On Echelon

The advance of intelligence systems like Echelon has reached an impressive growth and somehow resembles the structure of the internet itself for its ability to process data.What looks majestic to me is the dimension of this system. Trying to imagine the proportions and the quantity of information that is circulating around the world, it seems that a constant increasing amount of information is being everyday vehiculated through modern digital media.
Reflecting upon Echelon, its existence and its role in our society leaves me with an aura that contains at the same time elements of fiction (I can't help thinking of the American series 24 and NSA's role in it) and of the gigantic proportions that a system like this requires to work. It's easy to relate the need of such a system with bigger ones. If commercial powers such as google, yahoo (jee i can't believe i'm talking about yahoo in 2009, feels so old school :P ) need so much processing power to index and analyze just a portion of internet's data, how impressive would be a system that can actually process not only internet "static" data but also its dynamic information such as chat, VoIP and all the other possible streams that run through the internet? (not counting all the other media available in the world -i think of satellites, radio, sms…-)
This leads me to think that the financial effort which needed for an efficient system that could filter our world's information is impressive and that the UKUSA treat has been a natural consequence of a need -not just of physical coverage- but also of covering the expenses of such a big system.
Considering this and today's importance of information i'm wondering how richer countries could have a superior knowledge over world's information and how could this lead them to acquire even a higher status in the world's power. If it's indeed true that countries such as Switzerland can develop systems which could be similar to Echelon, will they ever be able to catch up with almost 60 years of expertise by the UKUSA?