Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definitions: Echelon |
EchelonNoun1. A body of troops arranged in a line. 2. A diffraction grating consisting of a pile of plates of equal thickness arranged stepwise with a constant offset. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "echelon" was first used: 1796. (references) |
| Domain | Definitions |
Military & Defense | A formation in which its subdivisions are placed one behind another, with a lateral and even spacing to the same side. Source: European Union. (references) |
| 1. a subdivision of a headquarters, i. e. , forward echelon, rear echelon 2. separate level of command. As compared to a regiment, a division is a higher echelon, a battalion is a lower echelon 3. a fraction of a command in the direction of depth, to which a principal combat mission is assigned; i. e. , attack echelon, support echelon, reserve echelon. Source: European Union. (references) | |
Mining | An arrangement of faults, veins etc in which the individuals are staggered like the treads of a staircase. Source: European Union. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
ECHELON is a name for what is believed to be one of the largest spy networks in history. According to some sources it can capture nearly every telephone call, fax and e-mail message sent anywhere in the world. There are estimates that ECHELON intercepts up to 3 billion communications every day. The participating countries of the network are the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The US-only program of "Total Information Awareness" relies on technology similar to ECHELON, and may integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the 'taps' already compiled by ECHELON.
Allegedly created solely to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies, today ECHELON is believed to search for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealers' plans and political and diplomatic intelligence. But some critics claim the system is also being used for commercial theft and invasion of privacy on a staggering scale.
All members of the English-speaking alliance are part of the UKUSA intelligence alliance that has maintained ties since the World War II. Various sources claim that these states have positioned electronic-intercept stations and deep-space satellites to capture most radio, satellite, microwave, cellular and fibre-optic communications traffic. The captured signals are then processed through a series of supercomputers, known as dictionaries, that are programmed to search each communication for targeted addresses, words, phrases or even individual voices.
Individual states in the UKUSA alliance are assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite and radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and thugs in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.
Experts stress that ECHELON is simply a method of sorting captured signals and is just one of the many new arrows in the intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated bugging and communications interception techniques, satellite tracking, through-clothing scanning, automatic fingerprinting and recognition systems that can recognize genes, odours or retina patterns.
The Americans are believed to dominate the UKUSA alliance, providing most of the computer expertise and frequently much of the personnel for global interception bases. The U.S. National Security Agency, headquartered in Fort Meade, Md., just outside Washington, DC, has a global staff of 38,000 and a budget estimated at more than $3.6-billion (all dollar figures US unless otherwise specified). That's more than the FBI and the CIA combined.
By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a branch of the Canadian Department of National Defence. It has a staff of 890 people and an annual budget of $110-million (Cdn). The CSE's headquarters, nicknamed "The Farm," is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building on Heron Road in the nation's capital of Ottawa, Ontario, and its main communications intercept site is located on an old armed-forces radio base in Leitrim, just south of Ottawa.
The governments of Australia and the Netherlands have already confirmed that ECHELON exists (though not specifying any details of its capabilities or operations). Furthermore, Former CIA Director R. James Woosley has admitted using the system information about foreign companies using bribes to win foreign contracts. The information was passed on to US companies and foreign governments were pressed to stop the bribes.
In May 2001 the European Union produced a report[1] on ECHELON which, amongst other things, recommended for citizens of member states to routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy. In the UK the government thwarted this approach by introducing the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which compels citizens to hand over their encryption keys on demand.
Echelon monitoring of mobile phones in Pakistan was reportedly used to track Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before he was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003.
See also
Further Reading
External Links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Echelon."
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Attack | Base of operations, point of attack; echelon. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Echelon |
| English words defined with "echelon": Echelon lens. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "echelon": assault echelon ♦ back tell ♦ centralized control ♦ decentralized control, dike swarm, director, product assurance, DIRECTOR, QUALITY ASSURANCE ♦ echelon cell, echelon pattern, en echelon, expanded metal ♦ forming up place ♦ landing force ♦ NSA line eater ♦ report line, RFC ♦ target list, track telling. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "Echelon" is also a word in the following language with the English translation in parentheses. German (echelon). |
| Domain | Title |
References | |
Books | |
High Tech |
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Business | CSF also provides support and services commonly needed by all Armed Forces services, such as finance, surveying, engineering, rear echelon administration, and armament appraisal and testing. (references) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| "Echelon" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 100.00% of the time. "Echelon" is used about 25 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 100% | 25 | 69,787 |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| Country | Name |
| USA | Echelon Corporation |
| (more examples...) |
Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.
Expressions using "echelon": assault echelon ♦ attack echelon ♦ combat echelon ♦ counterattacking echelon ♦ draw up in an echelon ♦ drawing up in an echelon ♦ Echelon lens ♦ fighting echelon ♦ first echelon ♦ forward echelon ♦ in echelon ♦ rear echelon ♦ sea echelon ♦ second echelon unit ♦ vertical echelon. Additional references. | |
| Hypenated Usage | |
Ending with "echelon": en-echelon, lower-echelon. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
echelon | 380 |
echelon warrior wind | 127 |
echelon nsa | 79 |
top echelon | 65 |
echelon mall | 64 |
echelon wine | 14 |
dreamcast echelon | 12 |
echelon ford | 11 |
echelon golf | 10 |
echelon insurance | 9 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "echelon"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | skalion, njësi (one, oneness, unit, whole), nivel komande. (various references) | |
Arabic | نسق (arrangement, array, assort, coordinate, gear to, layout, manner, match, mode, orchestrate, ordain, range, rate, regulate, series, system), القافلة (caravan, convoy), إصطف (align, rank, row, stand, string, toe the line), درجة (class, degree, grade, league, point, proportion, stage, stair, tier). (various references) | |
Bulgarian | ешелонирам, ешелон. (various references) | |
Chinese | 梯形编队. (various references) | |
Danish | echelonnere, echelon. (various references) | |
Dutch | en échelon-breuken (echelon faults), plooiing in groep (echelon folds, overlapping folds). (various references) | |
Farsi | پله (Rime, Rung, Stair, Step), ستون پله , رده (Category, Class, Regimen, Tier), بصورت پلکان دراوردن . (various references) | |
Finnish | en-echelon-siirrokset (echelon faults), en-echelon-poimut (echelon folds, overlapping folds). (various references) | |
French | échelon. (various references) | |
German | staffelung (drawing up in an echelon, feed, gradation, grading, graduating, graduation, offset, progression, separation, stagger, staggering). (various references) | |
Greek | κλιμακοειδήσ διάταξη στρατού, βαθμόσ αξιωματικού, ιεραρχία επιχείρησησ. (various references) | |
Hebrew | "ר' (degree, grade). (various references) | |
Hungarian | ranglétra, harclépcső. (various references) | |
Indonesian | formasi militer. (various references) | |
Italian | scaglione (bracket, in groups, terrace), scaglionare (space, space out). (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 部隊 (corps, element, force, unit). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | ぶたい (corps, element, force, stage, unit). (various references) | |
Korean | 대. (various references) | |
Manx | eshloon. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | echelonay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | escalão (rung, stair, step), eclesiasticamente. (various references) | |
Romanian | eşalona, eşalon. (various references) | |
Russian | эшелон. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | ešalon. (various references) | |
Spanish | escalón (bracket, doorstep, grade, ladder, peg, quantum step, round, rung, stage, stair, step, stope, tread). (various references) | |
Swedish | echelong, nivå (grade, level, Mark), grad (arity, burr, degree, even, extent, flash, grade, order, pitch, rank, scale, step, straight). (various references) | |
Thai | ระ"ับตำแหน่ง (level), จั"ระ"ับ. (various references) | |
Turkish | paralel olarak dizmek, paralel dizilme, kademe (bracket, grade, remove, stage, stair, step), diziliş (arrangement, array), basamak (column, digit, footstep, grade, ladder, order, pitch, place, rung, scale, stair, step, tread, tread board). (various references) | |
Ukranian | розташовувати уступами, ешелонувати, ешелон (wave). (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Late Latin | 300-700 | scala. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "echelon": echeloned, echeloning, echelons. (additional references) | |
| |
"Echelon" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: akheloos, cephalon, chelom, echeleon, Echelles, echelona, echeolon, echeon, echleon, ecuelle, ehelon, Ekelund, epheboi, eschelon, eshelon, Etelin, Geochelone. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "echelon" (pronounced e"shulÄ'n) |
| 4 | -u l Ä' n | carillon, Epsilon. |
| 3 | -l Ä' n | nylon, pylon. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "c-e-e-h-l-n-o" | |
-2 letters: clone, hence, leech, leone. | |
-3 letters: chon, clon, cole, cone, eche, echo, enol, heel, helo, hole, hone, lech, leno, loch, lone, noel, once. | |
-4 letters: cee, cel, col, con, eel, eon, hen, hoe, hon, lee, nee, noh, ole, one. | |
-5 letters: eh, el, en, he, ho, lo, ne, no, oe, oh, on. | |
| Words containing the letters "c-e-e-h-l-n-o" | |
+1 letter: echelons. | |
+2 letters: cellphone, chameleon, echeloned. | |
+3 letters: cellophane, cellphones, chameleons, clomiphene, coherently, echeloning, encephalon, houseclean, telephonic. | |
+4 letters: cellophanes, chameleonic, chloroprene, clomiphenes, clothesline, cyclohexane, honeysuckle, housecleans, nucleophile, preluncheon, schnorkeled, shacklebone, technophile, thermocline. | |
+5 letters: anchorpeople, candleholder, chalcedonies, chalcogenide, chloroprenes, clotheslined, clotheslines, cohesionless, cyclohexanes, dechlorinate, diencephalon, endotracheal, geotechnical, heliocentric, honeysuckles, housecleaned, incoherently, luncheonette, melancholies, nonscheduled, nucleophiles, phylogenetic, shacklebones, technobabble, technologies, technologize, technophiles, thermoclines, underclothes. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)45 63 68 65 6C 6F 6E |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references). -.-. .... . .-.. --- -. |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000101 01100011 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101111 01101110 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)E c h e l o n |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0045 0063 0068 0065 006C 006F 006E |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)39697471788180 |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Commercial 4. Images: Slideshow | 5. Quotations: Non-fiction 6. Usage Frequency 7. Names: Company Usage 8. Expressions | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Translations: Modern 11. Translations: Ancient 12. Derivations | 13. Rhymes 14. Anagrams 15. Orthography 16. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
