Didn't know that. My earliest recollection was during the Clinton Administration, although it makes sense that intelligence gathering operations such as this may take years to truly develop as they require technology maturation to really implement.
ECHELON: America’s Secret Global Surveillance Network — Patrick ...
http://www.ncoic.com/nsapoole.htm - 81k - Cached - Similar pages
ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the .... would follow for forty years would be the breeding ground of the ECHELON spy system. ... President Harry Truman established the NSA in 1952 with a presidential ...
“Executive Summary
In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the General Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today.
The ECHELON system is fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) programs, and look for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON “Dictionary”) that will prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective “listening stations” maintain separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation”