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Secret Power (now free to download as e-book) is a fascinating book about New Zealand's role in the international UKUSA based spy network. Published in 1996 but hardly known to the public, the book is one of the first well documented papers to shed a light on the most secret ECHELON system. The story begins after the Second World War, when the United States and the United Kingdom sign the UKUSA agreement, to gather and share Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). Soon after, Canada, Australia and New Zealand joined this cooperation. This was to become the largest worldwide SIGINT organisation ever. The boek provides many details about the origings and history of the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), their collaboration with the other SIGINT agencies and the how and why of the most secretive UKUSA agreement. In the 1980's, a system was introduced to automatically categorise, filter and store the vast amount of intercepted signals from commercial satellites, radio communications, telephone, fax, Telex and e-mail traffic. The system, codenamed ECHELON became an enormous source of intelligence.
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