ECHELON Intelligence Budget



Until now it was not possible to find out the specific segmenting of intelligence budgets as far as the ECHELON project is concerned. Many experts agree that ECHELON specific costs are woven into the complex budgets of several intelligence units. Money comes also from the host countries and Partners in the UKUSA Agreement.

For further reading:

http://www.usbudget.com/military/

http://www.access.gpo.gov/int/int017.html

http://www.fas.org/irp/budget.html

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1995_cr/sen29sep.htm

Refocus Intelligence Priorities:

http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/mswg/msbb98/tt08int.htm

>Approximately $27.6 Billion requested for 1999. The Congress has proposed an increase over the Clinton administration request. Almost all of this effort is devoted to exploiting the disciplines that were of primary importance during the Cold War: imagery intelligence [IMINT], signals intelligence [SIGINT], and human intelligence [HUMINT]. But with the end of the Cold War new disciplines, measurements and signature intelligence [MASINT] and open source intelligence [OSINT] are of far greater relevance to contemporary and emerging security concerns and intelligence needs, ranging from counter-proliferation activities to peace-keeping operations.<

Organization Annual Budget Staff

NRO 6,2 billion $ 1.700

NSA 3,6 billion $ 21.000 (- 40.000?)

CIA 3,1 billion $ 16.000

For comparison: CSE has only a $200-300 million dollar budget.

In 1988 Duncan Campbell wrote (http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/echelon-dc.htm): >With 15,000 staff and a budget of over £500 million a year (even without the planned Zircon spy satellite), GCHQ is by far the largest part of British intelligence. Successive UK governments have placed high value on its eavesdropping capabilities, whether against Russian military signals or the easier commercial and private civilian targets. Recently published US Department of Defense 1989 budget information has confirmed that the Menwith Hill spy base will be the subject of a major $26 million expansion programme. Information given to Congress in February listed details of plans for a four-year expansion of the main operation building and other facilities at Menwith Hill. Although the testimony referred only to a "classified location", the base can be identified because of references to STEEPLEBUSH. According to this testimony, the new STEEPLEBUSH II project will cost $15 million between now and 1993. The expansion is required to avoid overcrowding and "to support expanding classified missions".<

And another view on the relation between the several intelligence units as far as budget is concerned: "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner The New York Times, November 5 1994

>By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United States intelligence agencies. In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of the United States. $3.1 billion for the CIA $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines special-operations units $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA <

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ARPAnet

ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research.

In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.

But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.

Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net.

In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.

Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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