Wondering what Echelon is? It´s a system which intercepts and process international communications passing via communications satellites, it extracts information and intelligence illicitly from millions of messages every day. It´s used by NSA. Echelon is a part of a global surveillance system which is quite old, over 50 years. Still, it is seen useful and some countries have recently built Echelon-like stations.
The UKUSA Agreement is about breaking codes of signals, it was established in 1947 and it brought together the British and American systems, and later on Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Also Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey joined the UKUSA network. This network is engineered under the same principles as Internet and it can be accessed from NSA´s system, Platform. The funny names continue, as some parts of the system are called Embroidery, Tideway, Oceanfront, Newsdealer, Gigster and Preppy and Droopy. You can draw your own conclusions from those.
What is interesting is that the first global WAN (wide area network) wasn´t the Internet, it was the international network connecting sigint (signals intelligence system) stations and processing centers. Funnily, it looks and feels like using Internet, standard browsers can be used to look at the output of NSA´s Operations Department, of course only with appropriate permissions. This so called Interlink connects 13 US intelligence agencies and some allied agencies and it is run from Fort Meade HQ. The aim is to provide instant access to all types of intelligence information.
The information Echelon and other parts of the global surveillance system provides is used by the US and its allies. Commonly the information is used for diplomatic, military and commercial purposes. Even it is denied, commercial and economic intelligence is a major target. The goal is to recognize topics of phone calls, since word spotting is not so effective. This feature is about to come. Also ever more extensive use of encryption by direct interference is hoped to overcome.
It is important to realize that your emails really are open to the eyes of intruders. Systems like Echelon are needed until encryption and secret codes become much more effective and ubiquitous - and most likely also after that..
Influence to global community? Well, at least it is a surveillance system, so beware of what you write ;)
Duncan Campbell: Inside Echelon
The UKUSA Agreement is about breaking codes of signals, it was established in 1947 and it brought together the British and American systems, and later on Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Also Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey joined the UKUSA network. This network is engineered under the same principles as Internet and it can be accessed from NSA´s system, Platform. The funny names continue, as some parts of the system are called Embroidery, Tideway, Oceanfront, Newsdealer, Gigster and Preppy and Droopy. You can draw your own conclusions from those.
What is interesting is that the first global WAN (wide area network) wasn´t the Internet, it was the international network connecting sigint (signals intelligence system) stations and processing centers. Funnily, it looks and feels like using Internet, standard browsers can be used to look at the output of NSA´s Operations Department, of course only with appropriate permissions. This so called Interlink connects 13 US intelligence agencies and some allied agencies and it is run from Fort Meade HQ. The aim is to provide instant access to all types of intelligence information.
The information Echelon and other parts of the global surveillance system provides is used by the US and its allies. Commonly the information is used for diplomatic, military and commercial purposes. Even it is denied, commercial and economic intelligence is a major target. The goal is to recognize topics of phone calls, since word spotting is not so effective. This feature is about to come. Also ever more extensive use of encryption by direct interference is hoped to overcome.
It is important to realize that your emails really are open to the eyes of intruders. Systems like Echelon are needed until encryption and secret codes become much more effective and ubiquitous - and most likely also after that..
Influence to global community? Well, at least it is a surveillance system, so beware of what you write ;)
Duncan Campbell: Inside Echelon
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