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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Satellites Communications satellites are relay stations for radio signals and provide reliable and distance-independent high-speed connections even at remote locations without high-bandwidth infrastructure. On point-to-point transmission, the transmission method originally employed on, satellites face increasing competition from fiber optic cables, so point-to-multipoint transmission increasingly becomes the ruling satellite technology. Point-to-multipoint transmission enables the quick implementation of private networks consisting of very small aperture terminals (VSAT). Such networks are independent and make mobile access possible. In the future, satellites will become stronger, cheaper and their orbits will be lower; their services might become as common as satellite TV is today. For more information about satellites, see How Satellites Work (http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/satellites) and the Tech Museum's satellite site (http://www.thetech.org/hyper/satellite). http://www.whatis.com/vsat.htm http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/satellites

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