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Echelon
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In addition, there are concerns that Echelon's actions may be used to stifle political dissent. Many of these concerns were voiced in a report commissioned by the European Parliament. What is more, there are no known safeguards to prevent such abuses of power.
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According to Bea Yormark, Echelon’s president and COO, “There are many markets that, with the application of control technologies for energy efficiency and management, could have a huge impact on global climate change today. Echelon is creating the infrastructure that is enabling many industries such as the retail stores, street lights, and commercial buildings to cost effectively and easily incorporate energy efficiency into their operations.â€
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For convenience individual Echelon states appear to have a broad responsibility for monitoring traffic in different parts of the globe. Australia for example supposedly concentrates on communications originating in Indonesia and Indochina; the UK covers Europe, Russia west of the Urals and Africa. In practice much of the surveillance appears to be undertaken by US personnel operating from facilities in partner countries, with nationals of those states sometimes being restricted from all/part of a station. Much surveillance appears to be overlapping, with the US covering Latin America, most of Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China.
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Characters tend to banter rather than talk in screenwriter Conviser's workmanlike SF debut, set in an indeterminate and pacified future in which whoever controls Echelon, an electronic surveillance system, controls the world. After Echelon agent Ryan Laing dies and is brought back via nanotech "drones," he possesses an extra connection into Echelon's data flow. This ability comes in handy when Ryan and fellow agent Sarah Peters discover a coup in progress against Christopher Turing, Ryan's mentor and Echelon's director. Alternately on the run from and penetrating into Echelon's past and present, the pair persuade other agents to join them in a hunt for a legendary hacker hideout, Elysium. The highly visual descriptions of the cyberpunk setting make the usual suspects (nanotech that confers superpowers, secretive "suits" vs. "street" hackers, virtual/physical reality crossover) a bit more cinematic, albeit at the expense of believability. The mystery of Echelon's origin dangles at the end, pointing to the promised sequel.
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The Echelon system seems to have emerged in something like its present form, though at a much less advanced technological stage, during the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, as NSA and GCHQ geared up for the use of satellites on a grand scale, U.S. and British leadership began to recognize the need for interception and processing sites. The first ground station in what came to be known as Echelon was established at Morwenstow, Cornwall, in England, using two large dish antennae to intercept communications across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Soon NSA built another such station at Yakima, Washington, to intercept communications across the Pacific. Other sites followed, among them Men with Hill in England, Stanley Bay in Hong Kong (dismantled and moved to Australia prior to the Chinese takeover in 1997), and Sugar Grove in West Virginia.
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The new assay, co-developed by Lpath and Echelon, is designed as a sensitive and robust method for the quantification of S1P. It was developed under an exclusive agreement that grants Echelon world-wide rights to develop, market, and sell a "research use only" assay kit that incorporates Sphingomab as a method to determine the concentration of S1P.
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Echelon