Inside Echelon

Until communication and privacy protections become effective and ubiquitous, Echelon or systems like it will remain with us. This last sentence is probably one of the few sentences which show any solution and aren’t pessimistic. Otherwise it seemed intelligence collection system would be dreadnought and without any limits.

The first part of the article about Echelon shows the practical use and importance of electronic surveillance system – it was one of key factors in the WW2. The more information people send and the more is global communication important, the faster raise importance of these systems and services.

For me the most risky factor is that there is no public control how these system work, who receives information and outputs and how easy misusage of it is. Are data really safe, if a journalist can get inside the object (at New Zealand)? How easy can special interest group get to sensitive information about individuals, companies, technologies or armies?

The amount of information is really amazing, if the just one system can generate a million inputs per half hour; filters throw away all but 6500 inputs; only 1,000 inputs meet forwarding criteria; 10 inputs are normally selected by analysts and only one report is produced. This information is from the early nineties, this number must be now higher and present software is more developed and smarter. Moreover, it should enable sorting data more efficiently – in my opinion it might be inspired by sorting content on web – tagging, keywords, tag clouds etc.

The idea that every my sent message is somewhere noticed, run and stored is quite scaring. I can only hope that my data are so uninteresting, that gets lost in the information sea, and the system is “service for me”. Public service is the only sense of existing of these systems.