about  "Inside Echelon" 

Echelon is the system of international communications surveillance.

biggest network of Echelon seems to belong to US and his alliance. it covers all the communication means (except physical ones like a messenger): telephone, email, fax, telegraph ,pages..

this does not mean that somebody reads every email or listens to all the phone calls, but it is rather selective: there are lists of interested people to keep under surveillance and a set of keywords/concepts to filter the huge amount of daily communications.

nowadays the task of choosing relevant intelligence from ocean of data exchanged every second is done automatically. computers with tremendous processing powers do the job of information retrieval. after several automated step, a human may look at the extracted data and decide if it is valuable or not.

In this years, main target of Echelon systems are  economic and commercial intelligence used for so called ""the economic well-being" of the country.

it seems to me that second major use of this intelligent nowadays is spying on their own citizens! having social and political movements and their leaders under control is one main reason for that.
what they gather is half important as what they use this information for. if gathering information on social or trades union leaders follows actions to limit or disable social movements, in long run it can be harmful for the society's development.