| http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?x24258394
Echelon spying network exists, EU committee says 
09:59 Thursday September 6, 2001, Newsbytes Echelon exists, the European Union (EU) Parliament was told. Echelon, allegedly a vast information collection system capable of monitoring all the electronic communications in the world, has been talked about in security circles for several years. But no government agency in the world has ever confirmed or denied its existence. An EU committee has been investigating the system for almost a year. Just because the surveillance network exists, however, doesn't mean that government agencies can access all the information Echelon collects, Gerhard Schmid, the German Member of the European Parliament (MEP), told Parliament members in Strasbourg. In his presentation, Schmid said that Echelon - which allegedly is a joint venture between the governments of the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia and New Zealand - sucks up electronic transmissions "like a vacuum cleaner," using keyword search techniques to sift through enormous amounts of data. The report recommends that the EU negotiate a set of data privacy rules with the US, similar to those that already exist in the EU countries |
