"Onyx is a Swiss intelligence gathering system. It is similar in concept to the American ECHELON system, but at a much smaller scale. The costs of the system are not public, but the number of 100 million Swiss francs has been mentioned several times, in particular in 2000 by Werner Marti, SP deputy to the National Council of Switzerland. The Onyx system was launched in 2000, originally under the name SATOS-3 (the SATOS 1 and 2 systems were started in 1992, in particular to intercept faxes), and was completed in late 2005. Two new antennas will be installed in Leuk in 2006, for a total of four antennas at this site. The goal of the system is to monitor both civil and military communications, such as telephone, fax or Internet traffic, carried by satellite. In a way similar to ECHELON, Onyx uses lists of keywords to filter the intercepted content for information of interest, and the choice of keywords by the intelligence community must be approved by an independent commission. The system is not supposed to monitor internal communications; however, the monitoring of a communication between a person in Switzerland and someone in another country is allowed. The Swiss Federal Council has indicated that Onyx is not linked to other foreign systems such as ECHELON; according to the Council, the confusion and rumours about this issue are due to the sale by Swisscom to Verestar (now SES Americom) of the ground satellite communication station of Leuk (next to the Onyx site) in 2000." From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. URL: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)