Remember ECHELON? This is how they intercept communications

[TomInTib]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/ECHELON/echelon.html

Remember when this was tinfoil hat material?

"Oh, come on, no one would use this for anything other than good".

Yeah, right

[AX10]

1. ECHELON does exist.

We know that now.

[eek]

2. DARPA! DARPA! DARPA!

The Information Awareness Office is a mass surveillance development branch of the United States Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It has a mission to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness".


The IAO originally had a mission of Total Information Awareness -- amended in May of 2003 to Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA). John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan served as the first head of the IAO.
The IAO and its stated mission caught the attention of many Modulistics, conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians, particularly with its use of the pseudo-Masonic eye-in-pyramid symbol in its original logo. That logo featured the eye of Providence from the Great Seal of the United States gazing at the Earth, and the Latin motto scientia est potentia, meaning "knowledge is power".
On approximately December 19, 2002, the pyramid logo disappeared without comment from the official IAO webpage, presumably in response to widespread criticism of its Masonic/Illuminati overtones. The biographies of senior staffers also disappeared. For the former page, see the archived mirror <1><2>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

[TomInTib]

4. What is Poindexter up to now? Or did we just find out?

[killbotfactory]

7. Probably working for Acxiom

They have huge databases that store information on practically everybody, garnered from agreements with numerous companies who provide the information, available to anybody for the right price. This info has been used by Democrats and Republicans.

http://www.acxiom.com

Big Corporate Brother is watching you.

[Moochy]

3. Here's another good one: Too much Info to store?

"There's no way they could store all that information"

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430

But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work?

Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose.

TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.

A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.

A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.

32 gigabytes of RAM is a lot of telephone bandwidth, which means alot of concurrent phone calls.

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm here's another link, from the report to the EU Parliament back in 2000 on Echelon.

These are the statistics on the fastest known supercomputer in the world, BlueGene/L owned by the DOE. It has 131,072 processors. And it is capable of between 280,000 and 367,000 GFLOPS!!

System Name  	 BlueGene/L
Site 	DOE/NNSA/LLNL
System Family 	IBM BlueGene/L
System Model 	eServer Blue Gene Solution
Computer 	eServer Blue Gene Solution
Vendor 	IBM
URL 	http://www.research.ibm.com/bl...
Application area 	Not Specified
Main Memory 	32768 GB
Installation Year 	2005

Performance/Linpack Data
Processors  131072
Rmax(GFlops) 280600
Rpeak(GFlops) 367000 	

http://www.top500.org/system/7747

I only post blueGene/L as a comparison of "state of the art" supercomputer capabilites vs. what the technical requirements would be for recording every transatlantic phone call, fax, email etc.

[Dr.Phool]

5. I'm about halfway through "Body of Secrets" right now.

Published from NSA documents. And it came out in 2001.

If you think ECHELON is fun. Google "Operation Northwoods". Actual Joint Chiefs documents on that.

[Neil Lisst]

6. I always feel like somebody's watchin' me

and I got no privacy