What is this ECHELON mentioned in the book?

There is no Echel0n.

quote:

Originally posted by daniel:
What is this ECHELON mentioned in the book?

Echelon was the programme established in the late 1980s by the NSA and a bunch of other national intelligence organisations including the British, the Australians and even the Chinese!!! Its purpose was real time interception of telephone & telegraph traffic with simultaneous translation facilities.

Its main HQ was at the RAF station in Menwith Hill, just outside Harrogate; less than a dozen miles from where I was born and lived for almost 20 years. I had a number of friends, including one of my very best friends who worked there and who were REMARKABLY indicreet about some of the stuff that went on.

Read more about it here.

LN

Beware the New Zealanders

more or less, a program that allows the CIA to intercept and listen in on any phone conversation and intercept and information on the internet.

quote:

Originally posted by eRthIan:
more or less, a program that allows the CIA to intercept and listen in on any phone conversation and intercept and information on the internet.

Absolutly nothing to do with the CIA; they are second level clients. It is an NSA/DIA project jointly owned with the communications interception agencies of several other friendly countries. In fact the CIA run competing programs to Echelon; feeling that THEY should have run it in the first place. Technically speaking I think this is called 'sour grapes'.

LN

Come here Dr Watson, I want you

I spent several summers as a teenager in Greenhow Hill, Darley and Pately Bridge - everyone locally seemed not to notice those crazy giant golfballs. I went up to the gate once to try and get a better look and was told to move along.

I wonder how true the story is about the speaking of certain KEY PHRASES activating the listening equipment automatically?

Since it's all now being logged in Google's databases, that's no longer needed... : )

OMG...

I can understand national security and all... But listening to everybody...
I could actualyy say "bomb" in a phone call (or write it down on a forum post...) but that wouldn't make my communications a mattern of concern to anybody, less then all some govs

quote:

Originally posted by Bovaz:
OMG...

I can understand national security and all... But listening to everybody...

You don't have to worry Bovaz. No-one can intecept your Voices!

Lol..if the CIA had half the budget to run all these fancible operations that conspiratorialists love to say are real, they'd be a hell of lot more effective than they are.

The NSA's budget always was and will always be far more than almost any other intelligence agency. They built the bulk of Echelon and you almost rest assured the main management of it is rested in the United States.

And I highly doubt China is a part of it, since they'd be the biggest target of Echelon in that region.

Sorry if someone's already posted this link.

This is the public face of Echelon.

http://www.nsa.gov/sigint/

One of the earlier responses touched on the most important issues within Echelon (well, most important technical issues) which is how you decide what to look at. The poster asked whether keywords are used to decide what to read. The short answer is "not really" but, still, there is a significant problem with deciding what to read.

Think about it. You need to sort through millions of messages a day and decide which ones are worth reading. It's hard. Pattern matching is what it's all about.

Obviously, one might be interested in ALL the communication that involve some specific people but how do you find the random communication that is significant? For this, you use patterns of word use. You can look at previous messages that were important. You can look at things like "latent semantic indexing" which will give you a multidimensional pattern matcher of sorts. In this, you don't have to limit yourself to the words used in the communication. You can look for sets of words semantically related to the words that were actually used.

What you don't want to do is tie yourself to keywords or phrases because, in the case that they frequent, these are more likely than not to give you too many false alarms and, in the case that they are infrequent, if you don't know the specific phrases being used by the parties you're interested in, too many misses.

The most advanced the analysis, the less messages you can process in a single day.

I believe the correct terminology would be 'data mining' perhaps. rather than pattern recognition/apophenia ??

Hmm, AFAICR there was a backlash after 9/11 against over-reliance on signals / electronic / spy satellite etc data as CIA intelligence sources.

Can anyone confirm?

Our brothers in the EU, the French, got really upset with Echelon when somebody used it for industrial espionage. I suspect it was to do with Smart Card technology developed by the French which the CIA tried to buy the patents on.

There no such thing as E h lon.
Sleep well.

quote:

Originally posted by NRG:
I believe the correct terminology would be 'data mining' perhaps. rather than pattern recognition/apophenia ??

Data-mining is a term used by auditors for the process of going through an organisation's entire electronic catalogue of materials (including e-mails and each PC's cache) looking for keywords.

one of the major base of the echelon project was based in bad aibling (bavaria/germany) and it was obviously and mainly aimed at he former warsaw pact members [aka the "former axis of evil"] 2004 the whole unit was moved into the center of germany - namely griesheim near darmstadt [near frankfurt a.m].

located in this region are several units of the us armed forces and the frankfurt air base which is not only a center for the american air transports around the world but alo next to one of the most important centers of financial trade in europe [frankfurt] but also the center of the german telecom [which is in many fields of german telecommunications a quasi-monopolist-player].

the rumors of american intelligence agencies spying on european companies, state agencies an citizens via ECHELON are plenty and sometimes even discussed in european media...

... and please forgive me my maybe rusty english...