Why ECHELON doesn't exist
Published on April 29, 2004 By greywar In Current Events
(Disclaimer : This is only my personal opinion and in no way reflects the official position of the US Army or Government)

 

 

(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.


Comments (Page 2)
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on Apr 30, 2004
Just me and the other voices:) And you are correct MasonM email is *far* more prone to monitoring than conversation (it is already transcribed). Conversation monitoring would certainly be possible if the entire planet devoted massive resources towards this goal cooperativly... Let me give you just one reason more why they have neve done so... Look at the political capital there was to be won or lost in the Siege of Fallujah... How much would Bush have gained by loacting the leaders in that city (who have cell phones) and killing them ending the rebellion? Tons of political credibility would have been had and if ECHELON or *anything* remotely similar existed Fallujah would be a ridiculously small target for it, no where near as challenging as even my Wiesbaden scenario, yet we couldn't do it no matter how much it was worth it to us. If the means were available they would be used *daily*. They are not used and therefore the lieklyhood of their existance is very small based on that assumption *alone* not even consdiering the host of other factors involved. So while the "Bush knew" folks ninny-on and on about Government Conspiracy, the government itself seems to be unable to utilize the tools that these peopl assume it has. It just doesn't hold water folks, none.
on Apr 30, 2004
Allow me to add my apology to any reading this for allowing myself to be trolled. I should have recognized the trolsl other posts from conspiracy articles. I would have allowed him to stay if he could have stuck with comments of reasonable length but he chose to spam a page-long diatribe with numerous badlt sourced links in it (www.conspiracyplanet.com is *not* research). Should anyone ever feel the need to point out a larrge quantity of info on my blog, please post a short and concise comment with a link to a article on *your* blog. This blog is mine and I choose to not allow that sort of thing in my comment blocks.
on Aug 31, 2004
As this topic (sort of) came up in conversation with a friend of my wife, I searched out this article. I was a bit befuddled at how the comments read until I realized that grey had removed some comments of an offending poster.
I also notice the "I will address it in further posts" with dismay, as I don't think you have the inclination any more.
on Aug 31, 2004
Echelon is real - the Australian SIS head admitted its existence a couple of years back. A NZ researcher also broke into an Echelon unmanned listening post and videotaped the interior computer complex - I think he's serving time in maximum security at the moment. Most of the material is sent to the US for analysis, and it works (or rather, sort of works) through recognition of keywords in text and occasionally voice. Probably only a thousandth max of the material with keywords makes it to real analysts; the rest is just dumped. Some members of the Australian government were worried about the US's use of it for commercial purposes (for example so that AT&T could undercut Telstra on an Indonesian telecomms network) but that seems to have died down now.

It does exist, it's just I doubt it's as efffective as some would claim. Allegations about echelon, and more fully the ASIS head's comments and the NZ researcher's thoughts can be seen on the Sunday program of 23 May 1999. I haven't been able to find a transcript for the program, but the STOA report it's based on is here Link.
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