Unless there have been some recent changes that I'm not aware of, Echelon is not affiliated with NATO (in fact, many of NATOs members are spied on by Echelon). It is a network run primarily by intelligence agencies of UKUSA alliance - USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (as well as a few other minor partners who give some contribution). It is well known that Echelon can search through internet traffic and fascimiles (among other "written" forms of long-range communication) for keywords, but at the current point in time it is unclear whether Echelon possesses the ability to do the same with telephone conversations via some form of speech recognition. An EU report from earlier this year seemed to indicate there was little evidence of this.
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Unless there have been some recent changes that I'm not aware of, Echelon is not affiliated with NATO (in fact, many of NATOs members are spied on by Echelon). It is a network run primarily by intelligence agencies of UKUSA alliance - USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (as well as a few other minor partners who give some contribution). It is well known that Echelon can search through internet traffic and fascimiles (among other "written" forms of long-range communication) for keywords, but at the current point in time it is unclear whether Echelon possesses the ability to do the same with telephone conversations via some form of speech recognition. An EU report from earlier this year seemed to indicate there was little evidence of this.