Inside Echelon

Duncan Campbell has written an overview of the secret surveillance system Echelon. He writes how the system was created for the interception of international communications and what are the technical capabilities of the system in modern times and how it is used today.

The first reports about Echelon in Europe reported that it can intercept in Europe all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications. The system is not that capable yet though. Also - Echelon is not capable to recognise the content of every speech message and telephone call. But the American and British-run network can access and process most of the worlds satellite communications.

The creation of Echelon also created some ethical issues related to the secrecy of th information and related to how much information should be collected about citizens after all. They collected information on over 40 countries, including the allies in the 1960-s. They also monitored the American celebrities who wer against the Vietnam war.

In 1991 one employee who worked for the system went public and told off the record that the British partner of the Echelon collects basically everything they are capable to intercept - every single telex ( actually illegally). Also they intercepted the embassies, all business deals and even birthday greetings.

"Commercial and economic intelligence is now a major part of the international sigint activity. Under a 1993 policy colloquially known as "levelling the playing field", the United States government under President Clinton established new trade and economic committees and told the NSA and CIA to act in support of US businesses in seeking contracts abroad. In the UK, GCHQ's enabling legislation from 1994 openly identifies one of its purposes as to promote "the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands".

This means that they can intercept the business communication all over the world for the benefit of their local corporations. So much about the free market economy, fair trade and information stealing...

Recently there have been reports that CIA has invested in a software company that is monitoring the social networks. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA , invested in the fall of 2009 in Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement on using ”open source intelligence” — information that is publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of all the other media - blogs, radio, tv. The software program provides real-time feeds of what’s being said on social networks, based on a series of keywords. Then Visible “scores” each post as positive or nagative, mixed or neutral. It also finds out how influential a conversation or a portal user is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

If one could understand why it was necessary to start a project like Echelon in the cold war era - for national secutiry issues then it is more difficult to understand why they need to be monitoring the social networks. The other reason could be that CIA thinks that we have entered the era of information warfare where social networks can be used to influence the public opinion and to organize mass demonstrations. CIA being on the social network sites is not a secret interception any more - this is more like standing next to you all the time.