WHAT IS IT?

 

ECHELON (not an acronym—just written in all caps to make it scary) is the modern name for the largest and oldest signals intelligence-
gathering operation in the world. Rumored to have been in development since 1947, and probably in operation since the late sixties, it operates under the auspices of an agreement signed by the world’s five major English-speaking nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, aka AUSCANNZUKUS (now that’s an acronym).

In World War I, battles were won or lost by maneuvers planned before the first shot was ever fired—you transmitted orders by screaming as loud as you could. If the enemy outmaneuvered you, there was no way to react before your position was overrun and your men killed or captured. Human intelligence was king back then. Coded messages were handwritten using simple ciphers that today’s BlackBerry could crack. Capturing these messages came down to identifying a courier and interrogating, torturing, or killing him. The codebreakers of the era were nowhere near as important as the agents in the field.

That all changed during the Second World War. In World War II, thousands of troops could be redeployed with a single radio command, air power and artillery could be directed to where the enemy was most concentrated, and endangered troops could call for help. The battlefield went from a static pit of mud and blood to the fluid chaos of modern war.

Signals intelligence (the practice of intercepting transmissions; it is distinct from human intelligence, which is the practice of putting people in a dark hole and hitting them with a bar of soap in a sock) became critical. Both sides of the war poured resources into encryption and code-breaking techniques, each hoping for an edge. It was the Allied command of signal interception and codebreaking that allowed them to give the Nazis the righteous ball stomping they so richly deserved.