NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders

A note to say that the Stop Watching Us coalition rally is now just two days away. If you&#x27;re on the east coast, it&#x27;s not too late to attend. If you&#x27;re interested, you can find out more here:<p><a href="https://rally.stopwatching.us/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rally.stopwatching.us&#x2F;</a><p>Privacy is one of the hardest things to get folks riled up about. It erodes slowly, and for &quot;good&quot; reasons, like defending the country against terrorism. But privacy is critical to a meaningful democracy. Strangely, many of the members of Congress fail to understand how important it is, and that compromising our privacy for security is a huge mistake. Particularly since those compromises are not necessary.<p>The fact that the NSA is monitoring the calls of world leaders is also worrying. But it&#x27;s more of a foreign policy issue, damaging international relations and making it more difficult for countries to trust the US. I think it&#x27;s foolish, and needs to stop, but it doesn&#x27;t threaten our freedom directly.

This is the top comment on the Reddit thread:<p>&quot;They went after <i>high ranking military officers</i>. They went after <i>members of congress</i>. The Senate and the House - especially on the intelligence committees, and on the armed services committees and judicial. But they went after other ones too. They went after <i>lawyers and law firms</i>. Heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after <i>judges</i>. One of the judges is now sitting on the supreme court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after <i>state department officials</i>. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House - their own people! They went after <i>anti-war groups</i>. They went after <i>US companies</i> that do international business around the world. They went after US banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after <i>NGOs</i> like the red cross and people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few anti-war civil rights groups...<p>Now here&#x27;s the big one. I haven&#x27;t given you any names. This was in summer 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something year old wanna-be Senator from Illinois. You wouldn&#x27;t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It&#x27;s a big White House in Washington DC. That&#x27;s who they went after. And that&#x27;s the President of the United States now. And I could give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw! <i>The names and the phone numbers of congress</i>. Not only the names but it looked like staff people too, and their staff. And not only their Washington office but back home in their congressional offices that they have in their home state offices and stuff like that. This thing is incredible what NSA has done. They&#x27;ve basically turned themselves - in my opinion - into <i>a rogue agency that has J Edgar Hoover capabilities on a monstrous scale on steroids.</i>&quot;<p>--former nsa officer Russ Tice...<p>June 20th interview on Boiling Frogs... <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPyxeqcCjkc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CPyxeqcCjkc</a> (full 1hr+ radio interview)<p>or watch 11 minute RT interview <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6m1XbWOfVk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d6m1XbWOfVk</a>

<p><pre><code> Jay Carney issued a statement that said the US &quot;is not monitoring and will not monitor&quot; the German chancellor&#x27;s communications. </code></pre> This is probably the best tell the US government has for sniffing out the bullshit. If they don&#x27;t explicitly deny the event occurring in the past, it happened.<p>Reminds me of a Spaceballs scene:<p><pre><code> Colonel Sandurz: Now. You&#x27;re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now. Dark Helmet: What happened to then? Colonel Sandurz: We passed then. Dark Helmet: When? Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We&#x27;re at now now. </code></pre> I imagine this is probably about how the &quot;Cover Your Ass&quot; conversation goes before official comments are made to the press.

This is the understood and expected function of the NSA, isn&#x27;t it? Collecting signals intelligence from foreign sources? Does anyone honestly believe the Germans aren&#x27;t regularly trying to figure out ways to listen to American officials&#x27; communications?<p>I find the NSA&#x27;s domestic spying to be appalling... but this is the sort of thing everyone knew the NSA was responsible for since its inception.

This has some interesting implications:<p>What would this information be useful for? Why was the NSA collecting this information and at whose request? Is the same being done to US politicians?<p>The most useful applications of this I can think of are betraying allies, manipulating negotiations with rival trade blocs, economic espionage, and of course protecting the power of the agencies who perform this surveillance and the lucky few who are given strictly limited access to it.<p>If the POTUS is given this intelligence and makes most of his decisions based on it, how does he know that he is being given the truth, rather than a carefully edited version of it?<p>It seems surveillance is no longer focussed on terrorism, if it ever was (indeed a few terrorist attacks have gone on the US without detection in spite of all this surveillance). It&#x27;s telling that even the NSA have given up using that excuse as it becomes more and more clear where the focus of their intelligence gathering is directed.<p>Is the NSA (and the US by proxy) using the information it collects as a way of protecting and expanding its power? Is this inevitable if you give an organisation that much power over our lives and very little oversight?<p>Are all allies of the US mistrusted so much that they must be spied on? Should they in return shut down trust of the US and repudiate treaties they have with it like the one sharing SWIFT data or details of people visiting the US? Can the EU trust the products of American internet companies, or should they set up rivals?<p>It seems information has become more and more synonymous with power as our economies in the west become information economies, and the greatest power of all has been handed to an agency without significant legal limits and without any sort of public accountability, led by a member of the military.

I quite frankly don&#x27;t understand why anyone would condemn such acts of espionage. They are not only essential for a nation state to function successfully, but they are also a far superior way for the US to maintain its hegemony as compared to using acts of brute force.<p>Now I do not condone Orwellian spying on the citizens of your own republic, but this really is their job and it&#x27;s quite impressive that they&#x27;re this good at it. Especially given the fact that historically the US has not been completely invested in espionage and has favoured building up capacity after key events and quickly dismantling the apparatus once the emergency has passed. What these scandals are offering is a glimpse into a dramatic shift in the way the US conducts its affairs and that in of itself is quite noteworthy.

When ability is no longer a bottleneck on the actions of an individual or group, that is the time that the character of that individual or group is discovered.<p>The character of the US government in general, and the NSA in particular, is apparently that of a rotten, sneaking, dishonest liar.<p>I cannot say that I am surprised, human nature being what it is, but I am very disappointed.<p>On the bright side, it is in good international company.

I don&#x27;t understand the bulk of comments being about this not being important. Or... well yeah, I understand the perspective that any intelligence agency should be collecting intelligence, so this shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise per se. But this certainly levels out the playing field in that now the world knows at which lengths the NSA has been keeping tabs on people, and at least the majority of world leaders (and a lot of more &quot;insignificant&quot; people) will start using encrypted communications and networks like Tor. Which they should&#x27;ve been doing from the start. So, in this light, I think this is an important Snowden revelation.

After the crash of the Polish president&#x27;s plane in Smolensk, it was widely known that the Americans have recordings of all conversations made with his satellite phone aboard the plane. I don&#x27;t remember that sparking much controversy at the time, everyone was more like &quot;yup, that&#x27;s what Americans do&quot; and there was pretty much no outrage over that.

US Foreign Policy: How to turn friends into enemies and isolate yourself from the world

I can understand why &quot;world leaders&quot; would be frustrated by this, but much better them than us. This activity is at least plausibly within NSA&#x27;s purview. Also, <i>most</i> of these leaders have less at risk to the NSA threat than do USA residents. It isn&#x27;t as though NSA will sic the Drug Warriors, the IP Mafia, BATF, ICE, or EPA on leaders of other sovereign nations based on its observation of their communications. Whereas we&#x27;re definitely in those crosshairs.<p>There are exceptions! If your nation could plausibly be on deck for the next military-industrial complex fundraising activity, you might want your leaders to secure their communications against NSA. Of course, if they&#x27;re not doing anything wrong, they might want that fact to be observed, on the off chance it might make a difference.

Yes. And the US is the only country whose intelligence service has ever done anything like this.<p>And newsflash ... we probably bug your embassies too.

I feel we are taking our eyes off the ball.<p>Domestic spying violates constitutional rights. More to the point, I don&#x27;t want to support an institution with programs that violate my privacy, no matter what benefits such programs provide.<p>But isn&#x27;t international spying is different? Honestly, I don&#x27;t mind supporting an institution with an external espionage programs. Isn&#x27;t in my best interest? Does it harm me? What are the concrete repercussions of spying on foreign officials? Are these officials really going to renege on international alliances because they have a chip on their shoulder? If they have anything to hide, it&#x27;s by definition counter to US interests; if our allies are making plans behind our backs, I <i>want</i> our government to find out. (And to be totally honest, if <i>our</i> government is making secret plans behind our allies backs, I would want our allies to find out, as well.)<p>I&#x27;ll repeat this, because it is a real question, and the answer could have a real effect on my opinion: <i>What are the concrete repercussions of spying on foreign officials?</i>

I genuinely fail to be outraged by this. The NSA has a job, which is the monitoring of the signals of foreign militaries and governments. That they were doing that is not surprising or necessarily bad since those entities should be more than capable of operating in such an environment.<p>The problem is the mass slurping of the data of everyone else.

This is honestly the revelation that I worry about least in these NSA leaks. Isn&#x27;t foreign surveillance basically the raison d&#x27;etre for the NSA?

Quite expected. My disappointment with the US gov and its general attitude is reaching new levels. Really BAD.

I really can&#x27;t believe that there are so many comments that try to trivialize the actions.<p>It seems that the United States loses the reality and lapses in an egocentric &#x2F; ethnocentric disease.<p>How would the U.S. react if they found out such a thing the other way around?

Presumably this will soon be followed up by other ground-breaking journalism pieces such as &quot;Army kills people&quot;, &quot;Surgeons perform surgery&quot;, and &quot;Garbage collectors stun world by collecting garbage&quot;.<p>Irrespective of what one thinks of it (and I do not think favourably of it), how is it surprising that an organisation that is established specifically to spy on people is in fact spying on people?

We have ended up with the same conversations on this spying lark far too often.<p>I appreciate the sentiment of those that want to protest against this and I can understand the spoon-fed arguments about how the NSA must go after the kiddie fiddlers, terrorists that want to blow up innocent kiddies (as in the ones that haven&#x27;t been fiddled with, yet) and do all that mysterious national security stuff.<p>However, instead of same-old, same-old, can we work on a technological solution? Something that will work for you and I as well as Mrs Merkel?<p>We can let go the network analysis stuff, who is in contact with whom as right now there is no easy way to prevent the NSA slurping that stuff up. But, as for the content, can&#x27;t that be encrypted properly, without the NSA having the key and without there being secret courts where keys get handed over in secret? It is just code we need, and with it we can get a reasonable compromise where our conversations are secure.

No non-US government official can feel secure in giving just a business card to his US counterpart, because he has to assume his contact info will be given to the NSA.<p>Hell, <i>no one</i>, regardless of nationality, in or out of government, can fell secure in any communication of <i>any</i> kind with a US government person.

It used to be spying on other people&#x27;s governments would get people killed or start wars. In some way it will again. Maybe not so obvious this time.

I think we need a bit of context here. US is the hegemon.<p>Therefore it&#x27;s not reasonable to apply same expectations of how it acts as we do pleasant little countries like Norway or Netherlands (who are probably only independent because US defended them against Germans &amp; Soviets).

What is the strategy here? Of releasing information about NSA activities with foreign nations? Seems like it is mixing a potentially illegal activity (domestic spying) with their designated job. Doesn&#x27;t every country try to do this. The NSA personnel could very well have undergone considerable risk to get this sort of thing going on. On the other hand, Joe public sees Snowden fleeing and chilling out in Russia&#x2F;China and other &quot;despotic&quot; regimes.<p>Definitely Snowden:0 and NSA:1 in this case.

On the &quot;is not monitoring and will not monitor&quot;... If they took the time to deny present and future monitoring, the obvious question then becomes why haven&#x27;t they denied past&#x2F;recent past monitoring? Oh that&#x27;s right, because they can&#x27;t in fact deny it as they WERE monitoring.

I thought that the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;UKUSA_Agreement</a>) were the only nations the NSA was even pretending to not spy on.<p>It&#x27;s my understanding that the British were thought to have stolen submarine detection technology from the French, and the French were widely accused of industrial espionage against US companies in the 1990s. I also vaguely remember a 60 Minutes piece in the 1990s about Germans fulfilling their military service obligations by committing industrial espionage against US companies.<p>It seems to me that politicians are playing to public opinion, while knowing full well that this is how the international relations game has been played for decades, if not forever.

Watch as the flag-all-NSA-stories brigade pushes this relevant story off the front page...

If I were the leader of a major world power right now, I would push for a law in my country that decriminalizes the hacking of any government systems of countries that have proven hostile to my countries government. The only exception would be the hacking of public infrastructure like transportation systems and public utilities. Everything else would be fair game. Seems like this approach would introduce and element of M.A.D. into the mix that would mitigate the current hostile actions we are seeing from the US via the NSA and China via the PLA.

One way to tell if they are still doing it. Give them honeypots, hook them and wheel them in.

&#x27;After Merkel&#x27;s allegations became public, White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement that said the US &quot;is not monitoring and will not monitor&quot; the German chancellor&#x27;s communications.&#x27;<p>Which, of course, was a blatant lie.

Gee, I thought the government shutdown had succeeded in getting everyone to forget this whole spy hullabaloo. Well at least it worked in the good old USA.

I might think everyone should have access to all communications of all politicians. If you want to be a leader of millions you should be transparent.

I believe NSA is as much important as Android is to Google.