 This is the second of my Keep Space for Peace week journeys. This is the local journey, starting at the bus station on the 499 bus service to Brackley. Taken this bus many times before and I've been involved with this site for over 30 years. And over that time it has changed as my own work has changed and because they're both based on computers in many ways they're similar. Men with Hill is secret and we know nothing, whereas this place much of the information is in the public domain. And it's a strange sight in that Men with Hill gets all the publicity which I covered in the previous video and yet this place probably causes a lot more human suffering and that's because of what it is and what it does. As you walk out of Crownton Village you see some strange domes on the tree line. This is USAF Crownton. It's called REF Crownton but in fact the Americans pretty much run the whole show here and do what they want with very little accountability from the UK government. This is an old REF site and in the 1950s the Americans took it over. When they developed the nearby USAF at the Hayford bomber base they needed a communication link to the White House to be told when to drop the nuclear bombs and so Crownton was set up. What Crownton is today there is a very different animal. It's becoming the hub of a huge global web of communications at the heart of what is now called network-centric warfare. Citrated in the middle of England it relays messages to the American government for the military, for intelligence, for covert operations and it's the heart of a global communication system that is intrinsically involved with the projection of American power. Crownton is actually two sites as the main Crownton site and then there's a second transmitter annex at Bathston John. If you have a very powerful transmitter you can't put it next to the receiver and so one site transmits the other receives. But this is also related to the change in technology and if you want to understand what this site does you have to look at the technology involved and how the change in technology has changed its mission. There are a lot of people who live near this site and so you would think there will naturally be an interest but there isn't and that's a great pity because this site is directly involved in a number of humanitarian abuses around North Africa and the Middle East. How Crownton works is about to change. It's about to undergo a huge step change and to understand that change you need to look about how it worked in the past. In an ideal world, America could communicate directly with their forces in the Middle East. You could just send a message and a message would come back. That's not in reality how it works. This is Flat Earth. In reality the Earth is round and because the Earth is round you can't send a message in a straight line. There's no line of sight. How they make that happen is using the atmosphere itself the ionosphere reflects lower frequency radio waves and so they bounce the signal from America to Britain and then from Britain to the Middle East and then back again. It's this technology from the 1950s to 1970s that allowed the military, the American military, to project its power around the world. This is a picture of Barthas and John in the 1980s and you can see these extensive nests of antennas. They've all gone now because that technology has gone. So now let's come forward to the 70s, early 80s and now we have satellites. Satellites use higher frequencies and so the radio waves go straight through the ionosphere. So they bounce a signal from a satellite to Krautman and then it will be relayed to the Middle East. This was the standard way of communicating from the 1980s through the 1990s to about 2000. Here's Krautman at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s and again you can see the nests of transmitters alongside the rados. How this mission is going to change is intrinsically related to how technology is changing and the more invasive nature of that technology. And to really understand the military capability you have to understand the technological capability. We saw that first with the increase in number of satellites. The more satellites, the more radios you need. That's also made the radio communication systems obsolete although they do retain them for a few uses. What really changed global communications was fiber optic cables. There are a million miles of fiber optic cables laid across the planet. They connect countries and in Britain we have all these various bases that are involved in drone warfare, in military intelligence. And they're all linked by cables and many of those cables converge on Krautman to enable the relay of messages from Krautman to go not just around Britain but around Europe. Krautman is at the heart of a cable network that spans the globe and that enables it to do its job. One third of global internet traffic flows through Britain. That makes it the ideal site not only for communication but for mass interception and data analysis. And that's what Krautman has been doing or facilitating with America's partners such as GCHQ. And if you go to Beaud where most of these cables come ashore, GCHQ Beaud is there to intercept all the data from those international data cables. Krautman also gives access to the European telecommunications networks enabling Krautman and the American military to monitor European communications. A big part of present and future communication is mobile phones and not only tracking the mobile phone but intercepting signals. Krautman's great claim to fame here is intercepting Chancellor Merkel's phone calls on behalf of the American government. Krautman is also intrinsically involved in tactical drones, armed drones in the Middle East and North Africa. This was uncovered by Computer Weekly a few years ago and in particular the involvement of BT in providing the cables that enable these American operations to take place. These offensive military operations in many cases breed international law and if you look generally at how the Americans conduct their military operations by and large these operations are ignored and again that's bad because what network-centric warfare enables is a whole new way of dominating the world using very few people and lots of technology. So these radomes in Northamptonshire allow a drone strike somewhere in the world. This computer center allows targeted assassination in Yemen. This relay station allows Americans to send the Saudis intelligence to bomb Yemen. This whole mission is going to get much bigger and more intense with the creation of the new Joint Intelligence Analysis Center. Krautman will no longer just relay communications you'll actively process data sharing it with sites around Europe and then directing operations in the Middle East and North Africa. There are a number of high security areas on the Krautman site. The main one is in the north end of the site where you have the Intelligence Center and the Communication Center which houses the computers. This is a view of the Intelligence Center from the hill over the upside of the valley. The computer center is currently at the bottom of the radio mast and it's a very old outdated system with not a lot of processing power. That's going to be demolished under the new plans and they're going to build a far more powerful computer center. The SATCOM sites, SATCOM satellite communication, they're the big visual intrusion this site creates but although they're important for satellite communications it's crowned at the heart of a web of fiber optics which is what gives it its power. We know from the plan application the local council, South North Hampshire permitted what they're going to build and roughly what it is there for. The new Intelligence Center will massively increase its capacity and then there's going to be a whole load of other buildings which will support those operations to house the extra 1200 people who will be working here. This is a view, an artist impression of what the new site will look like. Again, the radomes look spectacular but most of the new effort will be into fiber optic cables and connecting Crownton to all these different services around the world. Although we can look at new staff and buildings what the GAAC essentially is, is a large computer. It's a big block of computer processing power which will knit together many intelligence and military sites allowing them to direct operations. One of the most significant of those right now is Global Hawk. This is a new facility based at Signale in Italy which has a network of drones which will continually watch around the Mediterranean into North Africa and the Middle East everything that happens on the ground and then relay that data back to NATO but essentially to the Americans. And that will enable them not only to direct military operations but increasingly cyber operations and cyber is where America sees its future military space happening. This was outlined in the Air Force Cyber Command strategic vision document a few years ago. It's a pretty weird document anyway but there's a lovely quote in there which sets out what their objective is. Therefore, we are establishing a new cyberspace command to stand alongside Air Force Space Command and Air of Combat Command. A newly designated Air Force Cyberspace Command will provide combat ready forces trained in equipped conduct sustained combat operations through the electromagnetic spectrum and fully integrate these with air and space operations. That is essentially what Crownton will do. It will nip together all these different systems to make a global projection of American military and political power. Every year in October there's a Keep Space for Peace Week demonstration at Crownton. There's a march around the edge of the site which leads to a rally where we have speakers and cake and music and it's a celebration of peace around a base which is there solely to serve the purposes of war. I'll give you a flavour of the day and just a little snapshot of the speech as we had and the events that took place. Oh, that's as well reminded. This is a major US communication and intelligence base. It supports many United States military sites in Europe and is involved in worldwide war operations. The United States is starting to spend 200 million pounds now to turn this place into one of the world's largest intelligence international intelligence hubs. They will build a new Joint Intelligence Analysis Centre, J-I-A-C and increase the personnel here by over a thousand. Our speakers today will tell us more about these developments and perhaps there's more ideas on campaigning against them. All over the world there are people at their own bases like here protesting about the role that those bases have in this kind of organic stranglehold that the American military and NATO would like to have on the Earth. And we are the ones that have to stop it because our governments are entwined in all of this. They're up to their neck in it, as Paul has already explained. They either don't want to see what's going on or they're part of it. So it's up to us really basically to save the world, if you like. We've got to save it from nuclear weapons. We've got to save it from this stranglehold of the military. So in 1996 the Commander-in-Chief of the US Space Command said, we're going to fight a war in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight interspace. In February 1997 the US Space Command produced its vision for 2020 laying out an expansive plan to achieve full spectrum dominance of the battle space, dominating Earth with the control of space. Space superiority is emerging as an essential element of battlefield success and future warfare. The US Space Command's vision of 2020 argued that the protection of space required the United States to have superior space capability and the US proclaimed itself as stewards for military space. When you talk about war crimes or crimes against humanity, there's another class which is crimes against peace. And after Nuremberg, crimes against peace came to have a very specific definition and this place falls foul of that. It's enabling them to plan air strikes in not so much friendly countries but countries which they haven't bothered to declare war on. And all this came to a head last year at a meeting of the Joint Human Rights Committee in the House of Parliament and their report was basically saying our government can't even get its story straight on whether or not we meet international law on drones and targeted killing. But what they kept saying was that's okay because we know what the Americans are doing as illegal and we're not doing that. So if they know the Americans are doing what the Americans are doing as illegal why are they letting it happen on British soil? This isn't American territory, this is British territory.