AUSTIN, TX-A suburban office building containing federal government offices was destroyed Thursday morning by a small airplane that authorities believe intentionally crashed. The seven-story, 65,000-square-foot Echelon I building was struck at approximately 9:30 a.m. local time.
According to various media reports, the building at 9430 Research Blvd housed offices for the Internal Revenue Service and several other federal agencies. The pilot of the Piper Cherokee that flew into the building, identified as Joseph Andrew Stack, reportedly had a long-running dispute with the IRS.
The IRS has stated that 190 employees worked at Echelon I, part of a four-building office park, and that personnel were still being accounted for Thursday afternoon. The Federal Aviation Administration says it is investigating the incident as a "criminal act" rather than an accidental plane crash.
Echelon is an interesting name!
I’ve known people who would not say that name aloud and would not type those letters on any computer.
For people unfamiliar with tin foil conspiracy theories, “Echelon” is the name used to refer to an alleged global monitoring system that allows the government to monitor, cross-reference and catalogue any and every electronic exchange of data. Phone conversations, e-mails, data transfers—the theory is that everything gets scanned, tagged by key words and stored. (The theory goes that’s how the US had tapes of the KAL-007 disaster.)
Wikipedia says: ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network...
Anyway, this building in Texas apparently is just a low-level government building and not the nerve center of the most advanced global spy apparatus in the world.
But it’s interesting that some nut decided to fly his plane into a building with the same name.
I was actually reading news at Free Republic when a Freeper apparently was the first person to discover the nut’s “manifesto” and send out its location to various new agencies. I checked out the HTML source of the nut’s supposed web site and it looked so neat and clean (the source code, I mean) that I assumed it was an internet prank and not the real deal.
But so far it’s being reported as real.
So today is an interesting day.
I’ve already seen the numerology references: 9+11=20 and 2+18=20 along with 9+1+1=11 and 2+1+8=11
That’s interesting. And the name of the building is interesting. And the amount of damage one little plane caused is interesting.
I’m guessing, however, that this is the kind of interesting stuff that will get more attention on the internet than on TV or in the papers.
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