ECHELON is a global communications interception system, created by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to routinely and indiscriminately monitor and record all forms of electronic communications worldwide both military and civilian and overseen by the National Security Agency. Designed during the cold-war, ECHELON primarily intercepts worldwide non-military communications, including those from governments, organizations, businesses and individuals. It could intercept practically any communication between countries anywhere in the world. The project ECHELON receiving system thieves this streams of millions of communications every hours to massive rez of computers. These computers decrypt messages when necessary, than when required utilize optical character recognition or advanced voice recognition techniques to extract words from each message. Every message captured is analysed for keywords or phrases found in the ECHELON dictionary. Keywords include all the names, places, code words or subjects that might be of interest. There are second search lists for each member country. Messages acquired at any of the receiving posts, containing requested keywords are automatically past on to intelligence organizations requesting those keywords. Those messages are flagged for further analysis. ...and ray of receiving stations collect all international communications carried by approximately 20 INTELSAT satellites. The INTELSATs are used by telephone companies of most countries. Thou they carry primarily civilian traffic, they also carry diplomatic and governmental communications. These INTELSATs are positioned in the stationary orbit around the equator and carry tens of thousands of simultaneous phone-calls, faxes and e-mails.
