France Sues U.S. and UK Over Echelon

gaijin|dog writes, "According to this article, the U.S. and UK are to be sued over Echelon. From the article "The British and U.S. governments are to be sued in France after claims that they have spied on French companies, diplomats and Cabinet ministers. French MPs claim to have evidence that the European Airbus consortium lost a Fr35 billion (£3.5 billion) contract in 1995 after its offer was overheard and passed to Boeing." " Now, I'd rate the probablity of actually getting said money at just about the same as, say, Rob and Heather Graham dating,

Comments

French-British History

[hawk]

A couple of years ago at a conference, I was relating my summary
of anglo-french history to a group that included some Europeans.

Roughly, in the second half of the eleventh centrury, a french
duke got irritated and took the english crown for himself. He
still held about a third of France. Over time, this got whittled
down, and the british sent an army across to reclaim/expand their
french holdings. Having done so again, they got neglectful, and the
french holdings again dissipated. Periodically, the brits would send
an army that would trounce a french army three to four times its own
size.

After about 500 years of this, the french finally noticed
that they had castles to hide in. When the brits came, they simply
didn't go out and play, and eventually went home due to long supply
lines. The brits never figured out that since they held the
entire area except for the castles, that they could build their
own castles.

Then came the 20th century, and they discovered that they hated the
germans more than one another.

At this point I was interrupted with a sharp, "No we didn't."

:)

seems it was merely expedient to fight together for a few years

One word: Countersuit.

[Apuleius]

France has been engaging in industrial espionage to give French firms an advantage:

http://www.aci.net/Kalliste/industryespion.pdf

I really hope the US and UK countersue, because then maybe more info on both issues will be revealed.

Re:Hypocrites

[Detritus]

The French have reached new levels of hypocrisy. US Security Bulletins have been warning Americans about widespread and massive espionage by the DGSE for many, many years. This is like the Menendez brothers asking for a lenient sentence because they are orphans.

P-145 documents

[jesser]

Codenamed P-415 Echelon, the world's most powerful electronic spy system was revealed in declassified US National Security Agency documents published on the Internet, and is capable of intercepting telephone conversations, faxes and e-mails.

Has anyone managed to find these documents?

I couldn't find anything mentioning echelon on nsa's public information releases or their list of "high-interest items".

I found a few sites mentioning echelon and P-415, though. This one mentions P-145 as being around for at least a decade. That site doesn't seem to be an unbiased source, though, because its homepage links to things like this rant about echelon with a really big font.

This is another site that mentions P-145 and mobile phone monitoring. It contains a document called "An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control", a long document which mentions echelon and discusses agreements among various countries regarding sharing of information obtained through echelon-like projects.

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