The so-called ECHELON Project is considered the largest surveillance effort ever made and would exploit a network capable of intercepting and analyzing practically every phone call, e-mail and message of any kind sent anywhere in the world. It would therefore be a real world system of interception of private and public communications.

According to the most reliable theories, the project originated in 1948 from an agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom...

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... and the United States of America, aimed at collecting information through SIGnal INTelligence (SIGINT). According to some, the name of this alliance would be the UKUSA Agreement.

The ECHELON global espionage system would have been created by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and would be managed in collaboration with the countries linked to the UKUSA agreement:

  • UK: General Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ);
  • Canada: Communications Security Establishment (CSE)
  • New Zealand: Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD) and General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB);

The real satellite infrastructure was then installed in the early sixties, during the cold war.

The processing of the huge amount of data would take place in laboratories located in the UK, Australia and Japan, however the United States would still have control of the entire infrastructure.

Famous journalist Duncan Campbell publicly spoke of ECHELON in 1988 but his revelation was considered only a baseless conspiracy theory and the institutions did not give credit to his words.

However, things changed later and around 2000 the European Parliament became interested in the ECHELON affair, starting a real commission (Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System).
The same European Parliament in 2001 published:

"If the UKUSA member states operate listening stations in important regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all the telephone calls, faxes and data traffic transmitted through these satellites"

The Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System concluded the following:

"The first such feature attributed to it is the capacity to carry out quasi-total surveillance. Satellite receiver stations and spy satellites in particular are alleged to give it the ability to intercept any telephone, fax, Internet or e-mail message sent by any individual and thus to inspect its contents. The second unusual feature of ECHELON is said to be that the system operates worldwide on the basis of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among several states (the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ), giving it an added value in comparison to national systems: the states participating in ECHELON (UKUSA states) can place their interception systems at each other's disposal, share the cost and make joint use of the resulting information. "

Despite this, the topic has not aroused the interest of the public and the major political parties (or perhaps it has been deliberately "forgotten" ...), consequently there have been no further actions in this sense by the institutions.

After the publication of a large number of secret articles by NSA informant Edward Snowden (Wikileaks affair), Duncan Campbell has returned to speak and claims that a 2005 document not only confirms the existence of ECHELON ("a targeted system to communications satellites ") but it also shows that the ECHELON program has been deliberately kept secret from official channels. According to this thesis ECHELON was the precursor of the network present today all over the world, connected to the main fiber optic cables that surround the globe, in addition to the satellites that orbit the planet.

Numerous films have also been shot on the events concerning Echelon: we remember "The Listening" (2006) and "Echelon Conspiracy" (2009).

What remains is a doubt about the purposes of such an impressive monitoring system: Political spying? Commercial espionage? The truth will probably never be revealed.

computer: Echelon is a threat to freedom.
- Echelon Conspiracy (2009)

Resources related to ECHELON: the largest surveillance network ever built:

  • N. C. O. I. C.
  • Wikipedia
  • The Intercept_
  • IMDb

Cover image by Wikipedia

Article image by Matt Crypto

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