Until Edward Snowden revealed the extensive global surveillance carried out by the US security agency, the NSA (National Security Agency) and other government spying agencies, ECHELON was just a name or rather a codename whose meaning was unclear to the public.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, ECHELON is a system used to capture and virtually analyze every phone call, email, fax, internet downloads, and telex message sent anywhere in the world.
Monitored transmissions are said to include up to 3 billion communications on a daily basis. These are transmissions of both public and private organizations.
The system is operated by the NSA in conjunction with the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada. All these organizations are bound together under a secret agreement whose terms, conditions, and texts remain a closely hidden secret even today.
ECHELON Targets
ECHELON was primarily designed for non-military targets, unlike most electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War.These targets include organizations, governments, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country around the world. The surveillance basically affects anyone communicating between and sometimes within countries anywhere in the world.
How Does ECHELON Operate?
The ECHELON system does not operate like other government spying agencies. It’s not designed to snoop on a particular email or fax message.
Rather, this system gathers huge volumes of data indiscriminately through an extensive system of radio antennae and particular satellites that closely monitor satellite communications. There are also sniffer devices that gather internet communications derived from data packets.
The system then filters out important information by use of computers (the computers identify and extract messages of interest to the organizations from a huge volume of information).
To make the filtering process easy, the system is designed to automatically identify messages/information containing pre-programmed keywords. These keywords contain target names, localities, subject, including others.
Various interception facilities have been established all around the world to eavesdrop into all international telecommunications networks. By linking all these facilities, ECHELON provides the involved organizations with the ability to tap into virtually any communication network around the globe.
According to various reports, ECHELON helped the US government learn of the plans to bomb the World Trade Center a few months before it actually happened. It’s not known how much information was intercepted by intelligence gatherers but since it was not prevented, we could assume the details were either unclear or insufficient.
Although the system has possibly stopped many attacks, the invasion of privacy has not been taken lightly by private organizations and the general public.
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