Congress has just voted to kill a measure to reign-in domestic spying,

The following text Source: Forbidden Knowledge

Congress has just voted to kill a
measure to reign-in domestic spying,
despite outcries from all over the place,
including the White House.

One wonders if any members of
Congress were blackmailed into voting
that way?

Before there was PRISM, there was
ThinThread and before that, there was
ECHELON.

There is nothing that Edward Snowden
has revealed that has not been public
knowledge since at least 1998, if not
earlier.

ECHELON has been active since at least
the mid-’70s, according to former NSA
employee, Margaret Newsham, who claims
that she worked on the configuration and
installation of software that makes up the
ECHELON system while employed at
Lockheed Martin, for whom she worked
from 1974 to 1984 in Sunnyvale, California
and in Menwith Hill, UK.

Although she enjoyed the work and was
proud of her programming prowess, she
says she regrets her participation in 
spying on ordinary people, politicians,
interest groups and private companies,
which is what she did for 10 years. She
was ultimately fired by Lockheed when
she refused to work on a particular project
in 1984, which she believed was was illegal,
unconstitutional and ultimately harmful to
the US Government.

Films about ECHELON in English are hard
to come by! This is a fascinating Korean
documentary on the subject, interspersed
with interviews conducted in English and
Korean subtitles.