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ECHELON Facts |
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What: A highly automated global system and surveillance network for processing data retrieved through interception of communication traffic from all over the world. In the days of the cold war, ECHELON's primary purpose was to keep an eye/ear on the U.S.S.R. In the wake of the fall of the U.S.S.R. ECHELON is officially said to being used to fight terrorism ann crimes, but it seems to be evident that the main focus lies in political and economic espionage.
When: ECHELON had been rumored to be in development since 1947, the result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Who: It is coordinated by the NSA, with participation of the CIA, USAF, NSG, GCHQ, DSD, CSE, GCSB. It seems that NSA is the only "contractor" who has access to the whole of information, whereas the other participants only get a comparingly small portion of information.
Where: Headquarters of the ECHELON system are at Fort Meade in Maryland, which is the NSA Headquarter. The NSA operates many interception stations all over the world, with or without the knowledge of the host country.
How: Each station in the ECHELON network has computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted data for containing pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and email addresses. Every word of every message is
automatically searched. Computers that can search for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has been designed to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole.
The scale of the collection system was described by the former Director of the NSA, Vice Admiral William Studeman, in 1992 (http://www.menwithhill.com/find.html). At that time the NSA's collection system generated about 2 million intercepted messages per hour. Of these, all but about 13,000 an hour were discarded. Of these about 2,000 met forwarding criteria, of which some 20 are selected by analysts, who then write 2 reports for further distribution. Therefore, in 1992 MenwithHillSation was intercepting 17.5 billion messages a year. Of these some 17.5 million may have been studied for analysis.
How much: ECHELON justifies obviousely multi-billion dollar expenses. But no detailed figures are available yet.
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World Wide Web (WWW)
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and  Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click  here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.
According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.
World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
 http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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