Thoughts after Inside Echelon

Review of the article "Inside Echelon" by Duncan Campbell

The idea (or fact) that we are being watched more and more by governments, is not new. Since the Cold War (maybe even before), people have constantly felt the Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

Campbell's article reviewed the system, that is one of the greatest examples of machinery committed to the creation of that feeling. Ehcelon has greatly expanded during the last decades, which is somewhat phenomenal, because there seems to be now no apparent threat to the countries involved. I believe it is happening because of the constant technological development and the cost-reduction of a surveillance system like that.

To other countries disadvantage - the system is owned mainly by US and secondly it's allies UK and other English speaking western countries. From gathering military information during the Soviet Union existing times, the Echelon has shifted to economic information gathering from western countries and somewhat lesser military information gathering from developing countries (North-Korea, China).

Since the surveillance system is being more and more automated, it is apparent, that from any day now, nothing will be private, since now the chance of you "missing the bot or the listener" will soon be eliminated.

Thoughts on the situation? I follow a somewhat simple code in my life. "Have no privacy". That means, that no one could shock me with their knowledge about my thoughts on some subject or events happened to me. Thus I am never worried, when hearing again ideas about governmental conspiracy. So I will not be stressing typical worries about individual right to privacy, because that's vanity. Thinking that you, a 75 year old incident to happen in this planet, are worth longtime tracing, is in my opinion short-sighted.

The problem however is big in the industrial spying between (or toward) different countries. How could we, Estonians, expect to really invent something world-beneficiary (Nokia), if big countries have surveillance systems like these. From the moment, some talented student or programmer in Tallinn writes down in digital form his or her great idea and shares it, basically it would be possible that the next day a group of IBM scientist are working on it, thanks to the information discovered and then shared by NSA, that for the greater glory of their country.

The way I see it, there is no point seeing us being anything greater than a country with nice islands to visit in summers, because never will we have such military potential to defent our economy (defending our country is somewhat questionable by certain people in Estonia) from systems like Echelon. That is of course saddening.