Peoples Democracy - India
THE NSA skeletons keep tumbling out of the cupboard. Not only were the Brazilian and Mexican Presidents’ – Dilma Roussef’s and Felipe Calderón’s – emails and phones hacked, NSA had targeted the French President Francois Hollande and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well.
None of these leaders threatened the security of the US or were linked to “terrorists”. Der Spiegel reported that in Mexico, “In the space of a single year, according to the internal documents, this operation produced 260 classified reports that allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments." In other words, help on international negotiations and investment decisions for US companies. As we also know, NSA has also broken into the secure servers of Brazilian Department of Mines and Petrobas, the Brazilian national oil company. President Dilma, in her tough UN speech, termed this break-in as nothing but “industrial espionage”.
Along with breaking into the emails of senior political and other government figures, the NSA has also been conducting massive eavesdropping operations on the citizens of countries such as France, Germany and Spain. President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel might have forgiven the NSA for conducting such intrusive surveillance on its citizens, except for the disclosure that their personal phones were tapped as well. It is also now known that the US Embassy in Germany was central to bugging of Merkel’s phone in cooperation with GCHQ’s (UK’s equivalent of the NSA) listening station in Mentworth Hill.
The US has responded by claiming that it is the French and Spanish intelligence agencies that collected this data of its citizens and shared it with the NSA. As the thieves fall out, now blaming each other, Snowden’s services to the world in exposing the global surveillance state of the US and its allies cannot be understated.
