A question about ECHELON.

ECHELON is supposedly capable of capturing over 3 billion communications daily. While that sounds impressive, how exactly does the NSA process all that information? I mean they would need an awful lot of manpower.(NSA employs 40,000, not nearly enough.) I'm sure that they have protocols set, like looking for keywords and various other means. But what is the likelihood of one of your or my transmissions showing up at Fort Meade on some analyst's desk? I don't think it's very likely, the odds are astronomically against it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

or 'assassinate'.

When I worked at EarthLink, this is how it was described to me... ymmv

that doesn't have those words in it? What about coded messages?

encryption algorythms too... I honestly don't know though.

When dealing with American data, they can't do it within the US borders because it would violate US law (maybe the 4th amendment). At least that's what I've heard.

Sorry. The thought of this particular government actually obeying the law was just too funny....

So I am not sure how effective it is in our satellite age.

Monitoring chunks of communication for keywords is no big deal. Analyzing whatever is filtered out would be a manual task, but out of 3 billion communications, how many require further investigation?

Of course the proof is in the pudding.

If I were to say to you that I have to KILL a colony of ants that live under the BUSH that is growing against the WHITE HOUSE across the street, then I guess I can only hope that the NSA still has a sense of humor left.

ECHELON was primarily used for industrial espionage (or so the story goes).

... including GCHQ in the UK. It will pick up and pull in just about every signal that the satellites and ground stations can absorb. You're right, though--the problem is that it has trouble digesting it all. But, the NSA is perhaps the biggest single buyer of computer power in the country. There's good evidence that we have supercomputers because of them, and they've long been interested in things like voice-to-text and machine translation.

It does work off a keyword list, but that keyword list is very extensive--that's why EU countries objected to it a few years ago--some felt they had evidence that Echelon was being used to do industrial and commercial espionage.

If you do overseas calls for business purposes, your communications have likely been recorded. Whether they're on some analyst's desk depends upon whether or not there was something interesting said in the conversation....

Cheers.