info

[deleted]

ECHELON is the name of a multinational project that monitors most of the world's communications--it was originally developed to spy on the Soviets, but it's been alleged that [insert shadowy organization here] is abusing it for various purposes. For what it's worth, most of these assertions rely on an overinflated idea of just what ECHELON is capable of; no computer on Earth can actually sift through all the data that passes through the system, and even just looking for the Arabic word for "bomb," for example, would produce millions of useless results. ECHELON's most likely use is in finding very specific phrases that are almost never used in conversation--a code name, for example, or the site of a major industrial lab. That makes it a very powerful tool for espionage, but not the Orwellian god-machine the filmmakers are probably thinking of. So in brief, yeah, this is gonna be like Eagle Eye, only slightly less dumb and containing just enough of the truth to send people into a paranoid frenzy.