You are just throwing accusations right and left without comprehending the material that you linked to.

Look, I am trying to point out the bigger picture here, internationally, and developments over the last couple of decades. I provided you with one of the key open sources that provided a public touchstone for those who were aware of the abuses over a decade ago. Understanding that document should put the fear in to most people. I am forced to question whether you have read the document, but reading your comments such as It seems that what ECHELON has access to is something that anybody can lay their hands on and I have pasted the whole section here it is clear that you have not. Put some effort in, educate yourself, then come back and have a discussion.

Tell me which clause leads you to believe ECHELON actively breaks into corporate networks.

Now you are putting words in to my mouth. I brought up Echelon as one part of the information warfare arsenal deployed by non-Chinese state actors for commercial espionage purposes, which was the original scope of discussion.

If you conduct your business by broadcasting messages over a public, then not only ECHELON, but the whole world can listen to it.

Oh right. "Everyone else deserves what they get", what a civic perspective! Show me how widespread encryption was in the mid '90s when the world was just getting on the internet. Now show me how widespread that was for VSAT systems and long-haul ISDN being shot out to NSA satellites over long-haul microwave links. I personally worked on video conferencing and surveillance systems in that era for multiple governments and I can tell you that as far as any deployed system I witnessed across five or so countries went, nobody used passwords, ever - to say nothing of encryption!

This is much different than the ugly spearfishing and active breaking in by the Chinese.

Believing there is no targeting capability within Echelon and similar systems is a huge and IMHO poorly supported assumption. Remember, that document is 10+ years old, discussing information on the state of the art ~15 years ago. Further, after Stuxnet and other revelations, believing the west does not develop offensive information warfare capabilities is laughable. Some of us knew this 10+ years ago. They were a lot less careful at hiding their tracks back then (eg. frequent use of IPs within reasonably.specific.descriptor.mil.somecountry reverse DNS to browse the web).

Did you just keyword search and paste without understanding what the clauses meant?

No, I read that document when it first came out, in fact I was reading about Echelon before it was published, and being labelled a nut-job. Since then I have occasionally glanced at it, usually to provide a reference to unbelievers. It's very rare that someone reads it and continues to argue.

While we're at it of a morning, here's some more information on how normal this stuff is. It is pretty well established that the Chinese routinely supply entire mobile telephony systems to developing nations (in Africa, etc.) in order to - on the face of it - sweeten resource extraction deals, but it is widely assumed to maintain a technical capacity for signals intelligence through that infrastructure (Huawei, etc.).

Are they alone? Consider this: while physically on the ground for a month during the Tunisian revolution, the first of the Arab spring, I found that Vodafone offered the fastest 3G I'd ever experienced - anywhere in the world. I even had Facebook and Gmail access. To assume that communications capability was not a targetable intelligence asset for the west in some measure seems ... highly unlikely to me.

More to the point, Applebaum of the Tor project also visited Tunisia later on as a precursor to his being in touch with people in other Arab Spring nations. Many (most? all?) of the revolutions uncovered vast, turnkey, state-level mass surveillance and censorship tools -- supplied to these regimes by individual companies in the west. Wikileaks then subsequently provided a large release around this: Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries. http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/

Now; where do you think the know-how to provide states with that sort of infrastructure comes from? Just the commercial world? Or people who have left the government fold to go commercial? I think you'll find they support each other.

In closing, we as technologists have a responsibility to maintain an ethical outlook on our field. Our field is a global one by definition, and therefore above nationalism. Given this context, we can either choose to contribute to paths that effect the betterment of the world through increased human rights, or to the whittling-away of individual rights to privacy, free speech and self-determination for the profit of the few. One path is easier, requires less thinking, less self-education, and offers more pay. The other is a greater challenge. In so far as I am aware, of those I personally respect, real hackers prefer a challenge. Your path is your own. Choose it wisely.