Scattered across 560 acres of England’s brooding North Yorkshire moors is an incongruous assembly of mammoth white domes. From a distance, these radomes, as they are called, resemble nothing more diabolic than a colony of puffball mushrooms. But more is there than meets the eye. The casual observer will not see the clusters of squat, fortified buildings that dot the grounds, nor the portions of the complex that are subterranean and radiation-hardened. Invisible, too, are the 40,000 telephone lines that serve as an umbilical cord, linking the compound to vast parts of the globe. The facility is fenced and aggressively patrolled, with razor wire, watchtowers, and guard dogs on prominent display to deter the curious.

Menwith Hill is the largest listening post in the world and one of the most sophisticated. It is part of a system called “Echelon,” a global network of electronic eavesdropping stations operated by the National Security Agency (NSA), the mother of all cyberwarriors. It was built during the Cold War, ostensibly to monitor the Soviet Union, but critics are suspicious that its mission has greatly expanded along with its capabilities. Many in Europe now believe that its ancillary objective is economic and industrial espionage. A report to the European parliament bluntly stated: “Within Europe, all email, telephone, and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the NSA.”

There’s no direct proof, of course, because eavesdropping leaves no trace, but accusations are mounting. In the UK, The Sunday Times reported that “in a row between Volkswagen and General Motors over commercial espionage, it was suggested that conversations by Volkswagen executives had been intercepted by the Americans.” It is doubtful that GM has such capability in-house.

The French, too, have been stung, claiming that “Thomson-CSF, a French electronics company, lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with a radar system because the Americans intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them to Raytheon [which] subsequently won the contract.” Airbus also believes it lost a contract worth nearly $2 billion to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas “because information was intercepted by American spying.”

Certainly Menwith Hill has the capability. Among other assets, the facility controls 56 data collection satellites. We saw a glimpse of their efficacy when KAL flight 007 was shot down after having strayed over Soviet air space. With the world speculating on what had happened, U.S. authorities released audiotapes and transcripts of the conversation

between the Soviet pilot who shot the plane down and the ground control officer who ordered it. According to former NSA director William Studeman, the scale of the NSA’s information gathering back in 1992 topped 2 million messages per hour, over 17.5 billion per year. Locating the intelligence needles in the communications haystacks is a process of keyword searches conducted by computers whose numbers are measured in acres.

While the NSA, with incalculable snooping powers, is clearly the hacking Goliath on the virtual battlefields of cyberspace, it is by no means the only combatant. The Internet has become a convenient and anonymous means of incursion not only for economic competitors, but also for foreign adversaries, the socially disgruntled, and bright kids with an abundance of time and a scarcity of scruples. Interpol estimates that there are about 30,000 hacker-friendly sites on the Web and some 17 million people with the computer skills to cause mischief. Their misdeeds range from the silly to the very serious.

On the senseless side, there is now an entire Internet subculture that amuses itself by defacing Web sites. Typically, they replace a target home page with their personalized “message.” The missive is sometimes political, often irreverent, and usually credited to a particular hacker group. COMDEX, The New York Times, the State Department, and hundreds of businesses and government agencies have been hit. Although surely annoying, all of it amounts to little more than adolescent chest thumping.

A bit more bizarre were the actions of a consultant working for US West who siphoned off CPU cycles from 2,585 of the company’s networked UNIX systems to conduct a personal search for a new prime number.

Recently, however, hacking has taken a serious turn. Earlier this year, British military authorities were unnerved when they lost contact with one of their four military communications satellites. Hackers had managed to gain control of the orbiting sensor, vectored it into a nonstandard orbit, and were demanding ransom. Although the British were eventually able to regain control of their satellite, they were understandably not amused. Disabling of satellites is a logical precursor to a preemptive atomic missile attack. If the scuttlebutt in the hacker community is to be believed, the transgressors were tracked to Russia and are being dealt with in ways that governments prefer not to publicize.

The Chinese apparently have even less of a sense of humor than the British. Two men hacked into a bank in Eastern China and created a series of dummy accounts that they cleverly filled with dummy deposits. They then visited several authentic branches and drew out roughly $31,400 of real cash. They were caught, tried, and—perhaps as a warning to other Internet cowboys—sentenced to death.

Although the stakes are getting higher and the consequences lethal, “netwars” and “cyberwars,” as they are characterized, are shaping up to be the battlegrounds of the 21st century. The combination of anonymity, skill, and malevolence exhibited by both state- sanctioned and freelance hackers has exposed the vulnerable underbelly of a world increasingly dependent on networked communication. There are many, it seems, who would exploit it.

The Pentagon, according to an article in the July Popular Science, “experiences 60 to 80 cyberattacks per day.” Most are harmless, and, in all likelihood, military authorities have set up sacrificial systems with cosmetic data to trap, trace, and practice neutralizing incoming cyberattacks. Nonetheless, by 1996, according to Chairman Jon Kyl of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information, “between 250 and 600 Department of Defense (DoD) systems were broken into by savvy hackers.” During a particularly volatile period, a single DoD system detected 4,300 unauthorized hits in only three months. In 1997, an attack actually succeeded in crippling the email system at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The servers of the Air Combat Command were being used by enterprising hackers to distribute pornography.

In response to the growing hacker threat, the NSA launched a no-notice exercise designed to test the security of federal systems. Fifty NSA spooks conducted cyberattacks against the government’s computer networks. The operation was dubbed “Eligible Receiver,” and its results were not encouraging. Although many of the details are

classified, Senator Kyl reported that over 60 percent of all federal systems have “known security holes which can be exploited.” Naturally, one would expect NSA specialists armed with the most sophisticated technology and software to be successful in crippling even highly protected military command and control systems. Except they didn’t use any of the NSA’s toys. They used downloadable software—available to anyone—found on the Internet at various hacker sites.

If the Internet has become a weapon for the clever, it is also an effective weapon for the weak. The General Accounting Office estimates that 120 countries or foreign organizations “have or are developing formal programs that can be used to attack and disrupt critical Information Systems technology used by the U.S.” Nations unable to compete militarily now have an opportunity to inflict wide-scale damage from a distance. The head of the CIA was particularly concerned—without elaboration—about potential cyberattacks from Iran, Iraq, and Libya.

Here the lines blur between military and civilian systems. Vulnerable to attack and impacting millions of citizens are systems controlling communications, the power grid, emergency services, air traffic control, and banking. This places the military in a conundrum: It has no authority over civilian systems, nor can it protect them against cyberattack as it would against a conventional incursion. The president has called for an interconnected computer security system to protect the nation against such attacks, but Congress has been slow to fund it. Regardless, such a project will take years to develop and decades to implement.

Meanwhile, the first wartime cyberattack has taken place. Three days after NATO began bombing the Serbs into compassion, hackers launched an attack against NATO’s email communications systems. Popular Science describes it as consisting of both a “ping” attack, in which “one computer automatically and repeatedly calls another,” and “email bombs” designed to overload servers. It worked, but only for a few hours.

Off the battlefield, President Clinton recently gave government cyberspooks permission to go after Saddam Hussein’s bank accounts and other electronic assets: the first known instance of one government leader hacking another.

In this orgy of intrusion, it is clear that if government agencies can pluck military communications from the sky above the Siberian peninsula, capturing private telephone conversations in Iowa must be child’s play. One must assume that all communications—cable, microwave, satellite, certainly anything transmitted over the Internet—have been compromised. At best, the mobility and anonymity of the Internet offers an uncertain kernel of protection that our own constitution, sadly, no longer can.

If there’s an upside to all this spying and hacking and cracking, it is that the much- maligned, low-tech Postal Service is again the safest means of private communication.

Nor is the situation without irony and humor. While President Clinton (who should know better) was indulging in phone sex with Monica Lewinsky over an unsecured line, the Israeli Mossad—whose eavesdropping technology was no doubt developed and/or financed by the United States—was getting the whole breathy exchange on tape.

And finally, having lost any pretense at privacy, we may take comfort in the triumph of British ingenuity. Knowing that people are highly curious about the goings-on at Menwith Hill, an industrious Brit is offering hot-air balloon rides over the compound. All quite legal and quite annoying to the NSA. Menwith Hill Tours offers the “day-tripping family, dissident, or amateur espionage enthusiast” an unparalleled view of what they describe as “one of the seven wonders of the intelligence world.” They even pass out parabolic microphones and binoculars, saying: “You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn about how much they know about how much you know.”

Quite so.