The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him (John), to
shew unto his servants things which must shortly (suddenly?) come to
pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John
...

13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or
the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number
of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six
hundred threescore and six.

15:2 And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them
that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and
over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of
glass, having the harps of God.
 
 

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00617F63D540C778DDDA80994DA404482

... here is what faces us:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine
subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site
you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you
receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every
event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go
into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual,
centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has about you
- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records,
judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the
F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera
surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a " Total
Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to
your personal freedom ... if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented
power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval
Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national
security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant
idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages,
and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in
Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of
misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court
overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his
testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that
the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for
fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even
more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness
Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology.
Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the
"data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every
American."

William Safire is a former speech writer for Richard Nixon.
 
 

http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

... summary:

In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National
Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename
ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax,
email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is
controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the
Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the
Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian
Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications
Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound
together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text
remain under wraps even today.

The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept
stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave,
cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this
information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA,
including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition
(OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the
ECHELON "Dictionary") that will prompt the computers to flag the
message for recording and transcribing for future analysis.
Intelligence analysts at each of the respective "listening stations"
maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation
or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the
respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the
intercept.

But apart from directing their ears towards terrorists and rogue
states, ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its
original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance
targeted at American civilians for reasons of "unpopular" political
affiliation or for no probable cause at all in violation of the First,
Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution - are  consistently
impeded by very elaborate and complex legal arguments and privilege
claims by the intelligence agencies and the US government. The
guardians and caretakers of our liberties, our duly elected political
representatives, give scarce attention to these activities, let alone
the abuses that occur under their watch. Among the activities that the
ECHELON targets are:

Political spying:

Since the close of World War II, the US intelligence agencies have
developed a consistent record of trampling the rights and liberties of
the American people. Even after the investigations into the domestic
and political surveillance activities of the agencies that followed in
the wake of the Watergate fiasco, the NSA continues to target the
political activity of "unpopular" political groups and our duly
elected representatives. One whistleblower charged in a 1988 Cleveland
Plain Dealer interview that, while she was stationed at the Menwith
Hill facility in the 1980s, she heard real-time intercepts of South
Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. A former Maryland Congressman,
Michael Barnes, claimed in a 1995 Baltimore Sun article that under the
Reagan Administration his phone calls were regularly intercepted,
which he discovered only after reporters had been passed transcripts
of his conversations by the White House. One of the most shocking
revelations came to light after several GCHQ officials became
concerned about the targeting of peaceful political groups and told
the London Observer in 1992 that the ECHELON dictionaries targeted
Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and even Christian ministries.

Commercial espionage:

Since the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the intelligence
agencies have searched for a new justification for their surveillance
capability in order to protect their prominence and their bloated
budgets. Their solution was to redefine the notion of national
security to include economic, commercial and corporate concerns. An
office was created within the Department of Commerce, the Office of
Intelligence Liaison, to forward intercepted materials to major US
corporations. In many cases, the beneficiaries of this commercial
espionage effort are the very companies that helped the NSA develop
the systems that power the ECHELON network. This incestuous
relationship is so strong that sometimes this intelligence information
is used to push other American manufacturers out of deals in favor of
these mammoth US defense and intelligence contractors, who frequently
are the source of major cash contributions to both political parties.

While signals intelligence technology was helpful in containing and
eventually defeating the Soviet Empire during the Cold War, what was
once designed to target a select list of communist countries and
terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually
every citizen in the world. The European Parliament is now asking
whether the ECHELON communications interceptions violate the
sovereignty and privacy of citizens in other countries. In some cases,
such as the NSA's Menwith Hill station in England, surveillance is
conducted against citizens on their own soil and with the full
knowledge and cooperation of their government.

This report suggests that Congress pick up its long-neglected role as
watchdog of the Constitutional rights and liberties of the American
people, instead of its current role as lap dog to the US intelligence
agencies. Congressional hearings ought to be held, similar to the
Church and Rockefeller Committee hearings held in the mid-1970s, to
find out to what extent the ECHELON system targets the personal,
political, religious, and commercial communications of American
citizens. The late Senator Frank Church warned that the technology and
capability embodied in the ECHELON system represented a direct threat
to the liberties of the American people. Left unchecked, ECHELON could
be used by either the political elite or the intelligence agencies
themselves as a tool to subvert the civil protections of Constitution
and to destroy representative government in the United States.