Edward Snowden latest statement: The NSA lobbied heavily for leaders in Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Germany to authorize mass surveillance operations, including programs in which intelligence is gathered and then shared across borders with allied nation-states abroad, the former intelligence contractor said. “Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries communications,” he said, including one instance in Germany where officials there were allegedly pressured by the US to modify the countrys G-10 law “to appease the NSA” while at the same time “it eroded the rights of German citizens under their constitution.” Pressuring those countries to increase their surveillance capabilities and adopt new technology created a “European bazaar” that enabled EU member states to essentially funnel intelligence to spy firms around the globe, Snowden said. According to Snowden, “an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the [unenforceable] condition that NSA doesnt search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesnt search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national governments spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.” “By the time this general process has occurred, it is very difficult for the citizens of a country to protect the privacy of their communications, and it is very easy for the intelligence services of that country to make those communications available to the NSA -- even without having explicitly shared them,” he said.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 04:18:47 +0000
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