The report of the European Parliament’s commission to investigate ECHELON was released in 2001. Despite showing that ECHELON merged US signal intelligence work with economic and industrial espionage, 9/11 overshadowed any potential for a political response.
In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed the existence and functions of a new iteration of mass surveillance programs. He said at the time “[if] there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests — even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security — then they’ll take that information nevertheless”. Still, the political responses were mere performative outrage and subsequent attempts at building out small-scale equivalents.
Today’s ECHELON is almost certainly already built and being expanded. And it’s going to be AI in and AI out. It will be fed the entire context of all your interactions with the SOTA models. And your company’s interactions. The interactions of all the organizations of your country.
This unlocks industrial espionage capabilities on an entirely different level. If the political will exists, it could relay realtime information about trends and directions of every international competitor to US industrial interests. Research, operations, detailed day to day, hour by hour, explicit and tacit knowledge and actions.
There is no doubt that the current US administration understands this. And that the industry this time will be ready and willing to play a more active part, given the politics of their leadership and the legal infrastructure of the Patriot Act.
If this new ECHELON is not already active, those in charge should be fired on the spot. The opportunity is just too good and the money and capabilities are clearly there. The only question that remains is how the rest of the world is going to react this time.