ECHELON has been confirmed by the Princess Dianna spy story...

Now many people out there might read the story and think "secret service" means "Secret Service," but that is the same difference between "democratic" and "Democratic."

To the UK, secret service is like intelligence service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_service

^^^Article about this.^^^

Article about Dianna's phone being bugged:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1968664,00.html

So that means that the ECHELON program was in fact real.

I can now guarantee you that your telephone conversations have been monitored by a foreign government as part of this program.

The idea is simple, since no democratic nation on Earth would allow its government to intercept all the telephone calls of its people without a warrant, governments cannot wiretap their own people en masse.

However, the people of a democratic nation 1 do not have control over democratic nation 2, and if democratic nation 2 were to spy on the people in democratic nation 1, then it wouldn't be illegal.

If you ask anyone in America if they have a problem with wiretapping calls on foreign soil made by foreign peoples, they will probably respond that they don't have a problem.

However, they don't realize that another democratic government may be listening on their phone calls. And they probably wouldn't guess that the information gathered in those calls may indeed get back to the US government.

Article about ECHELON at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

This is what happened in the Dianna case, and because it is so distracting no one is paying attention to the overarching problem, the long alleged ECHELON program is real.

This actually brings up another problem, since we know the 9/11 hi-jackers made telephone calls, how is it that this ECHELON system didn't prevent 9/11, if it is so integral to national security?

then they are listening to everyone else.

This is such a betrayal of the British people who are supposedly our allies. Friends aren't suppose to spy on friends.

this is a consensual agreement, they (their governments) know it is happening, even though MI6 wasn't informed (that's probably BS by the way, though people on both sides might have a special agreement not to spy on leaders.)

This may very well be a big day in a couple of years. People are going to realize that this is 2006, and it's a hell of a lot worse than 1984.

Listening to the British Royal Family is a much more serious matter.

and it shows how Clinton was not a real Democrat. No real Democratic President would allow this, and one has to wonder if that's why none other than Clinton have been elected in so many years. Of course Al Gore and John Kerry are both DLCers.

This is pretty scary stuff.

I think however, that all the participating governments must have had limits on whom they could spy, and one of the logical limits would be not spying on leaders. Hence, the Dianna flap that is about to happen.

than previously reported.

It widely reported after 60 Minutes did a story on ECHELON, that the program was solely an electronic signal intercept. Meaning over the air. Meaning, only long distance satellite telephone communications were being monitored, and that anything at the local level was safe. Well, somehow the US government has managed to get taps on the landlines of Europe. This program must be spying on millions of innocent everyday people.

If the rabble get to take pictures with their phones, corporations and governments get to do fun stuff like that too. And since institutions are much more important than any individual person in this world, the watchers/listeners don't care if they might be watched/listened to. If they get caught, the system goes on.

And the thing is that it's going to be hard to tell Americans what's wrong here. It's such a complicated scheme.

To the idea of freedom(whatever that is)? Yes, it's fairly fucked up.

For the idea of security, order, predictability, chanceless existence? It makes sense, and the further you go, the more sense it makes.

It's not just this program obviously. It's all these data mining/information gathering programs. It's everything on credit, it's computers, it's phones, it's everything period. Hell, to simply protest, you need to fill out regulation forms to get permission to do it. It's our entire way of life. It's the ease of order.