Turing kicks butt
The Germans had dozens of genius mathematicians on their side, but the British had a guy named Alan Turing. Turing was such a badass math genius that he could solve complex differential equations just by pelvic thrusting and saying, “Boo-yah!” German code was so afraid of him it broke itself. Thanks to the work of Turing and his team, signals intelligence became indispensable. With a shortwave radio and a team of math nerds, you could sit comfortably at home (or, in the case of Turing, at the decoding center in Bletchley Park) and listen to the enemy tell you what he was going to do. The days of sending borderline psychopaths onto foreign soil to engage in mayhem were over.
Building something like ECHELON was a no-brainer. In the forties, we knew exactly where all the bad guys were—in Central Europe and Japan. After the war, we turned our attention to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Why not build a worldwide listening organization designed to sift through every piece of information it could grab out of the air?
ECHELON is a worldwide network of satellite intercept stations, telephone network listening installations, and analytic computer systems scanning all the communications traffic it can for key words, trigger phrases, coded messages, and encrypted data. When it first began operation, it collected and sorted all of the signals intelligence coming out of the Soviet bloc; now it allows the English–speaking world’s spooks to check out what’s going on everywhere all the time.
Any time the National Security Agency is connected with a program like this, you know it’s going to be trouble. The NSA is the favorite bogeyman of conspiracy theorists around the world—and with good reason. If the United States were going to create an organization specifically to employ evil supergeniuses, it would be the NSA. The CIA is full of smarter-than-average jocks that split their time between going over other people’s bank statements and flying to foreign countries to kill people. The NSA is full of retired mathletes with a mean streak. ECHELON is the biggest toy in its toybox.
When the Soviet Union fell apart and everyone realized that the prospect of war with China was silly, the NSA was left with a giant ear and no bad guys to listen to. Or rather, the bad guys had scattered. Instead of gathering together conveniently in the same country, they disappeared into deserts and cities, hiding among the civilians of friendly nations. These days, the bad guys are everywhere.
ECHELON listens to everything it can, parses what it hears for references to drugs or terrorism, and lets your local black helicopter dispatcher know. Theoretically, that’s all it does. But then, about ten years ago, an investigation by the European Parliament determined that ECHELON could be used for industrial espionage—meaning that the NSA, when it picks up a hint of an interesting innovation in Europe, might be passing along technical or strategic details to American businesses. If that’s the case, what else are they listening for?