The Erosion of Privacy in 21st Century America

ECHELON is the global electronic surveillance system of the National Security Agency. Capable of intercepting virtually any electronic communiqué in the world, this system has met harsh public criticism. Fears have spread that the National Security Agency and the rest of the Intelligence Community have been using the system to keep tabs on every citizen of the world. Allegations have escalated since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

It is claimed that ECHELON not only monitors private citizens, but is also being used to engage in corporate espionage, benefiting American corporations over their foreign competitors. And while rumors such as these have been spreading, the Agency itself has finally come out claiming that their systems adhere to the strictest of legal standards. Much of the debate centers on whether or not the organizations such as the NSA should be able to wield this much power, and what can be done to stop them from abusing it.

The National Security Agency, a subdivision of the Department of Defense serves the nation s intelligence gathering capabilities in a number of ways. Its main role is to function as the Signals Intelligence gathering apparatus for the United States. This means operating US satellites and monitoring various foreign communications and codes. This information is then spread through the rest of the intelligence community in order to help in forming foreign policy.

In 1948, the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand signed a classified agreement allowing greater cooperation in Signals Intelligence. Known as the UKUSA agreement, this treaty would establish a system under which the intelligence agencies of these 5 nations could work together to improve their intelligence gathering capability. Although much of the information about this agreement remains classified, its this system that allowed the ECHELON network to be formed.

Although many of the details of ECHELON are unknown, its overall idea is not terribly complicated. Patrick Poole a professor of government and economics published one of the first and most comprehensive reports of the ECHELON network. According to him:

The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position of intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic communications traffic and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON dictionary ) that well prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis.