Well. I won't claim to have evidence of what exactly the network is used for now. The radio and communication satelite interception is what we know from some documents after the Freedom of Information act, even if it's glaringly obvious that the project was not shut down or limited to a specific set of areas. It's hopeless discussing the evidence for what it does, though. It will always be partial theories like this, for instance. Of course, the US still denies that anything like /this particular espionage system, nossir/ exists, even after other intelligence agencies have admitted it, and that would mean hundreds of conspiracy theories muddling the real issue. Because what is interesting is to look at the possibilities of such networks, and how they might be used. And after that, how they might be circumvented. I mean, the interesting parts are how much we trust information to be safe, what uses encryption has and so on. Perfectly sane and important issues that have been just that since the start of global communications. You can read about the echelon network on echelonwatch.org if you'd like a paranoia trip or something like that. But as I said, it offers no proof, even if many likes to think so, that there exists a global network which can scoop any and all information from anywhere. That kind of theories have a special name. That is no excuse for saying that there exists no possibilities for these networks whatsoever, though. Think of how fast the blaster- worm managed to spread and how long it survived, and you get the picture. The author of that virus wrote something like "oi, Bill Gates made it possible for me to do this to your system - upgrade now" in the code. Believe me, causing a protection fault which would shut down the system is not the only thing a buffer overflow can be used to do to a system (specially if it's windows).