WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?

 

That’s an interesting question. For fifty years, the government and just about everyone else was convinced that a cataclysmic war was imminent. ECHELON was created in the hope of understanding the Soviets well enough to head off such a war. If that proved impossible, we could learn enough about what they planned to attack first with overwhelming destructive force.

That world was easy for agencies like the NSA to understand because the bad guys more or less played by the same set of rules as we did. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, the intelligence environment has become much more confusing. Terrorists gather together in secretive, decentralized organizations with few ties to a country. They don’t use traditional means of military communication, and they hide among the civilian population.

To normal people, it’s terrifying that anyone on the street could be planning to blow up a subway station. For intelligence agencies, it’s just frustrating. They used to be able to pin the enemy down and put him under a microscope. Now it’s all they can do to even find rumors about where the enemy might be. If the enemy could be anyone, the best solution is to watch everyone.

Of course, your safety is not our intelligence agencies’ only motivating factor. In 2001, the European Parliament issued a report warning businesses in the European Community to begin encrypting their communications because they believed ECHELON had been used for industrial espionage. That’s right: The NSA was shaking the dust off its signals analysis calculator to financially benefit American businesses. It has also been alleged that ECHELON was used to spy on Japanese automakers to give Detroit an edge.

Unless you’re a millionaire European industrialist (or a billionaire American one), this doesn’t mean much to you. Except, if the NSA is willing to engage in what is essentially an act of war against our closest allies only to benefit American corporations, what might they be willing to do to you?