In a piece published today in The Intercept, life-long privacy advocate Duncan Campbell describes his past few decades tracking down the elusive Project ECHELON, “the first-ever automated global mass surveillance system. The scope has evolved in that time period from keyword lifts in intercepted faxes to its current all-encompassing data harvesting. Over the last fifty years, Project ECHELON has given the UK and United States (as well as other members of the Five Eyes) the capacity to track enemies and allies alike within and outside their states. If history is written by the victors, government surveillance agencies will have an awfully long list of sources to cite.ĭomestic digital surveillance has often seemed to be a threat endured mostly by the social media generation, but details have continued to emerge that remind us of decades of sophisticated, automated spying from the NSA and others.īefore the government was peering through our webcams, tracking our steps through GPS, feeling every keystroke we typed and listening and watching as we built up complex datasets of our entire personhood online, there was still rudimentary data to be collected. Image Credits: Anna Jumped (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license. Uncovering ECHELON: The Top-Secret NSA/GCHQ Program That Has Been Watching You Your Entire Life
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