Is Big Brother spying on you?

[Magical Zombie Cow <waste@zor.hut.fi>]

http://www.msnbc.com/local/WTVJ/140469.asp

The eavesdropping stations are controlled by the National Security
Agency in Maryland, which is bigger than the FBI and CIA combined.

Is Big Brother spying on you? 

Imagine your government being able to listen in on every call you
make, check every fax you send and find out about your ATM and credit
card transactions. Stop imagining. It is not a movie...it's real. Big
Brother- the U.S. government- may be secretly spying on you.

It may sound far-fetched, but it is true. A super-secret hi-tech
surveillance system has been in place for years to monitor
communications world wide. It is operated by five countries- the U.S.,
England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

 Watch Ike Seaman's
 Special Report

Now former spies and others are coming forward to warn that this
system may be being used to listen to you. From thousands of miles in
space, satellites are monitoring every form of communication in the
world. They are zeroing in on your phone calls, e-mails, faxes, etc.
So who is controlling this super secret surveillance system?...
Government spy agencies. "This is a giant vacuum cleaner that's
capable of sweeping up essentially all telecommunications," said Barry
Steinhardt of theAmerican Civil Liberties Union. "It's worse than
that. It's also capable of intercepting all your ATM charges, credit
card transactions, anything that is communicated electronically,"
added former spy Mike Frost.

Twenty satellites circle the globe transmitting communications from
businesses, government, and people like you. The messages are
intercepted by a system that sounds like something from a spy novel.
It is called ECHELON- a vast worldwide network of eavesdropping
stations such as the one in Sabena Seca, Puerto Rico, which was
originally built to spy on Cold War enemies. It is controlled by
theNational Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland and is bigger than
the FBI and CIA combined.

 Many Americans first
 heard about the NSA'S
 awesome eavesdropping
 capability in the movie
 "Enemy of the State." In it
 Gene Hackman warns Will
 Smith: "The National
 Security Agency conducts
 worldwide surveillance:
 Fax, phones, satellite
 communications."

A growing number of critics charge this potential to invade your
privacy is targeting Americans. "To say that Big Brother is listening
is somewhat of an understatement given the magnitude of what appears
to be going on here," said Rep. Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia.
NSA computers scan millions of messages listening for keywords trying
to find terrorists, drug dealers and threats to national security.
Experts estimate ECHELON also spies on as much as 90 percent of
Internet communications.  Privacy experts such as Wayne Madsen, a
former NSA analyst, say if information gathered by high-tech computers
such as these are mis-used, innocent people can easily get caught in
ECHELON's web. "If you were to say I'm reading a book about the
Kennedy assassination right now, the assassination is a key word. It
would trigger the ECHELON database," Madsen, a former NSA analyst,
said. "These are innocent conversations that are being analyzed by
intelligence operatives." According to Frost, one man was a suspect
because an analyst said he repeatedly talked about "bombing." "He
wasn't saying "bombing." It was an undertaker talking about embalming
and this poor guy, we had him listed as a possible terrorist," said
Frost, who was a spy for 19 years. He was trained to use ECHELON for
Canada's secret spy agency, a NSA partner. "They can invade your
privacy and mine at will," Frost continued.  Frost is the first
insider to ever talk about the secret eavesdropping system and NBC 6
is the first American television station or network to tell his story.
He showed NBC 6 Senior Correspondent Ike Seamans an ECHELON base in
Ottawa, Canada which he says can violate anyone's privacy. "It's being
geared toward individuals rather than the enemy. We are now looking at
citizens of our own country." Before Congress passed a law to stop it
20 years ago, the NSA routinely spied on Americans, sometimes on
orders from presidents. An official familiar with intelligence told
NBC 6: "The NSA still targets Americans if national security is
threatened. But abuses don't happen today." Abdeen Jabara says he was
not a threat when he led protests against U.S. Middle East policy. But
when he sued the government for invasion of privacy- and won- in 1994,
he learned the NSA spied on him. "For all I know, the NSA still has
this material. They have an enormous amount of material that they
maintain in computers as a result of this surveillance that has gone
on against Americans for many years and I'm just one of them," said
civil rights activist Abdeen Jabara.

The NSA spy base in Menwith Hill, England is the largest in the world.
Outside the spy base, using a home satdish aimed at a communications
satellite, protesters discovered how easy it is to eavesdrop... on
you. Congressman Barr, a former CIA analyst, wants a law to force the
agency to come clean about spying on Americans. "When the intelligence
community won't even come forward and provide us a basic understanding
of what they are doing, it certainly makes us suspicious," Barr said.
The NSA refuses to confirm or deny anything. James Bamford first
revealed the extent of NSA's spying in the book "The Puzzle Palace."
"The NSA is like a black hole. Everything goes in but nothing comes
out," Bamford said. "Yes, they eavesdrop on foreign countries but that
is what their job is. The question is- Will the system be turned on
the U.S. population? And that's the big danger." "Big Brother can
invade your privacy at will anytime he wants to and you will never
know it. And it's really scary," Frost warned, "If this isn't checked
in the near future, it's going to to become a very serious problem."
Awareness and now protests are growing. On Tuesday, the American Civil
Liberties Union put up a Website called ECHELON Watch to keep it in
the public eye. The European Parliament is also charging its citizens
are spied upon and wants it stopped. At a high-level briefing in
Washington, Seamans offered the NSA an opportunity to talk about
ECHELON. He was told, "There are so many allegations about NSA, we
can't confirm or deny the charges."