E-C-H-E-L-O-N  M-A-G-A-Z-I-N-E
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ECHELON   -- Clarus
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login: root
password: ********

Last login: Thu 8 Oct 2029 from system console

[root /root]#dav|more /home/dave/ech.txt


I'm sitting here, looking out at the pallid, grey, early evening sky, 
the worlds' increasingly grey. Grey men, from grey companies, and grey 
politicians from grey countries rule the world. Even the walls in my 
room are grey.

60 years now since Ken Thompson wrote the OS that made so much of our 
'work' possible. There'ev been some rather big changes since then, the 
home computer, the net, bio implants. Nearly everythings' happened 
fairly fast, but thats just normal nowadays: technologies come, 
technologies go - it takes months for something to become popular, and 
months more for it to die. Nearly the only part of the 'revolution' 
that happened overnight was the opening up of Echelon.

It was one of the big turning points at the end of the twenty-tens. 
Within 24 hours everyones' perception of the world changed. After New 
Zealand got involved with the rebels in Micronesia - on the 'wrong' 
side, the United States of America and United States of Europe pulled 
out all co-operation with the New Zealanders, putting in place 
comprehensive trade sanctions, but what they forgot, was they left 
behind nearly 70 years of intelligence technology!

It didn't take long for the NZers to realise that if they couldn't 
strike back militarily, they could politically. All the worlds press 
were there when Prime Minister Harper exposed their echelon 
interception station at Waihopai, which had been codenamed 'Flintlock'
when it was built back in the last century.

Suddenly _everyone_ realised that the worst of what some had believed 
was true since the mid 1990's had been going on since the middle of 
the last century, and that its pervasiveness had grown dramatically 
since people were last interested in it over 30 years ago now.

The New Zealanders revealed everything, the hardware sites, the complex
search methods the behemoth used, which comm links each of the 
different countries' in the alliance targeted, which people, which 
organisation, which regions - over a terrabyte of text on the project. 
Everything from which screw went in where on the radomes of the last 
millennium, to the diplomatic wranglings and tensions that had grown up
during the preceding crisis.

Some had 'known' about Echelon for decades, but these were only 
rumours. Everyone from the then weak European Parliament, to mainstream 
hacks and hacker mags covered it briefly, giving all too little 
information as back then, people just didn't realise how big the 
secret was, and how far it had trickled down in to society, even by 
then.

Many suggested that there was no chance that 'spooks' could run around 
the whole telephone network, and that it was impossible to filter 
through the millions of calls a day for the several hundred that were 
of interest. What these people underestimated was the sheer amount of 
money spent on 'black projects' just like this. With regard to the 
telephone network, it was easy, after the introduction of electronic 
switching, for the UKUSA intelligence agencies to lay just a couple of 
hundred fat pipes and plumb them in to the Intercept Centres. This 
shadowed phone network, or Embroidery, was much simpler and cheaper to 
run than the PSTN as there was only ever one subscriber for each 
network segment.

Much of the Echelon system was installed in the semi-secrecy afforded 
by the need for secure cold war communications - it seemed sensible to 
everyone from parliaments to the populous that all countries would need 
a backup telecoms network for use after a nuclear attack. The British 
government even admitted to some of this in a full page advert on page 
9 of The Times from Tuesday September 17th 1963. The 'vital points for 
the Civil Defence of Britain' include:
"A chain of self-supporting broadcasting transmitters is being built" 
and "Important telephone cables are being re-routed away from the big 
population centres, and special radio links installed to bridge gaps 
that might be caused by bombs"

Similar efforts were taking place in all the other UKUSA countries, 
where many of the 'important telephone cables' were routed into SigInt
(Signals Intelligence) stations. All the data was able to be sifted 
through by the massive computer facilities at these bases. During 
this period, much of the high-end cutting edge development in 
electronics wasn't taking in what one would think of as the computer 
companies of the era, but done by bodies such as Britains GPO labs and 
Bell labs in the US, each of which had massive overlaps with government
and defence departments. The 8008 may have made billions for some, and 
started what became the home computing revolution, but it mattered 
little to those running Echelon, who had millions to burn, some of the 
best minds in their respective countries, and gigs of data to crunch 
each day. The conventional postal system at the time had developed 
systems that could read hundreds of 'post codes' - geographical 
identifiers for each address, per second. This, which found and read 
handwritten characters of differing sizes, on different background was 
well in advance of home and business character recognition until about 
2005. Before then it was only feasible for 'OCR' as it was termed, to
read computer printed characters. This example of how, with large 
budgets and great minds, Post Office scientists, who then ran the UK's 
phone system, were able to build technology that wouldn't be equalled 
in the mainstream market for another 25 years. Similar technology was 
applied to deciphering primitive facsimile messages of the time. 
Enhanced, context sensitive versions of this system often bettered 
human comprehension of low quality intercepts, only processing them 
many thousands of times more quickly.

Whilst the mainstream computer industry struggled to keep up with 
Moores Law, the power of the specialist chips used by the project 
increased much more rapidly that of the desktop computers, and the 
power increases were matched by equally impressive budget increases - 
throughout the 1980's the buoyant world economy helped fund the project 
and in the leaner 90's the fall of world Communism only seemed to bring 
an increase in spending. The target of the interception was by this 
time not foreign power, or their agents operating in the alliance 
powers, or even terrorists or organised criminals, but the ordinary 
citizens. The ability to effectively gather, archive and use the 
massive amount of information that was available to the intelligence 
organisations made no one question the need for the massive amount of 
spending on the system, with none of the countries wanting to appear to 
be skimping on updates, in case the others decided to remove them from 
the system, and cut off their supply of information from the other 
partner states. Just like the Heroin addict lusting after his fix, the 
NSA's and GCHQ's of the Echelon member states deluded themselves into 
thinking they could not survive if they didn't demand higher and higher 
budgets and if they didn't have massive amounts of information to show 
for their spending.

The mobile communications improvements of the late 1980's and 1990's 
were nothing of an obstacle to the system. The unfocused transmission 
between the client device and the cell receiver made it easy to site 
aerials across the alliance countries, where, with limited signal 
enhancement, the Echelon 'cells' could cover 100 miles radius or more. 
These covered calls within the various networks, whilst anything that 
routed through the conventional phone system was often intercepted 
twice.

When, up until the early 1990's the internet population was mostly 
limited to academics and government or military employees the user 
numbers were small and only one or two network switching centres needed 
to be monitored to receive a near complete set of the days internet 
throughput, put as the explosion in usage due to the World Wide Web, 
the task became much more complicated. In 1994 the decision was made 
that specific internet content would be chosen for processing as the 
throughput of gigabits per hour, for a much lower amount of useful 
information that on other media was drawing a disproportionally large 
amount of the Echelon budget for their 'return on investment'. All 
traffic originating from certain countries and routing points was 
included, as were all emails. A popular text discussion system of the 
time, Usenet, was also monitored as, despite its public nature, the 
throughput saved by ignoring whole sections of the net 
(mostly the 'web') allowed the capacity to be used for the 
comparatively smaller (bandwidth wise) Usenet.



When people realised that, for years, nearly everything they said, 
wrote or typed could, and probably was, read by someone or thing other 
than the intended recipient people reacted with a wide gamut of 
responses. It was of little consequence to some, businesses who weren't 
seen as important enough to benefit from Echelon received information 
presumed it had damaged them and tried to take legal action. Many 
countries outside the system, even though something like this had be 
rumoured to exist for years, were amazed, and extremely hostile. The 
USE, which had grown out of the continental, western European states of 
the old EU in 2009 imposed full sanctions on the UKUSA member 
countries, the same action that had precipitated the revelations in the
first place. The strong cryptography market suddenly grew from a small 
number of mathematicians working on code to be used by those with 
something dubious to say, to a large mass market industry that provided 
the majority of the population with a means of secure communication 
that many had not realised they had needed for the last 80 years.

Despite assurances from the USA, UK, Canada and Australia that they had 
all deactivated their Echelon infrastructure 'as it no longer serves 
any useful purpose' their denial of the last 30 years didn't really 
increase anyones' confidence in their truthfulness! All of the sites 
listed in the published files were dismantled within months, but there 
are no assurances that they were not hastily reconstructed in other, 
better hidden, locations.

We've now entered what some have termed a Cold War. Not that there's a
threat of direct military action, the 'weapons' have already been 
launched in the form of crippling economic embargoes. This 'Cold War' 
is the now deeply embedded feeling of mistrust between the UKUSA powers 
and the rest of the world and the 'cold shoulder' that each are showing 
the other.

The world has become a different place now. Due to the efforts of some 
scientists and spooks after the Second World War, everyone from 
countries down to the man in the street doesn't know if whatever 
information they send electronically if being read by some computer 
thousands of miles away before being referred to the workers of a now, 
even more secretive, multi-governmental organisation.

Who knows, maybe even this is being read?
