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“Remember Echelon?”

Below is a little primer on Echelon for those who have forgotten, never knew or never cared about Echelon:

A short history of Echelon, the grandparent of Prism:
http://echelononline.free.fr/documents/dc/inside_echelon.htm

The world’s most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity.

Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications.

During the 20th century, governments realised the importance of effective secret codes. But they were often far from successful. During the Second World War, huge allied codebreaking establishments in Britain and America analysed and read hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese signals. What they did and how they did it remained a cloely-guarded secret for decades afterwards. In the intervening period, the US and British sigint agencies, NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) constructed their worldwide listening network.

The system was established under a secret 1947 “UKUSA Agreement,” which brought together the British and American systems, personnel and stations. To this was soon joined the networks of three British commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Later, other countries including Norway, Denmark, Germany and Turkey signed secret sigint agreements with the United States and became “third parties” participants in the UKUSA network.

Besides integrating their stations, each country appoints senior officials to work as liaison staff at the others’ headquarters. The United States operates a Special US Liaison Office (SUSLO) in London and Cheltenham, while a SUKLO official from GCHQ has his own suite of offices inside NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, between Washington and Baltimore.

Under the UKUSA agreement, the five main English-speaking countries took responsibility for overseeing surveillance in different parts of the globe . Britain’s zone included Africa and Europe, east to the Ural Mountains of the former USSR; Canada covered northern latitudes and polar regions; Australia covered Oceania. The agreement prescribed common procedures, targets, equipment and methods that the sigint agencies would use.

Among them were international regulations for sigint security , which required that before anyone was admitted to knowledge of the arrangements for obtaining and handling sigint, they must first undertake a lifelong commitment to secrecy.

Every individual joining a UKUSA sigint organisation must be “indoctrinated” and, often “re-indoctrinated” each time they are admitted to knowledge of a specific project. They are told only what they “need to know”, and that the need for total secrecy about their work “never ceases”.