Echelon: Corporate Welfare?
Via Progressive Review:
Here it comes.... Wait for it, wait for it....:
ALAN PERROTT, INDEPENDENT, UK, JUL 14, 2001 - Echelon was set up during the Cold War by the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to collate electronic intelligence. The network has grown to keep pace with the explosion in information technology. Today it gives 55,000 British and American operatives access to data gathered by 120 spy satellites worldwide. Every minute of every day, the system can process three million electronic communications. . . This daily barrage is fed through a computer system which sifts out messages containing keywords or individual names and divides them between various intelligence agencies for further study. . .
Here it comes.... Wait for it, wait for it....:
One of Europe's main worries is the claim that Echelon gathers industrial espionage from European companies for American rivals. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are said to have beaten France to a $6 billion contract to supply Airbus jets to Saudi Arabia, thanks to Echelon intercepts of faxes and phone calls. . .
posted by Kevin Carson | 10:31 PM
3 Comments:
I wonder if you could get every blogger to write the words al Qaeda and then go to their telephones and say the say thing about ten times. Light up the boards,as it were.
Funny you should say that, because as I recall there was a "Jam Echelon Day" sometime in Oct. 2000 when everybody was supposed to pick up the phone and insert as many "key words" into their conversations as possible.
There was also a stunt a few years back, I believe, of libertarians attempting to flood Home Depot and buy potential meth components in large quantities.
Personally, I'd like to see Wal-Mart's photo developers swarmed with anti-Bush photos.
I saw the "jammin' Echelon" email as recently as 2003. If the intent of mass-seining communications really was law enforcement, the jams could be filtered considerably. Comparison with known communications and some applications of spam filters would eliminate a lot. But all it is is building a rainy day reserve of potentially useful prosecutorial and harassment ammo and sleazy information peddling.
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