 Noah VailSon made my AvatarPremium join:2004-12-10 Lorton, VA kudos:1 Reviews:
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Knee Jerk! Interesting. A knee-jerk reaction, accusing the right wing of a knee-jerk reaction.
Anyhoo, Echelon, as we know it, appears to put into action between 1996 and 1998 under the oversight of George Tenet. It was executed by Clinton and authorized by the FISA court. However it's an outgrowth of existing surveillance by the NSA and the GHCQ. There are documents as far back as 1981 referring to the gathering process as Echelon 2.
It seems be initially directed toward eastern bloc and Russian monitoring, but expanded during the 80's and 90's to include international terrorism, drug cartels and expanded spying. It's a cooperative effort including the sigint agencies of South Africa, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and (who knows) maybe even Antarctica.
It's various attributes and incarnations have been know as P-415, Silkworth, Project P-377 (aka CARBOY II) and a host of others.
What Clinton put into action brought the most profitable use of Word Spotting for sifting information and brought it to new levels of effectiveness.
I'm pretty sure there are already files on me somewhere anyway.
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