1972–2000: Public disclosures Former NSA analyst
Perry Fellwock, under the pseudonym Winslow Peck, first blew the whistle on ECHELON to
Ramparts in 1972, when he revealed the existence of a global network of listening posts and told of his experiences working there. He also revealed the existence of
nuclear weapons in Israel in 1972, the widespread involvement of
CIA and NSA personnel in drugs and human smuggling, and CIA operatives leading Nationalist Chinese (Taiwan) commandos in burning villages inside
PRC borders. In 1982, investigative journalist and author
James Bamford wrote
The Puzzle Palace, an in-depth history of the NSA and its practices, which notably leaked the existence of the eavesdropping operation
Project SHAMROCK. Project SHAMROCK ran from 1945 to 1975, after which it evolved into ECHELON. In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a
Lockheed employee under NSA contract, disclosed the ECHELON
surveillance system to members of Congress. Newsham told a member of the
US Congress that the telephone calls of
Strom Thurmond, a
Republican US senator, were being collected by the NSA. Congressional investigators determined that "targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start". Bamford described the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian
telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg. A detailed description of ECHELON was provided by the New Zealand journalist
Nicky Hager in his 1996 book ''
Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network''. Two years later, Hager's book was cited by the
European Parliament in a report titled "An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control" (PE 168.184). In March 1999, for the first time in history, the
Australian government admitted that news reports about the top-secret
UKUSA Agreement were true. In 2000,
James Woolsey, the former Director of the US
Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed that US intelligence uses interception systems and keyword searches to monitor
European businesses. Lawmakers in the United States feared that the ECHELON system could be used to monitor US citizens. Critics said that the ECHELON system emerged from the
Cold War as a "Big Brother without a cause".
2000–2001: European Parliament investigation , who testified before the
European Parliament and provided specific details about the ECHELON
surveillance system The program's capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001. It was chaired by the Portuguese politician
Carlos Coelho, who was in charge of supervising investigations throughout 2000 and 2001. In May 2001, as the committee finalised its report on the ECHELON system, a delegation travelled to
Washington, D.C. to attend meetings with US officials from the following agencies and departments: • US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) According to a
BBC correspondent in May 2001, "The US Government still refuses to admit that Echelon even exists." The EP report concluded that it seemed likely that ECHELON is a method of sorting captured signal traffic, rather than a comprehensive analysis tool. The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. • TRANSIENT: for intercepting
Soviet satellite transmissions • ECHELON: for intercepting
Intelsat satellite transmissions The
European Parliament's
Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System stated, "It seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail". At that time, according to Newsham, the code name ECHELON was NSA's term for the computer network itself. Lockheed called it
P415. The software programs were called
SILKWORTH and
SIRE. A
satellite named
VORTEX intercepted communications. An image available on the internet of a fragment apparently torn from a job description shows Echelon listed along with several other code names. Britain's
The Guardian newspaper summarized the capabilities of the ECHELON system as follows: Documents leaked by the former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden revealed that the ECHELON system's collection of satellite data is also referred to as FORNSAT - an abbreviation for "Foreign Satellite Collection". ==Intercept stations==