Project Echelon

So you think the NSA monitoring your Phone Records and American Citizens INTERNATIONAL Calls is a recent post 9/11 Bush administration only thing?

Well your wrong.

Project Echelon is a Global Surveillance network. This network has databases set up in countries all around the world, that store the information on every call, email, and any other data source the NSA can their hands on. This means that even United States Citizens could possibly have information about themselves in these international data centers, the program is/was not only limited to outside the U.S. it spied on everybody. By setting up the databases in foreign lands, the NSA got around US anti-monitoring laws.

So when the USA Today, Washington Post, and New York Times, releases news stating the NSA has super secret programs that collect information about American Citizens, I can only say "it took you long enough to figure that out."

Project Echelon has been around since the 1980's. If somebody stated it back then they were labeled a UFO freak, for lack of a better word. By the time I was in 6th grade, hell, I even knew about the hush-hush Project Echelon, so it's nothing new.

The part that gets me is when Congress tries to blame this on the current sitting President. Since Project Echelon and collecting intelligence on American Citizens (en-mass) has been around since (at least the early 1990's) there is no reason Congress should be blaming this on anybody, just to make it an election issue.

The fact is this program is so secret if revealed it could start a war with a few of the global powers sitting on this planet, like Russia. Project Echelon was not only limited to wiretapping, the NSA also participated in satellite communication tapping, computer network tapping, utility records (and any other record you can think of).

Quite honestly it seems outlandish, even when I step back and look at the whole Project, but it's not entirely NEWS, as some of the papers would like to put it. Congress has no right to attach President Bush to this, no matter his stupidity level.

The USA Today, the Post, and the Times are reporting is misleading information to attempt to stir up public sentiment, and so the authors of the articles can win national acclaim. To those NSA employees who think they have done a service to their country, you in fact should respect your God damn paygrade and not try to leak information you don't know much about in the first place.

Technorati tags: Project Echelon NSA Wiretapping Phone Records Privacy Saftey