'One former member of the Canadian intelligence service, the CSE, claimed that every day millions of emails, faxes and phone conversations were intercepted. The name and phone number of one woman, he said, was added to the CSE's list of potential terrorists after she used an ambiguous word in an innocent call to a friend. "Disembodied snippets of conversations are snatched from the ether, perhaps out of context, and may be misinterpreted by an analyst who then secretly transmits them to spy agencies and law enforcement offices around the world," Mr Bamford said. The "misleading information", he said, "is then placed in NSA's [de grote broer van de CIA] near-bottomless computer storage system, a system capable of storing 5 trillion pages of text, a stack of paper 150 miles high". Unlike information on US citizens, which officially cannot be kept longer than a year, information on foreigners can he held "eternally", he said.

The [...] draft report concludes the system cannot be as extensive as reports have assumed. It is limited by being based on worldwide interception of satellite communications, which account for a small part of communications. Eavesdropping on other messages requires either tapping cables or intercepting radio signals, but the states involved in Echelon, the draft report found, had access to a limited proportion of radio and cable communications. But independent privacy groups claimed Britain, the US and their Echelon partners, were developing eavesdropping systems to cope with the explosion in communications on email and internet.
In Britain, the government last year brought in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allowed authorities to monitor email and internet traffic through "black boxes" placed inside service providers' systems. It gave police authority to order companies or individuals using encryption to protect their communications, to hand over the encryption keys. Failure to do so was punishable by a sentence of up to two years. The act has been condemned by civil liberties campaigners, but there are signs the authorities are keen to secure more far reaching powers to monitor internet traffic.

De National Post: 'Still, critics of Echelon warn the potential for abuse never goes away. "This whole thing is so bizarrely powerful that the opportunity or temptation for abuse is fairly substantial," says Mr. Pike of the American Federation of Scientists. "How many people in your organization always obey the rules? "The notion that NSA or any other of these spy networks is the only large organization in human history in which everyone always obeys the rules just flies in the face of common sense," he says.'

Veel meer over Echelon is te vinden via FAS en in een artikel van specialist Duncan Campbell. Ook is er een Echelon-FAQ.

DaanSpeak
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