Back in the day at winmag.com, I wrote a few times about Echelon, a supposedly top-secret project by the NSA to monitor all international communications to and from the U.S. Echelon, it was said, could pick out key words from among the flood of information traversing the American border.
I expressed my doubts about whether something like Echelon could exist, or whether it was the product of Oliver Stone-fevered minds.
Danish journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, who apparently have been following the Echelon story for a while, landed an interview with a gent named Bruce McIndoe, the lead architect for Echelon II. He basically confirms the whole thing.
Of course, he could be lying, too.