Greenwald: Leaked Docs Reveal Agency's (GCHQ) Digital Propaganda Toolkit

[Octafish]

41. (I imagine) ECHELON used mainframes out of IBM.

ECHELON Today: The Evolution of an NSA Black Program

Tom Burghardt
FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013

EXCERPT...

Coupled with Snowden’s disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported here and here), revealed that the agency–far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his “secret and confidential” black files–has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.

While Tice’s allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American policy–elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations–despite being deep-sixed by US media, they confirm previous reporting about the agency.

When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA’s ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for New Statesman revealed that a whistleblower, Margaret Newsham, a software designer employed by Lockheed at the giant agency listening post at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England, stepped forward and told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session, that NSA was using its formidable intercept capabilities “to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals.”

Campbell’s reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s groundbreaking book, Secret Power, the first detailed account of NSA’s global surveillance system. A summary of Hager’s findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared in CovertAction Quarterly.

As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that “NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes,” said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.ca/2013/07/echelon-today-evolution-of-nsa-black.html

IBM had a lot of experience in the field.