ECHELON

\'ech e lon\ noun (1) a formation of units or individuals (2) the US National Security Agency's electronic surveillance network, which can intercept much of the world's telephone calls, faxes and emails, making them available for keyword searching by agencies of the five member UKUSA intelligence alliance.

A note from the author:

I launched this webpage in early 1997, after reading Nicky Hager's book, Secret Power, and have not been maintaining it in recent years. For more up-to-date information, I suggest you continue your search using keyword "ECHELON" in any of the popular search engines. You'll get lots of hits, in lots of languages.

Just a few years ago, those search engines would have turned up an article in Covert Action Quarterly, and Guy Polis' alarming Cryptography Manifesto, which resided here. There wasn't much else online. John Young began collecting stories for his Cryptome, and scanned in three chapters of James Bamford's excellent book, The Puzzle Palace. Posting this kind of information to the internet felt highly illegal back then, but not any more. It seems like everyone is doing it these days.

For me, the technical capacity of the NSA is not the most interesting aspect of this. In the 1960s, there was plenty of capacity to keep thousands of so-called subversives under surveillance. In 1972, the FBI's Administrative Index (ADEX) included 15,000 Americans considered to be subversives, subject to mass arrest in the event of a national security emergency. Supporters of non-violent, albeit radical movements, were the targets of FBI counterintelligence operations designed to neutralize their work. The abuses of our intelligence agencies were the subject of a major investigation of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee. This investigation uncovered far more disturbing abuses of power than Nixon's Watergate scandal, which occurred at about the same time.

Personally, I doubt that anyone outside the intelligence community can say for sure what the NSA's capabilities are. I expect that the limits are set by the ability to sort through and understand all the information that is readily available, not by the ability to intercept it.

For more on the historical context of domestic surveillance, see my COINTELPRO webpage. I expect to be doing a number of updates to my cointelpro page in the near future, stay tuned.


- Paul