that information is inaccurate, or being used for distorted ends. There is also a worrying disparity between the rights of citizens within a territorial or state jurisdiction, and their vulnerability to the power of global surveillance. NSA, for example, is limited to holding information on US citizens for one year, but can hold information on foreigners forever. This disparity is highly convenient when such surveillance systems are avowedly international in nature.

In Africa, many states are western clients, and will have access to the information Echelon can provide on opposition parties, civil liberty groups and NGOs, while their citizens do not even have the privilege of the protection of adequate domestic privacy law. With perhaps up to 40% of Echelons activities devoted to economic& espionage, the system also provides participating countries with an enormous, unfair advantage, since most developing states cannot afford the expertise and equipment to protect the privacy and security of their own networks against such intrusions.

Above all, surveillance by the state and its partners highlights the hypocrisy of governments of those in power. Elected by, and accountable to citizens, states owe us an obligation to be transparent. In reality, citizens are routinely denied freedom of information, while putting up with large scale, arbitrary and unaccountable intrusions into their own private and collective - lives. The EU report recommends we routinely encrypt all our online communications. Perhaps. But if Duncan Campbell, the investigative journalist, is correct in arguing that the Anglo-Americans secretly plan a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time, it may take far more than encrypting our emails to protect ourselves from such hypocrisy, let alone to root it out.

Further information:
The European Parliament Commission on Echelon:
EchelonWatch: http://www.echelonwatch.org/
Statewatch: http://www.statewatch.org/
Body of Secrets by James Bamford on NSA: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/25/nsa/
Duncan Campbell: http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/
Campaign to close Menwith Hill, Yorkshire CND: http://www.gn.apc.org/cndyorks/mhs/

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Amnesty International. The following text is extracted from the Foreword to AI’s Annual Report 2001 and written by Pierre Sane, former Secretary General.

The end of the Cold War was hailed by many as the start of a new world order that would bring freedom and prosperity for all. But for millions the reality has proved very different.

Globalization - the spread of the free market economy, multi-party political systems and technological change - has been accompanied by growing wealth for some, but destitution and despair for many.

Globalization did not start in the 1990s but its effects have intensified and become clearer over the past 10 years. Capital has always been mobile; what has changed is that the reliance of corporations on national states has become less and less important. Parallel with the concentration of wealth in the hands of multinational corporations has been the growing power of global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO).

Globalization has been accompanied by debt and poverty. More than 80 countries had a lower per capita income in 2000 than they had in 1990. At least 1.3 billion people struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. Deregulation, privatization and the dismantling of social welfare provision have led to widening inequalities in many countries. In large parts of the world, corruption has increased, and personal, social and political insecurity has spread. The predictable and almost inevitable consequence of this growth in poverty has been a parallel escalation in violations of all human rights. The Berlin Wall may have crumbled, but the walls of poverty, intolerance and hypocrisy still stand.

However, it would be naive not to recognize the potential conflict between the pursuit of profit and the protection of human rights. For example, the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) would have restricted states' ability to regulate the conduct of multinational corporations. It would have limited the capacity of states to enforce certain human rights, while not imposing any binding obligations on multinational corporations to protect such rights. A broad coalition of non-governmental organizations, trade unions and political parties lobbied against the MAI, which in the event was shelved, temporarily at least.

Similarly, the World Bank, ostensibly working to alleviate poverty but heavily engaged in promoting deregulation and globalization, is in a position to exert great influence over national economic and political agendas. The World Bank disburses more funds than all the UN agencies put together.

In a world where globalization is undermining many nation states and bringing poverty to the forefront of the human rights agenda, the challenge for AI is to remain relevant. In my opinion, this means broadening our aim from the protection of civil and political rights to embrace all human rights. The indivisibility of human rights is not an abstraction: the context which gives rise to human rights violations is invariably complex and cannot be divorced from issues of wealth and status, injustice and impunity. We have to maintain our focus on the individual victim to articulate what indivisibility means in real life. And in real life, accountability extends beyond the police officer wielding a baton, not only to his or her political masters but also to those who profit from inequality. In the minds of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, freedom from fear and freedom from want have always been inseparable.

And the indivisible links between socio-economic and political rights have been mirrored in the emergence of a new network of protest movements. Globalization has brought together activists on issues such as child labour, the environment, anti-capitalism, Third World debt and human rights, creating an international, grassroots movement. Many of the groups that have come together to halt the proceedings of international financial institutions overcame long-standing divisions and diverging agendas using one of the much-vaunted advances of globalization - the Internet. A global solidarity movement to address the negative consequences of globalization is in the making. AI will bring its unique contribution to this endeavour.

Divisions within many societies have deepened in recent years, and in some have degenerated into open conflict. Far from the fall of the Berlin Wall marking "the end of history", we have witnessed a resurgence of bitter wars in which countless lives have been ruined and lost. In the past decade there have been tragic conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other parts of former Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, East Timor, Algeria, Somalia, Central Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Faced with the mass violations of human rights committed during such conflicts, and especially the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, AI was forced to re-evaluate some of its working methods and its policies. Many of AI's campaigning and research techniques were developed in the Cold War era of individual prisoners of conscience faced with a monolithic state apparatus. But the scale, the ferocity and the speed of these disasters demanded new approaches. AI developed new internal mechanisms to respond to human rights crises more rapidly and forcefully, and grappled with difficult issues such as "humanitarian" military intervention and sanctions. Our members expanded AI's mandate in the light of the increasing number of conflicts with complex internal and international dimensions. Central to our approach has been the belief, borne out in each succeeding crisis, that impunity is the poison that allows human rights violations to spread, to recur or to re-emerge.

I am confident that new audiences will find a home in a multifaceted mass human rights movement, and that together we will rise to these challenges. The forces ranged against us may be formidable. However, the outrage at injustice that led to the founding of AI 40 years ago continues to inspire and motivate millions of people determined to build a better world.