Where technology is today vs. 60 years ago
Let me spin you a yarn about a net you can’t see.
Once upon a time—back when computer techs wore neckties and people smoked in restaurants—there was a contraption called ECHELON. It was a listening machine, built by five English-speaking nations who decided the world was too loud to leave un-shushed. They strung antennas across quiet hills, hid cables under louder oceans, and taught a new kind of clerk—the mainframe—to eavesdrop politely at industrial scale. It could scan for keywords and record your conversations unto tape. People said it didn’t exist. People always say that right up until it does.
Sixty years later, the machine is no longer across the hill; it’s in your pocket—helpfully taking photos, counting steps, and writing down every place you’ve ever meant to forget. That, dear reader, is what progress looks like when it forgets to ask for permission.
Five Eyes: from wartime hack to peacetime machine (1940s–1960s)
- Bletchley & Midway → the proof. WWII codebreaking (Enigma/Ultra in the UK; Purple/JN-25 in the U.S.) proved that signals intelligence (SIGINT) could win battles as surely as tanks.
- BRUSA (1943) → UKUSA (1946). A temporary wartime pact hardened into the UKUSA Agreement, knitting together the U.S. (NSA), UK (GCHQ), Canada (CSE), Australia (then DSD, now ASD), and New Zealand (GCSB). This is the origin of the Five Eyes (FVEY).
- Division of labor.
- UK: Europe/Middle East/Africa choke points (e.g., Menwith Hill; GCHQ Bude).
- U.S.: Global infrastructure, satellites, undersea taps.
- Canada: High-latitude & Arctic traffic.
- Australia & New Zealand: Southern Hemisphere, Indian & Pacific basins (e.g., Pine Gap in AU; Waihopai in NZ).
- Early Cold War goal. After 1946 the mission sharpened: watch the USSR continuously—missiles, fleets, embassies, industry.
ECHELON: birth and build-out (late 1960s–1990s)
- The problem. By the late ’60s, satellites, HF radio, and microwave relays produced too much traffic for humans.
- The answer. Automate it. Under an umbrella effort often recounted as FROSTING (1971), ECHELON focused on capturing and filtering satellite/commercial links at scale.
- How it worked. Worldwide listening posts hoovered up radio, satellite downlinks, and (where feasible) microwave and cable hops. “Dictionary” computers applied keyword lists (names, terms, numbers) to flag messages for analysts.
- Notable sites (sampler).
- RAF Menwith Hill (UK): those “golf balls” (radomes) in Yorkshire; satellite downlink focus.
- GCHQ Bude (UK/Cornwall): Atlantic gateways and cable traffic.
- Pine Gap (Australia): Asia–Pacific satellite interception and telemetry.
- Yakima (U.S.): Pacific satellite tasks (historically cited).
- Teufelsberg (West Berlin): a man-made hill of WWII rubble turned antenna farm, aimed at Warsaw Pact signals.
- Complement, not replace. ECHELON’s ears paired with aerial/satellite eyes (U-2, CORONA/Keyhole) and HUMINT to form a layered picture of Soviet capability and intent.
Inside the Cold War spy game (what it actually did)
- Missile & space telemetry. Intercepts around test ranges revealed types, readiness, and trajectories, feeding early-warning and arms-control verification.
- Submarine patrols. Radio coordination and discipline lapses helped anticipate SSN/SSBN movements; ocean acoustic nets + SIGINT made ambushes harder.
- Diplomatic cables. Kremlin-to-embassy instructions exposed policy lines before they hit the podium—crucial in crises (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis as a composite of imagery + SIGINT).
- Industrial/tech watch. State research chatter flagged aero, nuclear, and computing priorities—sparking perennial debates about economic espionage vs. security.
The taps and the towers (methods at a glance)
- Satellites. Ground stations locked onto downlinks (INTELSAT and military birds) to pull voice/data before it reached receivers.
- Microwave relays. Long-haul terrestrial chains leaked; place a dish just right and you could sip the beam.
- Undersea cables. Risky and rare, but high-stakes taps proved possible.
- HF radio. Old but global; ionospheric skip let well-placed antennas hear thousands of miles away.
Secrecy cracks and public fights (1970s–2000s)
- 1971: Ex-NSA analyst Perry Fellwock (“Winslow Peck”) publicly describes a global intercept alliance; for many, it’s the first time they hear of the NSA.
- 1975–78 (U.S.). The Church Committee exposes domestic abuses; Congress creates FISA (1978) and the secret FISA Court to cabin surveillance at home.
- 1988: UK journalist Duncan Campbell details ECHELON’s scope and hints at commercial targeting controversies.
- 1996: NZ’s Nicky Hager publishes Secret Power, mapping New Zealand’s role (Waihopai) and keyword “dictionaries.”
- 2000–01 (EU). The European Parliament investigates, concluding a Five Eyes system exists and privacy safeguards are inadequate; debate over industrial espionage (Airbus, etc.) erupts.
- UK legal milestones. Interception of Communications Act (1985) → RIPA (2000) modernizes authorities and oversight.
- Canada/Australia/NZ. Mandates and oversight evolve (CSE/ASD/GCSB) with periodic inquiries as digital traffic explodes.
After the Wall: from bloc watching to planet watching (1990s–2010s)
The target set widened: proliferation, terror networks, cyber, organized crime, economic/security threats. The pipes changed too—from satellite emphasis to fiber backbones, IXPs, mobile networks, cloud platforms, and mass web traffic.
Then Snowden (2013) dragged the grandchildren of ECHELON into the sun (PRISM, TEMPORA, XKEYSCORE). The names on the boxes changed; the logic did not: collect broadly, filter automatically, share quickly across FVEY. The architecture matured from Cold War batch processing to always-on, metadata-rich, machine-assisted surveillance—with encryption and platform policies becoming the new battlegrounds.
Personal note
In full disclosure, I never worked on any of this. But I knew of a few mysterious buildings—some with rooms inside rooms and doors that swallowed keycards like candy. When 9/11 broke the sky, part of that lattice cracked, and it was rebuilt with a vengeance. Steel hardens in a forge and so does the surveillance state.
Yesterday’s Net vs. Today’s Ocean
Then (circa 1965–1971):
- Hardware ruled. Rooms of gear caught radio, satellite, and microwave signals. Storage was physical, heavy, and expensive.
- Targets were few. Blocs and armies; “signals” meant diplomats, radars, fleets.
- Filtering was blunt. Keyword “dictionaries” and human linguists sifted haystacks for needles.
- Speed was slow. Days to collect, weeks to decrypt, months to understand.
- Secrecy was the feature. The public heard rumors; the official answer was “no comment.”
Now (2025):
- Software rules. Chatter flows through clouds, phones, apps, APIs; storage is cheap, elastic, and effectively bottomless.
- Targets are…everyone. Not just states but citizens, companies, journalists, activists, and bots pretending to be all four.
- Filtering is surgical. AI models pattern-match across languages, images, voices, locations, and social graphs—on autopilot, in real time.
- Speed is instant. Events are observed, labeled, and actioned as they happen.
- Secrecy is replaced by opacity. We “consent” via 42-page click-throughs, and data brokers convert our lives into line items.
The Old Cathedral vs. the New Bazaar
- Centralized surveillance → Federated harvesting. Yesterday’s vault was government-only. Today’s vaults are ads systems, app SDKs, telcos, clouds, smart TVs, cars, doorbells—stitched together by contracts instead of code names.
- Scarcity of compute → Abundance of inference. What once took cryptographers now takes consumer GPUs and open models. We don’t just record the world; we predict it.
- Signals intelligence → Everything intelligence. A phone’s motion sensor, a photo’s EXIF, a Bluetooth handshake, a loyalty-card swipe—each is a syllable. Together they form a language that says who we are.
A simple ledger of the last 60 years
- Compute: From room-sized hulks to chips that sip power and guess your face in a crowd.
- Storage: From tapes in safes to petabytes on tap.
- Bandwidth: From chokepoints to oceans.
- Algorithms: From keyword matchers to foundation models fluent in the mess of life.
- Friction: From warrants and war rooms to one-click permissions and quiet pipes.
If you prefer windows with curtains
- Use end-to-end encrypted apps for anything you truly care about.
- Limit default sharing on phones, cars, TVs, assistants; uninstall the cute flashlight that asks for your contacts.
- Rotate unique emails/phone aliases to starve data brokers.
- Prefer on-device AI when you can; it leaks less than the cloud.
- Assume metadata is forever. Behave accordingly.
Back then, the telegraph line hummed, and the men at the other end swore they weren’t listening. Today, the line is the air itself, and the listener is a friendly rectangle that wakes when you say its name. We traded scarcity for saturation, secrecy for opacity, and rumor for policy written by product managers on a deadline.
Was ECHELON a shield that kept the peace, or a seed that grew a forest of eyes? That argument will outlive both of us. But I’ll tell you what the old river teaches: water follows the easy path. So does data. If we don’t build the banks, it will take the town.
Sixty years on, the machine doesn’t hide in hills. It borrows your charger. And if you don’t decide who it serves, it will decide for you—politely, automatically, and at scale.
The Devil’s Bargain
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