Echelon

[flo1989]

BBC news report (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stm)

Wikipedia result (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)


Important little not

Industrial spying

The ECHELON system has also allegedly been used to advance American commercial interests by gathering proprietary information. Examples include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[17] [18] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.

This could mean they can also spy on military technology of countries that are not aware of the threat of Echelon...it also means they can steal all our technology that we invented and claim it is theirs. :frown3:

[flo1989]

Organization

The UKUSA intelligence alliance has maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Each member of the UKUSA alliance is allegedly assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern mainland China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern mainland China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

As the EP report concludes, it seems likely that, rather than being an all-seeing surveillance system, ECHELON is simply a method of sorting captured signals, and is just one of the many arrows in the intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated bugging and communications interception techniques, satellite tracking, through-clothing scanning, automated biometric recognition systems that can recognize faces, fingerprints & retina patterns.

The U.S. communications-intelligence agency is the National Security Agency (NSA), which is headquartered at Fort Meade, just outside Washington, DC. Although the NSA budget is classified, as of 1996 the agency was estimated to have a global staff of roughly 38,000 and a budget of approximately US$3.6-billion. The UK equivalent organisation is the Government Communications Headquarters GCHQ based at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Further, smaller organisations exist to provide communications technology and expertise (e.g. Her Majesty's Government Communication Centre).

By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a branch of the Canadian Department of National Defence. It has a staff of over 1600 people and an annual budget of $225 million CAD. The CSE's headquarters is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in the nation's capital of Ottawa, Ontario, and its main communications intercept site is located on an armed-forces radio station in Leitrim, just south of Ottawa.

On July 6, 2000 the BBC published an article called Echelon: Big brother without a cause? that said:

The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute. Echelon evolved out of Cold War espionage arrangements set up by the US and UK in 1948, and later bringing in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, in their capacity as Britain's Commonwealth partners. The biggest of Echelon's global network of listening posts is at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, where about 30 "giant golf balls" called radomes litter the landscape. The system also boasts 120 American satellites in geostationary orbit. Bases in the five countries are linked directly to the headquarters of the secretive US National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The system's superpowerful speech recognition capability enables it to filter billions of international communications for whatever key words or word patterns are programmed in.

The claim that there are 120 American satellites involved in signals intelligence collection is a common error that apparently originated in a misreading of British researcher Duncan Campbell's report that, as of the year 2000, the UKUSA nations were "operating at least 120 satellite based collection systems", including 40 satellite dishes monitoring commercial communications satellites, 50 monitoring or formerly monitoring ex-Soviet communications satellites, and 30 operating signals intelligence satellites. The presence of errors of this nature casts some doubt on the reliability of this BBC article.

[flo1989]

Spymasters gather in New Zealand - news.monstersandcritics.com article ("http://news.monstersandcritics.com/intelandterror/article_1227878.php/Spymasters_gather_in_New_Zealand)

[Mohmar 'Deathstrike']

I knew about them stealing the wind turbine technology, not the speech recognition one. It's funny how the German media mentione Chinese industrial espionage in Germany but remain silent about the far worse American espionage.

[mustavaris]

It was many years ago when I heard about Echelon for the first time (I think it was 2000 due to article above). There is a three sat constellation which is visible during some nights when it goes over the sky, then they said that it is that which is one of the more essential parts of the system. Dunno about that but here in Finland the US espionage has been well known for decades (as we were between west and east during the cold war).

[flo1989]

I knew about them stealing the wind turbine technology, not the speech recognition one. It's funny how the German media mentione Chinese industrial espionage in Germany but remain silent about the far worse American espionage.

yeah, did u know the american CIA did illegal flights over Germany and when it was found out they weren't prosecuted for using false signals, etc.

i've got it in a newspaper somewhere .will dig it up (is in German though)

will give German version and personally translated version into English^^

[Mohmar 'Deathstrike']

yeah, did u know the american CIA did illegal flights over Germany and when it was found out they weren't prosecuted for using false signals, etc.

i've got it in a newspaper somewhere .will dig it up (is in German though)

will give German version and personally translated version into English^^Yes, German, and most other European politicians are pussies.