Echelon - Technological Cold Warfare in the Third Millennium

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Echelon - Welcome to Technology’s Cold War

Eavesdropping on phone calls, checking your e-mail and controlling your faxmachine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Echelon.

In 1999, Echelon was still officially completely renounced by the US and Great Britain. Today, the debate is altered into inexistence, though Echelon is very much a reality. UK and the US still knows nothing of it.
British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, denies the allegations.

30 radomes, more likely to be enormous golf balls, are to be found above the US military base at Menwith Hill. That is, of course, apart from the 120 American satellites in geostationary orbit around the world.

“[Echelon] is capable of hovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and e-mails a minute” // BBC July 2000

All collected information is transmitted to the US headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA). From here, signals and reports are handed out to stations all over the world. This is not just spying – it’s sophisticated spying.

Telephoning privately? Voice recognition knows who you are. Utilising the wrong words, sentences or pattern of messages suddenly gets a whole new meaning. result in a very unpleasant surprise. The goal is to search for international crime-related material.

Only after Australia’s involvement and official statement that their Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is a part of the spying network did the US and Britain admit to Echelon’s existence. On the direct question if information is shared with overseas countries like the US, the Inspector of Intelligence and Security, Bill Blick said: “They might be in certain circumstances”.

The sensitivity and specialization of Echelon is not to be underestimated.
Duncan Cambell, a Scottish investigate journalist who has consecrated the bigger part of his life to examine the development and spread of Echelon, exposed market fraud as he found evidence that the NSA had listened to French firm Thomson-CSF, bidding for a contract in Brazil on a radar system. The contract was worth $1.4bn and was easily won by the US. The second instance was brought up when European consortium Airbus lost a $6bn deal to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia had by then bought information from Echelon. When asked, none of the profited companies had no comment whatsoever.

The sensitivity of the data provided by one of Echelons 120 American satellites is extreme and tremendously detailed. All you need is a credit card and an idea of what you want the satellite to look for.

“There´s no safeguards, no remedies, " Cambell
said, "There´s nowhere you can go to say that they
haven’t been snooping on your international
communications.
Its a totally lawless world."

He names Microsoft, IBM and a certain “large American microchip maker” as providers of Echelon.

This is industrial espionage. Apart from an intrusion on the UN Charter on Human Rights on integrity and privacy, that is.

In February, the European Parliament declared that Echelon had twice helped the competitors over European firms. But there’s a problem when one of the parts still denies the existence of Echelon. The Americans do.

Pity the former CIA director James Woolsey acknowledged US economic espionage against European companies in Wall Street Journal one year ago. To quote him literally; “We have spied on you because you bride”, as Woolsey wrote himself.

It has been a decade since the Cold War ended. Back then, Echelon was originally set up for surveillance of the communist states of Eastern Europe. As the war came to an end, one thought it to be a waste of great technology if not used. Instead, Echelon was improved into perfection. What we see today (or rather what we can’t see..) is the result of this.

The former US army intelligence officer Colonel Dan Smith broke the code of silence; “Technically they can scoop all this information up, sort through it, and find what it is that might be asked for”.

Suddenly, hundreds of US Department of Commerce “success stories” seem somehow vague. Nobody has ever before questioned the innumerable gains of US companies over European and Japanese ones.

So when a European delegation was sent to Washington for diplomatic reasons concerning Echelon, CIA, the State and Commerce department and the NSA all refused to settle for a meeting. The delegation met a few people from the Congress and the Justice Department, an...