Echelon...
google echelon french parliamentary inquiry
France is a NATO member, therefore participates in Echelon. Back around 1998-2000 The French government wondered how come French companies kept getting their bids on major international projects beaten. They had a parliamentary inquiry, and found that the US was using their control of the Echelon system for commercial spying on their NATO 'partners.'
If you keep looking you will find a lot on Echelon. Though it's all outdated information now.
For eg
https://cryptome.org/jya/echelon.htm (1998)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_AffaireEchelon-EN.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820352.stm EU probes Echelon 5 July, 2000
My personal reference points:
* I have some ex-Echelon satellite downlink receivers. 'Rescued' from destruction. Came from SBRS (Shoal Bay Receiving Station) which was an Echelon eavesdropping site. The information on their source was via a friend, a high up tech in the Oz Navy.
* Conversation with a fellow (name withheld) who at the time was the head of the ACC (Australian Crime Commission) Intercepts division Sydney branch. (I can't reveal the nature of that connection. And it might still have been called NCC then.) Discussed Echelon. He found it uncomfortable but acknowledged Echelon exists (as I described what I knew of it.) His estimate of the proportion of all electronic communication that gets filtered through Echelon: 98% Btw Echelon does not do 'targeted intercepts'. Its designed intent is to scan *everything*.
* Knowing some people who briefly, on a private, password protected web forum, using only their online nics, discussed taking some illegal actions related to traffic cameras. Most were visited soon after by Federal police, who had their real names, addresses, and a full printout of the entire conversation. The police were very nice, just wanted to be assured the conversation had been all in jest. But mainly just letting them know they were watched. (In some other countries those guys would have just vanished.)
Ha ha... I'd made _one_ comment in that severely retarded thread, saying briefly "Are you kidding? You know having spoken of it here, you can't actually do this, right?"
I'd told them before, multiple times, about Echelon. None of them believed me. Severe normalcy bias & failure to research and self-educate. Some of them learned from the experience, others not.
Does anyone in Sydney remember the incident many years ago, where someone with an axe and angle grinder took out all the coms cables in a central node of the Sydney cable tunnels? Knocked out most coms in Sydney for several days.
I'm told that event was Sate-sponsored, perpetrator known, no action taken. Purpose was two-fold.
1. Convince Telstra to lock up all access points to the cable tunnels.
2. Provide an excuse for the downtime required to splice all those cables off to the nearby Echelon monitoring building.
Not many years later there was an identical incident in Hobart. Same reasons.
Re encryption.
All state-approved encryption standards are designed with holes, specifically so the State can read everything that uses those standards. This includes all telcom channel encryption.
Only strong private & public key encryption schemes offer an impediment to State spying. Which is why they are officially depreciated.
For a while, back in the early 1990s, it looked like the Australian government was going to outlaw all strong encryption schemes. I had a friend (died in 1996, mountain climbing in Nepal) who was a high level systems programmer for Telstra. I've stood in his office, reading documents of a Telstra research program in which their network management computers would analyze the nature of content in a channel, working down to identify whether the underlying customer content was encrypted, and if so, in what form. The purpose wasn't just for curiosity.