What the krunk is ECHELON?
. . . start making sense! For a detailed summary of how ECHELON works, check out this report to the European Parliament archived at J. Orlin Grabbe’s website. But basically, ECHELON is a creature of the UKUSA alliance, a pact between five English-speaking countries. The 1947 agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Austrailia, and Canada established an elaborate signals intelligence (SIGINT)-sharing program. Virtually every phone call, fax, and e-mail message in the Western world, maybe over the entire planet, is picked up by an elaborate network of high-powered listening stations (the one pictured above is located is in Menwith Hill, England). The stations are operated by security agencies of all five countries, but most of the money, equipment and staffing is provided by the U.S. National Security Agency. All these captured bitstreams are searched for flagwords like, say, ECHELON, Al-Fayed, Mena, or what have you. Flagged reports are then forwarded to int
