Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?

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15 October 2004
Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?
Uncle Sam using Texas' SAM.
By Chris Mellor, Techworld

You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the 
US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking 
for key words and phrases.

Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing 
international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to 
listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the 
hope of preventing attacks.

All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists 
and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed 
that the Brits and Yanks has got there first.

It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites 
and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine 
satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them 
on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the 
recordings in real time.

But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps 
our government spy on the world? And how does it work?

Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk 
(SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at 
TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP 
systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of

snip

<http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430>


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