With the recent controversy over Edward Snowden and his leaks regarding government surveillance, it is hardly astounding that a international communications espionage program headed by the united states would be in existence, but what is truly astounding is the publics’ seemingly oblivious knowledge of such a system and the sparse lack of attention that is paid to it even after controversies such a wiki leaks, anonymous, and Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. An even larger problem remains the disturbing lack of ethics revealed by the existence of such a program that is the coordination of multiple countries.
The program is called ECHELON and scholars in law have studied the programs existence before, however to many it is not common knowledge. According to scholar Lawrence Sloan in an article in the Duke Law Journal “Echelon and the Legal Restraints on Signals Intelligence”, ECHELON is a worldwide communications espionage effort. It is a joint project by the National Security Agency in the USA along with its counter parts in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Scholars like Sloan believe that ECHELON intercepts all forms of global communication, from telephone communications, to the Internet to satellite data transmission as well as high frequency radio, microwave radio relay, and subsea cables.
The purpose of this spy network is to comb communications for messages related to terrorism and international crime. Although Britain and America deny such a system exists, BBC News obtained confirmation that ECHELON is a reality from the government of Australia and their Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Bill Blick.
It is a tool that can easily be abused and in Europe allegations were surfacing that the system could be used to conduct illegal economic espionage on behalf of American companies to give them an advantage over their foreign competitors. Scholars already believe ECHELON has the likely potential of being used to spy on individual citizens.
ECHELON truly does represent a viable threat to personal security despite the claimed purpose. Invasion of privacy is a paramount concern, since the project seems to operate in absence of the law and order of international regimes and personal liberties of both the citizens who the agencies claim to be watching out for, and those of foreign citizens as well. ECHELON truly takes Big Brother to an unprecedented level, standing as a hypocritical tool for nations that claim to protect the rights, liberties and freedoms of their citizens. These rights and liberties have already lost ground in the post 911 world, but one was wonder how far is too far. ECHELON begs the question, to what end will governments go in the name of “fighting terrorism”? How much more ground will our personal liberties have to give in this new era?
By merely existing this type of system may be a threat to democracy. The system itself has no moral compass for rights and wrongs; that is placed entirely in the hands of the systems operators and directors who are consolidating power with such a tool. One wonders what would happen if dictatorships and autocracies like North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Russia were to create a similar project together, or other countries as well. Cyberspace and personal privacy could prove to become the battleground of information warfare. Thinking about how many regimes arrest, in prison, detain or kidnap private citizens already for dissent, a tool like ECHELON could expedite and simplify those highly unethical practices.
The public needs more disclosure on projects like ECHELON or personal and cyberspace privacy may very well become virtues of the past.