After 27 Years, Reporter Who Exposed ECHELON Finds Vindication in Snowden Archive

5.8.15

After 27 Years, Reporter Who Exposed ECHELON Finds Vindication in Snowden Archive: As Campbell writes today, in a first-person article in The Intercept, the archive of top-secret documents provided to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contains a stunning 2005 document that not only confirms ECHELON’s existence as “a system targeting communications satellites”– it shows how the program was kept an official secret for so long.

It describes how in 2000, the European Parliament responded to increasingly authoritative reports that ECHELON was being used to indiscriminately survey non-military targets — including governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every corner of the world — by appointing a committee to investigate the program.

Members of the committee vowed to get the truth from the NSA. What happened, according to an article in the NSA’s own in-house “Foreign Affairs Digest” was this: