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There are rumors of a satellite network, known as Echelon, that was developed by the United States and Britain that can intercept international electronic communications including e-mail and the Internet.

Top French government officials are ignoring warnings to ditch their cherished BlackBerrys -- smartphones with e-mail capacity -- despite warnings their messages may be intercepted by US spy agencies, a report said Tuesday.

Source: Breitbart, June 18, 2007

Echelon excesses

If Regan's alleged activities were identified through Echelon – a very real possibility – it raises very grave legal and ethical questions. Did a foreign intelligence agency – or agencies – become de facto tools of American law enforcement, conducting surveillance on a U.S. citizen, beyond the purview of our courts and the Constitution? While U.S. intelligence agencies are barred from conducting domestic surveillance, Echelon could easily circumvent that prohibition, transforming allied intelligence organizations into surrogates for their American counterparts, gathering information on U.S. residents with virtually no oversight, and no regard for our basic civil liberties.

Source: WorldNetDaily, January 2, 2002

Feds May Be Reading Your Mail

Got an international e-mail pen pal or chat buddy? Belong to a mailing list that includes one person from outside the United States? Use a cell phone much? If you do, odds are good that Big Brother is watching you.

Source:  CNN, April 26, 2000

U.K. plan to open Internet spy center draws criticism

The United Kingdom Home Office is responding to the concerns of civil liberties groups over a government plan to open a facility designed to intercept and monitor Internet traffic, including e-mail and encrypted messages.

Source: CNN, May 1, 2000

Legal Authority of National Security Agency

The upshot of all this change is that we have an environment in which the ground rules are increasingly unclear.  On the one hand, the Intelligence Community is reevaluating interception techniques and revising legal standards to fit situations that were not even imagined at the time FISA was drafted.  On the other hand, American citizens are left with precious little understanding about how legal standards written in the 1970s are protecting their privacy today, three decades later.  Our citizens are left with a feeling of unease that is unhealthy both to our Intelligence Community as well as to citizens themselves.

Source: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Hearing on "The Legal Authorities of the National Security Agency" April 12, 2000

Britain warns EU to drop spying debate states over Echelon

Britain is trying to stifle a European Union debate about its involvement in a US-led economic espionage network by warning its partners that their own secrets could be exposed.

With Portugal planning to raise concerns about the controversial Echelon surveillance system - a network of satellites and listening posts - the government signalled yesterday that EU member states should think carefully before allowing any discussion.

Source: The Guardian April 8, 2000

The information vacuum cleaner

The NSA's Echelon system is the perfect example of a modern signals and communications intelligence system. The interception leg of Echelon is a massive, modern global monitoring system using satellites and secure communications. The analysis leg of Echelon resides at NSA headquarters and is performed by an enormous number of supercomputers. The final leg of Echelon is a reporting system to subscribers, based on needs and classified by categories.

Source: WorldNetDaily, April 9, 2000

ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network

The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON "Dictionary") that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective "listening stations" maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept.

Source: Free Congress Foundation, May 8, 1998, Volume 1, Number 12

Federation of American Scientists
Project on Government Secrecy

STOA Reports
The European Union and Data Protection

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