Re:New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone ...
by amatecha on Monday July 18, 2022 @09:30PM
(#32146415)
Ah right, I remember when Echelon Watch[0] was launched, and made the rounds in chat rooms I frequented at the time... Of course most people dismissed it as conspiracy theory stuff :)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelo...
It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues):
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer...
By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day".
>It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...