BRUSSELS Euro-MPs spent 12 months looking for it and now they claim to have found it, a global eavesdropping network called Echelon which could be reading your e-mails.

Deputies who formed a committee to find evidence of Echelon believe ordinary individuals and companies in the European Union are being regularly spied on and advise people to encode all messages in order to avoid prying eyes.

"We have proof beyond all reasonable doubt that this is happening," said committee member Gerhard Schmid presenting a report to the European Parliament this week in Brussels.

Hard and fast evidence of how echelon goes about its work is difficult to secure but when they got started Euro-MPs never expected to get official confirmation of a system whose existence has not been acknowledged by the governments involved.

The EU Committee was set up around a year ago following reports that echelon, originally a system designed to combat organized crime and counter espionage attacks, was being used by U.S. companies as well to monitor everyday private and business phone calls and e- mails.

The system dates back to just after World War II and was considered vital to Western military intelligence during the Cold War years.

According to the parliamentary report, which is based on circumstantial evidence only, intelligence organizations in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand agreed with each other to set up the global eavesdropping network on a grand scale.

Washington has, however, already denied that it used installations on the territory of EU member Britain to carry out illegal espionage activity.

Not that the Americans have been keen in the past to lay all their cards about echelon on the table. Only a few weeks ago a European Parliament delegation which went to the U.S. on a fact-finding mission to probe the background to the controversial eavesdropping system, was given a snub by government and intelligence officials although the visit had been agreed a long time in advance.

Schmid said the report did not go as far as to claim the U.S. is spying on people for the benefit of its domestic industry but he did advise all EU-based companies involved in international transactions to encode their e-mails, phone calls and facsimile messages. the report contains no further recommendations.

Amid the general silence in North America on accusations about echelon one voice was raised last year. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey confided to a newspaper that U.S. companies were being more or less forced to spy on their competitors abroad "since European firms are more corrupt that American ones and keep trying to gain lucrative contracts by offering bribes," according to DPA.