HOW DOES IT WORK?
Radio and satellite communications are easy to intercept, as long as you have billions of dollars to spend doing it and the space to spread out. With sites in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere, ECHELON has the world covered.
Radio is a stupid way to broadcast secure communications, even if you use code. When you use a radio, it squirts the signal in pretty much every direction for hundreds of miles. Anyone with an antenna can hear it. At the beginning of the Cold War, most military communication was done over shortwave radio, so the NSA just built antennas in a circle around the Soviet Union and hired a bunch of Russian-speaking analysts to sit there and listen. That was the beginning of ECHELON.
Telephone networks were likewise unsophisticated. Every telephone was connected to a central switching station that routed all traffic. Tap into one part of the network and you had access to the entire thing. The United States was really fond of tapping Soviet telephone networks—even going so far as to send submarines into Russian harbors to deploy divers to install taps on underwater cables. Submarines actually had self-destruct buttons in case they got caught doing this stuff.
When the world began switching over to satellite-based communications, ECHELON evolved. The microwave transmissions used in satellite networks are harder to intercept than radio. Still, microwave scatters enough that you can capture the signal as long as you have a big enough radar dish. So the NSA put a bunch of giant radar dishes in orbit.
The Internet explosion of the nineties was like Halloween and Christmas combined for the NSA. For most of that decade, something like 99 percent of all Internet traffic was routed through the United States, making it a cinch to scoop up every bit of it as it floated by. By 1999, there must have been entire mental wards full of NSA analysts driven mad by terabytes of Star Trek fan fiction.
Today, ECHELON may be nearing the end of its life. In the last decade, the worldwide communications infrastructure has decentralized and returned to Earth, relying now on line-of-sight networks (you and I call them cellular networks) and fiber-optic cables. Neither technology relies on a central hub for routing traffic. To intercept all the cell phone traffic in the world, you’d need to place a listening device on every cell tower. To listen in on modern Internet traffic, you’d need to travel the globe physically tapping fiber-optic trunk cables.
Behemoth government programs like ECHELON don’t ever die. The actual listening capability of ECHELON may be diminished, but the analytical kung fu it has learned is not something the NSA will lightly discard. It is certain that ECHELON will only transmogrify into some new technological terror designed to snoop into our secrets.