Every time you make a phone call or send an email, your message is scanned for possible "subversive" or illegal content. And if there is anything suspicious in your message, your emails and phone calls will be monitored even more closely in the future.
This continuous, worldwide surveillance of electronic information is carried out through a system called "ECHELON".
ECHELON consists of a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted communications (including emails, faxes etc.) for pre-programmed keywords. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries.
ECHELON connects all these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed elements in an integrated system. An ECHELON station's Dictionary contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also lists for each of the other four agencies in the UK/USA
system [NSA, GCHQ, DSD, GCSB and CSE]
According to Jack Anderson and Douglas Cohn (United Feature Syndicate), ECHELON intercepts up to 2 million transmissions per hour. It achieves this by detecting and homing in on communications containing specific
keywords, such as "bomb", "assassinate", "PLO",
"cult", "kidnap", "cocaine" - and hundreds of other words and terms related to criminal and antisocial activities and radical viewpoints.
ECHELON also tracks the movements of certain "targeted" individuals across cyberspace. Visitors to monitored and "sting" websites are also tracked by means of "cookies" dropped in their browsers.
ECHELON is illegal in most of the countries in which it operates, but the governments of these countries - including the Irish government - have refused to discuss the issue. Until recently, in fact, they denied ECHELON's existence.
It's probably fair to assume that the ECHELON people are mainly interested in the "big fish" of international terrorism, gambling, drugs and pornography; however this does not mean that they are not also compiling secret dossiers on "small fry" - the people who take part in public demos, or who sign petitions, or who visit certain websites - for possible use at a later date, or to pass on to security agencies etc. People might not get arrested on the basis of information obtained on them through ECHELON surveillance, but who knows how and when that information will be used against them in the future, or by whom?
Regular visitors to chatrooms and adult message boards often argue
about whether they and their posts are really anonymous, or whether they can be tracked.
Make no mistake about it: not only can you be tracked, you are being tracked, 24/7.
If you want to know more about ECHELON, here are some links:
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm
http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/index.html
http://www.fire.net.nz/echelon.htm
http://www.fipr.org/rip/
