You are correct IKNowNot. This thread is full of speculations, but hardly anyone commenting seem to know their 'facts'.

Carnivore (which is used by the FBI) is in no way, shape, or form, designed to be a central packet collection. It is simply a digital wire tap. With a warrant, they can use these devices with the cooperation of the suspects ISP, and filter the traffic to that specific customer. This can be used to monitor any illegal activity over the wire. It is indeed like a glorified cisco box with dummy friendly GUI that they can connect to.

Echelon (directed by NSA) on the other hand, IS a central information collection. We are not talking about a desktop sitting in a dark NSA room in some bunker running ettercap, collecting every packet in the globe... nor are we talking about a single 'super computer'. Echelon is just a name given to the most complex collection of surveliance technologies our government has today. It is tied together with our satelite systems, our telephone systems, our cellular systems, and also the Internet back bone fiber lines. It operates on filters mainly, and processes chunks of data at a time, looking for 'keywords' and red flags. We are talking everything from voice recognition, to nuclear blast detection.

Echelon has been in operation since the 60's, and has actually grown quite obsolete. There is a new operation being implemented that is simply being reffered to as 'Echelon II'.

Although the subjects are classififed, they are not a complete mystery. All you have to do is a little homework.