Government was spying on you before Mr. Bush was elected


It didn't start with 9-11
This is from a February 2000 60 Minutes report.

If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency and four English-speaking allies: Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

The mission is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon's computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world.

How does it work, and what happens to all the information that's gathered? A lot of people have begun to ask that question, and some suspect that the information is being used for more than just catching bad guys.

That is a bit of an exaggeration though. This history article explains.

Echelon is a system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and process international communications passing via communications satellites. It is one part of a global surveillance systems that is now over 50 years old. Other parts of the same system intercept messages from the Internet, from undersea cables, from radio transmissions, from secret equipment installed inside embassies, or use orbiting satellites to monitor signals anywhere on the earth's surface. The system includes stations run by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to those operated by the United States. Although some Australian and British stations do the same job as America's Echelon sites, they are not necessarily called "Echelon" stations. But they all form part of the same integrated global network using the same equipment and methods to extract information and intelligence illicitly from millions of messages every day, all over the world.

The first reports about Echelon in Europe[2] credited it with the capacity to intercept "within Europe, all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications". This has proven to be erroneous; neither Echelon nor the signals intelligence ("sigint") system of which it is part can do this. Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognise the content of every speech message or telephone call. But the American and British-run network can, with sister stations, access and process most of the worlds satellite communications, automatically analysing and relaying it to customers who may be continents away.

The world's most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity. Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.

The Echelon program originated in the 1960s, and has it's roots going back to World War II. What the histories don't tell you is that before Watergate, it was pretty much an open secret that the U.S. Government would listen to whoever it wanted whenever it wanted and justify it later. Yes, there were "protections," but they were seldom enforced.

Jimmy Carter may have been the only President since before WWII not to use all the resources at his command, both legal and illegal. Every other President has not only used it "against the American people," but has issued Executive Directives to keep it under wraps.

This is not a defense of George W. Bush, or a justification for what he did. Instead, I want to point out that the abuse of power predates President Bush, and these self-righteous Congressmen making noise were only too happy to look the other way if the public didn't pay close attention or if the domestic program was focused on the "right" people.

Government is not your friend, even if the elected officials make noises you like.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - December 19, 2005 at 04:28 AM  Tag


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