Nsa echelon program

The ECHELON has become a popular word used in media and popular culture to describe an alleged secret global surveillance network developed and operated by the American government along with the signatories of the UKUSA Agreement—a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between five countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Numerous claims mentioned that the program originally emerged in the late s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War.

Through developments in computer and communication technologies, the program evolved into a sophisticated global surveillance network. Central to the purported capabilities of ECHELON is the interception of transmissions transpiring in several communication networks to include phone systems and cellular networks, the Internet, and other types of electronic communication.

Despite being a classified program involving powerful countries and their sophisticated intelligence organizations and networks, there are several claims and evidence confirming the existence of the ECHELON surveillance network. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell has been largely credited for the first public disclosure of a program that revolved around signals intelligence.

In his article published by the New Statesman, Campbell documented the emerging controversy about alleged surveillance activities conducted by the American government. One of the personalities that emerged during then was Margaret Newsham, a former employee at aerospace company Lockheed Corporation.

Newsman revealed to the U. Congress that the U. National Security Agency was intercepting and recording the telephone calls of Republican senator Strom Thurmond. Further investigations carried out by the Congress concluded that there was indeed a system designed to target American political figures.

The NSA and its partners had arranged for everything we communicated to be grabbed and potentially analyzed. The program reportedly utilized massive ground-based radio antennas to intercept satellite transmissions containing the digital communications of millions.

It then relied on its content-sensitive dictionaries of keywords and phrases to scour the communications for relevant information. While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a—a lousy job. Embed Size px. Start on. Show related SlideShares at end. WordPress Shortcode. Share Email. Top clipped slide. Download Now Download Download to read offline. Mark Raduenzel Follow. Automatic Kalashnikova Modern tanks.

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Political controversy soon followed, especially in Europe. According to Richelson, fear of monitoring by the government led to a January report for the European Parliament in which an Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control committee, claimed "within Europe, all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland This public suspicion of government surveillance continues to this day.

SIGINT systems which were created and implemented during the Cold War tended to be geared towards intercepting diplomatic, espionage or military communications.

To make this capacity possible, the United States has placed a variety of geosynchronous, elliptically and low-earth satellites into orbit which catch electronic communications, missile telemetry and emanations from radar.

Distributed ground stations in Britain, Germany, Australia and Colorado control the satellites and receive the signals intercepted from the satellites Richelson , With this infrastructure in place, it is possible to intercept the vast majority of all electronic telecommunications including phone, fax and emails practically anywhere around the world. Instead, its design allows the UKUSA Signals Intelligence alliance made up of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to use the system to intercept both military and non- military government communications and private sector organizations and businesses.

The UKUSA nations designate which items are of intelligence value by providing selected keywords to monitor for Richelson , As we shall see, this keyword identification functionality is fundamental to how the system operates.

By sorting through vast flows of telecommunications traffic, the interception and processing technologies identify specifically targeted messaging.

On each of these computers is stored a comprehensive database which contains designated 4. Rudner , As the millions of intercepted messages are searched for a keyword in the Dictionary, any match is then flagged as an item of interest and shipped off to the computers of the requesting agency Richelson , Since there is not a system of accountability regarding ECHELON, it is extremely difficult to discover the criteria used to determine who is or who is not a target.

The targets can change as often as national security priorities change, made easier by the flexible system design. Issues Does sifting through such a vast volume of collected data produce any valuable intelligence?