Who's
Listening? THE UNITED
STATES-led ECHELON
spy network is eavesdropping on the whole
world. Village
Voice has
some great articles on human rights
violations (in New York State-as well as
NOW's NY offices getting involved in a
huge class action case against NYS) and
international surveillance
ECHELON
govt project. That system is
called ECHELON
and it is controlled by the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA). In America, it is
the Intelligence Network That Dare Not Be
Acknowledged. Questions about it
at Defense Department briefings are deftly
deflected. Requests for information about
it under the Freedom of Information Act
linger in bureaucratic limbo. Researchers
who mention possible uses of it in the
presence of intelligence officials are
castigated. Members of Congress
-- theoretically, the people's
representatives who provide oversight of
the intelligence community -- betray no
interest in helping anyone find out
anything about it. Media outlets (save
the award-winning but low-circulation
Covert
Action
Quarterly)
ignore it. In the official view of the
U.S. Government, it doesn't
exist. | 2. The NSA has been
snooping the world's telecommunications
traffic for years... the top secret
project ECHELON
is exposed in former New Zeland
Intelligence Agent Nicky Hager's
book Secret Power. In the late in
1980s, in a decision it probably regrets,
the United States prompted New Zealand to
join a new and highly secret global
intelligence system. Hager's
investigation
into it and
his discovery of the
ECHELON
dictionary have revealed one of the
world's biggest, most closely held
intelligence projects. The system allows
spy agencies to monitor most of the
world's telephone, e-mail, and telex
communications. The computers at
each station in the
ECHELON
network automatically search through the
millions of messages intercepted for ones
containing pre-programmed keywords.
Keywords include all
the names, localities, subjects, and so on
that might be mentioned. Every word of
every message intercepted at each station
gets automatically searched whether or not
a specific telephone number or e-mail
address is on the list. "We feel we can no
longer remain silent regarding that which
we regard to be gross malpractice and
negligence within the establishment in
which we operate," aid British
intelligence operatives.
|
ONCE AGAIN
we state our postion: we have no objection
to the "good Guys" listening to every word
we speak or write or even think. They have
no need to spend your tax dollars doing
this,
they can knock on our front door, and
we'll leave them happily alone with our
files and computer discs - as long as they
return them all to us in good condition.
It is when the Bad Guys start doing the
same thing that we get
worried... |
write to David Irving