(Disclaimer : This is only my personal opinion and in no way reflects the official position of the US Army or Government)

            Some time ago I stumbled across a few articles referring to something called ECHELON, for those of you who have never heard of it ECHELON is supposed to be a vast computer and intelligence network that monitors and records every email, telephone call, and fax communication in the civilized world. Ostensibly this is done at the whim and behest of the United States Government and it’s allies. I will not categorically state that there is no ECHELON system as it is quite simply impossible to prove that something does not exist. This very fact is what allows conspiracy theorists, ufologists, and psychics to thrive at all. I will go into some reasons why I believe the network does not exist however.

            Let us start with a brief scenario in which ECHELON does in fact exist and is being used to survey an average German city say… Wiesbaden for instance. A quick bit of googling tell me that Weisbaden’s population is roughly 270,000. Let us assume for the moment that on average over the course of a day the time spent on the telephone is 30 seconds per person. I would say that is likely to be a *very* conservative estimate. This would generate a grand total of 2250 *hours* of conversation each and every day. Take that out to a year and the total is roughly 821,250 hours of conversation which for the most part would be in German.

            We will work with the daily total first. Assuming you have a native speaker listening to these conversations, (not someone who was taught the language), also assuming that this native speaker is a very efficient transcriptionist (at a rate of 1 minute of conversation being transcribed real time), and assuming further that they are a genius at moving the fully transcribed conversation into a formatted report that *all* intelligence databases require (say it takes them another 20 seconds per minute of conversation), we come up with one analyst processing one minute of conversation in 80 seconds. To process one day of Wiesbaden’s telephone conversations would require 180,000 man-hours. If you have 18,000 of these wunder-kind transcribers working for you 10 hours a day. You could keep up with the demand of this one city in terms of *transcription* only. I will not even begin to delve into the time it would require to analyze this mountain of data after the process of putting them into data-readable formats is done.

            The above example of course was so ridiculously conservative in it estimates that the true number of staff this feat would require in the real world staggers the mind. Real transcription times are closer to 5 minutes of transcription per minute of conversation and another 2 minutes per for formatting as well. Which is assuming you have available native language speakers available to do the work which is simply fallacy.

            This article only scratches the surface of this issue and I will address it further in later posts.