Investigating Echelon

It appears that the European Parliment is going to attempt to investigae Echelon, the somewhat mystical eavesdropping entity that is supposed to be able to listen to all Continental communications. This article gives a great amount of detail about what it is alleged to be, but apparently it's run by five security agencies, including the NSA, and can intercept almost anything. I'd love to have this rig at home. updated Die Zeit has an article in German about an alleged abuse of Echelon: a german company invented a more efficient method of generating ecologically friendly energy. To their surprise an american company claimed it to be their invention and sued them. German TV (ARD's plusminus) has shown a lot of evidence that the NSA got the information via Echelon and then gave it to the US company. Recall that Germany is not part of Echelon. At the end of the article, they even claim that Intel may be building a back door into its latest processors. (sengan)