On November 8, the U.S. Senate gave thumbs-up to an annual funding bill that bolsters America's spying skills. Total monies approved for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NSA, and other super-secret efforts remain classified. While both House and Senate lawmakers must now strike a balance between their respective funding bills, it is clear that billions of extra dollars -- beyond that of a minimum $30 billion yearly budget -- are earmarked to revitalize and beef-up ground- and space-based surveillance technologies.

"Five years from now, the NSA must have the ability to collect and exploit electronic signals in a vastly different communications environment than that in which we spent most of the second half of the 20^th century," said Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat.

As he introduced the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 in Congress, Graham said that having the same level of electronic surveillance today that we had just a decade ago requires a major investment in new technology, such as sophisticated software to cope with huge amounts of collected data.

The wisdom of Congress pumping added monies into high-tech, intelligence-gathering gadgetry like eavesdropping spacecraft is arguable, two noted experts contend.

"The Echelon network represents a reasonable attempt to share the burden of global coverage among several nations with shared concerns about terrorism, proliferation, and other key topics," said Robert Steele, a 25-year veteran of the national security community. He is Chief Operating Officer for Open Source Solutions in Oakton, Virginia.

Steele points out, however, that Echelon is largely based on 1970's technology. It has gradually lost most of its value because of considerable gains in private sector forms of communication that are not amenable to Echelon collection.

Spies on the ground are more in demand than spending and sending billions of dollars worth of intelligence-gathering satellites skyward, Steele argues.

"The information explosion has dramatically changed what and how nations need to do intelligence. Instead of secret collection, the emphasis must now be on all-source processing. Instead of technology in space, the emphasis must now be on smart humans with their feet firmly planted on Earth,"

"I am strongly opposed to the recapitalization of the secret satellite program," Steele told SPACE.com. New expenditures represent an "outrageous continuation of very old ideas," he said.

What is desperately needed, Steele adds, "is to improve human analysis, clandestine human collection, all-source processing, and access to the full range of multi-lingual open sources of information."

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists's Project on Government Secrecy, offers a similar note of caution.

"After September 11, the limits of the so-called Echelon surveillance network should be clear to everyone. Far from being some kind of omniscient global surveillance system that is the instrument of U.S. hegemony, Echelon was not even adequate to the task of protecting against a direct attack on the United States," he told SPACE.com.

"Between those who assert that NSA's global surveillance activities are ubiquitous and inescapable, and those who say that NSA is slowly going deaf in the face of technological change, events seem to favor the latter position," Aftergood said.