ECHELON system shows you're being watched

By Rob Goodspeed

Daily Editorial Writer

Imagine a system that attempts to intercept every e-mail, phone call and fax transmitted in the world. Imagine vast underground supercomputing centers searching these messages for keywords, churning through two million messages a second with voice recognition and text translation software.

This is big stuff. Imagine a system so powerful that a mother talking about how her son "bombed" in the school play could be flagged as a potential terrorist (true story). Well folks, stop imagining.

While the National Security Agency might not have the capabilities depicted in "Enemy of the State," they do maintain an enormous system, known as ECHELON, which comes extremely close to achieving its goal: To intercept every electronic communication worldwide. "Oh really?" you skeptically ask. Really: The American Civil Liberties Union has established a Website specifically designed as a clearinghouse for ECHELON-related materials, and The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the BBC and even 60 Minutes have all printed or aired pieces about ECHELON.

The threat of corporate espionage even motivated the European Parliament to investigate the system, resulting in a 40-page report concluding that such systems not only exist, but also threaten the privacy of European individuals and businesses.

How does ECHELON work? Since telecommunications satellites can easily be tapped through a few well-placed satellite dishes, intercepting worldwide communications becomes a matter of putting enough dishes in the right places.

While it's easy to tap satellites near the U.S. mainland, it's harder to intercept traffic where we have no permanent base to place a dish. So solve this problem, the NSA has formed a multinational agreement so that it can monitor satellites around the world, thereby intercepting communications from such diplomatically sensitive areas as the Middle East, India, China and the Koreas even though we do not have military bases near the satellites which service these areas.

Around 1970, the respective intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia agreed to share the raw data their satellite dishes intercepted - thus forming the ECHELON system. A veritable plethora of technical detail is available online - but this description will suffice to suggest the power of ECHELON.

Why should American citizens be concerned with such a system? First, in an increasingly globalized society, it becomes difficult to differentiate between domestic and international traffic. The Internet knows no political boundaries: The innocuous e-mail you sent to grandma just might be routed though a Canadian server, and if you include the right combination of words, just might end up on a computer monitor in Ft. Meade (or in Britain or New Zealand, etc). Second, our tax money supports it. We have a right to know, within reasonable limits, what type of system exists, and what controls are protecting our constitutionally protected privacy rights.

So what should Joe Student do about this insanity? Feel powerless in the face of secretive government bureaucracy? Don't be. If the corporations haven't entirely hijacked our government, people still have some say in how our money is spent. Due to recent media attention and popular concern, the legislature required the NSA to publish a report about the legality of their actions and the senate held hearings investigating the Carnivore program. If either of these programs seems sketchy to you - look into them (www.echelonwatch.org is a good place to start) and tell your senators (Carl Levin and Spencer Abraham) and representative (Lynn Rivers) about your concerns.

-Rob Goodspeed can be reached via

e-mail at rgoodspe@umich.edu.