<nettime> echelon

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

a friend from Brazil writes:

hello, i think it can be interesting to you.

last 21, the french newspaper "liberation" published some articles about an
European Union document, from december 97, called "une appreciation des
technologies de controle politique". the main subject was a global
surveillance system, echelon, coordinated by United States (with the
collaboration of New Zeland, Australia, Great Britain and Canada). Echelon
uses 25 Intelstat satellites which cover all satellite telecommunications
on earth - what means telephonic conversation, web messages, email, fax,
etc. all information are precessed by computers and send to the NAtional
Security Agency in US. They can get any kind of information - political,
industrial, military, etc. The french deputy Alain Pompidou proposes that
UE construct a similar project to profit this information espionage system.

in a interview, britain deputy Glynn Ford explains how the system work:
each country list some keywords; all informations (from telephonic
conversations 'till emails) which have these words (what can be either drug
or industrial information) are automatically processed by the computers and
send to the country which want them. He says that one country doesn't know
the other country "dictionaire", and he thinks the major problem is to know
if and how some organizations - like islamic jihad or terrorist groups -
use the system, their dictionaires, and how they use the informations.

all these articles can be found, in french, at
http://www.liberation.com/quotidien/semaine/980421mara.html
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