Lawrence Sloan writes in the Duke Law Journal http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+1467 ----- "The various allegations surrounding ECHELON can be roughly grouped into two categories. The first set of allegations, coming primarily from Europe, concerns the use of the ECHELON system to conduct economic espionage on behalf of American companies. The second set of allegations involves the illegal use of ECHELON to collect intelligence about American citizens. This second set of allegations will be the focus of this Note. In a society such as ours, which considers privacy and freedom from intrusive government to be fundamental values, the prospect of the American government spying on its citizens is extremely troubling. These allegations raise questions about the sufficiency of the legal restrictions placed on the collection and use of signals intelligence. The use of national intelligence assets to conduct industrial espionage for the benefit of American companies over their foreign competitors is controversial, but that issue turns primarily upon matters of policy rather than law. This Note will focus on the legal restrictions on signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities and, thus, will set aside the primarily policy-driven question of using national intelligence assets to conduct economic espionage." -----