by: F.R. Duplantier

"The culmination of the Cold War conflict brought home hard realities for many military and intelligence agencies who were dependent upon the confrontation for massive budgets and little civilian oversight," reports Patrick Poole of the Free Congress Foundation. For the National Security Agency, or NSA, however, "the end of the Cold War just meant a shift in mission and focus, not a loss of manpower or financial resources."

Poole says "the rapid growth of NSA resources and facilities around the world" has prompted protests from various foreign nations regarding "the extensive spying upon their citizens by the U.S." He cites a recent European Parliament report confirming the existence of ECHELON, "a massive U.S. spy technology network that routinely monitors telephone, fax, and email information on citizens all over the world, but particularly in the European Union and Japan."

Poole explains that ECHELON is "a vast network of electronic spy stations located around the world and maintained by five countries: the U.S., England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries, bound together in a still-secret agreement called UKUSA, spy on each other's citizens by intercepting and gathering electronic signals of almost every telephone call, fax transmission, and email message transmitted around the world daily. These signals," Poole points out, "are fed through the massive supercomputers of the NSA to look for certain keywords. . . ."

Poole emphasizes that ECHELON enables the snoops at the National Security Agency to spy on "the citizens of other countries while also allowing them to circumvent the prohibition on spying on U.S. citizens. ECHELON," he charges, "is not only a gross violation of our Constitution, but it violates the good will of our European allies and threatens the privacy of innocent civilians around the world. The existence and expansion of ECHELON," Poole warns, bodes ill for "the future of our Constitutional liberties."

Poole recognizes "a need for such sophisticated surveillance technology. Unfortunately," he concedes, "the world is filled with criminals, drug lords, terrorists, and dictators that threaten the peace and security of many nations. The thought that ECHELON can be used to eliminate or control these international thugs is heartening," Poole agrees. "But defenders of ECHELON argue that the rare intelligence victories over these forces of darkness and death give wholesale justification to indiscriminate surveillance of the entire world and every member of it."

Poole urges freedom-loving Americans to reassert civilian control of these invasive technologies in order to suppress the "illegal targeting of political opponents, business competitors, dissidents, and even Christian ministries." He considers the current lack of Congressional oversight to be "a frightening harbinger of what may come here in the United States. The European Parliament has begun the debate over what ECHELON is, how it is being used, and how free countries should use such a system," Poole observes. "Congress should join that debate," he counsels, for failure to do so could lead to "the demise of our republican form of government."