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The NSA’s Economic Spying Slowly Comes Into View
The publishing of NSA secrets continues. The Guardian, Spiegel and the New York Times report on efforts to listen to new satellite connections. The tests were run against a (partitial) “target database” and their results reveal what targets that “target database” contains. These included international organizations like UNICEF, Non-Government-organizations like Médecins du Monde, high European Union functionaries, economic entities like the oil giant Total and the electronics and military producer Thales. They include many heads of states and state institutions as well as some alleged terrorists. Some of the target numbers were obtained from U.S. officials who share their rolodexes with the NSA.
The NSA spying on telephone data in the United States has decisively helped in zero terrorists cases instead of the 54 cases the NSA had claimed. The real international target list is likewise not primarily aimed at “terrorists” as the NSA claims. I also doubt that it is mainly just to target politicians or political entities. I believe that most of the targets will turn out to be economic entities and that this will be the real issue that brings up a storm against international NSA spying. Notice that the wording the NSA uses when asked about economic spying gets more elaborate and includes more caveats each time questions are asked. This from the NYT piece linked above:
In a statement, the N.S.A. denied that it had ever carried out espionage to benefit American businesses.
“We do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line,” said Vanee Vines, an N.S.A. spokeswoman.
But she added that some economic spying was justified by national security needs. “The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security,” Ms. Vines said.
How can one detect “anomalous economic activities” when one does not observe the “normal” economic activities? One can not and that caveat thereby reveals the real activities.
There is also the history of the current spying activities:
The documents that were reviewed also suggest that the satellite dragnet is likely a continuation of the legendary global Echelon surveillance network, which was the subject of an investigation by a committee of the European Parliament in 2000.
In their 2001 final report, the EU politicians presented a wealth of convincing evidence of industrial espionage allegedly committed through Echelon …
When the NSA spokesperson says “We do not … give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies” the next question must be who does the NSA give that “economic” intelligence to and to whom does that entity (likely the CIA as was the case with Echelon data) hand those secrets?
Pressure on non-U.S. politicians to build a really secure Internet communication systems will only come when the companies in their countries find out that their well-being depends on it. With many new revelations about the NSA still to come it is likely that we will soon see that the economic aspect of the spying scandal, and the response to it from parties that have real stakes in such issues, is a major if not the major part of the whole affair.
It gets clearer and clearer: while the world has watched, with bated breath and barely disguised contempt, the ever more extravagant “kinetic actions” of the US, its NATO satraps and its auxiliaries; counting the countless dead, noting the aerial massacres, following the death squads’ bloody trails and protesting the torture, the concentration camps and the kidnapping, the real campaign to establish full spectrum dominance has been concentrating on the internet, electronic communications and universal surveillance.
The success of this campaign, so far has consisted, it seems, of erecting the infrastructure of the Panopticon- to make it possible to see everything and record everything, because it is understood that to do so is to possess a key to great power. There is curiously little evidence that anything very much has been done with the information: a bit of petty political work, the killing of a few careers (Scott Ritter; Eliot Spitzer; John Edwards) and other maverick operations. Some industrial espionage, but little, one suspects, of great significance if only because nobody has a greater interest in undermining US manufacturing than the American ruling class, busily exporting jobs, capital and technologies to more profitable venues.
For this there are two reasons. The first is that the military elites running the NSA and the Corporations it employs to carry out many of its functions are not very bright. They are building the machinery for others to employ. It is one thing to collect data, it is another thing to collate and catalogue it, to run it through crude analyses, of the sort which has proved completely ineffective in tracking down ‘terrorists’, and to trace cell phones in order to aim missiles at them.
But the real work will be carried out by social scientists, psychologists, experts in behavioural patterns and mathematical formulae. I am unsure how it will work but I’m pretty certain that what is aimed at is the establishment of a regime in which dissent is subject to pre-emptive policing. Which was the purpose of the Panopticon when it was first conceived. To prevent ‘crime’ before it occurs. With the upsetting of social order or the breaching of communal peace being the ultimate crime. Isn’t that right General Sissi?
But all this is in the future. The immediate, rather sordid, object is to lift the US one more level from effective international arbiter to complete dominance. This is to be done by solidifying the, now notorious, International Community which thinks what Washington thinks and does what Washington wants. This is the International Community that pretends to be shocked by Syria’s government, that pretended to live in fear of Ghadaffi bombing Benghazi, that pretends that there is evidence that Iran has a nuclear arms programme, just as it expressed alarm at Saddam’s WMD. It isn’t really either International or a Community, it’s a film set on a propagandist’s lot, a Potemkin Village run up to impress the embedded Press Corps as it passes by on its way to another war.
And that is what the current comprehensive “Free Trade” agreements are all about, the erection of a new system of commercial law, complete with a robust sanctions regime, under the direct control of the US Corporatist system, which will reduce national sovereignties to the right to design flags and, provided they don’t impinge upon employers’ rights, designate national holidays.
Blogs like this, using English as a universal language and bringing together the views of people all over the world are great. But they are also symptomatic of the underlying problem, which is the enthusiastic surrender of much of the world to the creole culture of anglo-America, the Imperium.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 21 2013 16:00 utc | 15
Interesting, Mina, thank you. I also just watched a video discussion by Sibel Edmonds, who whatever you think of her, is still chair of the self-described Whistleblowers Association, which Thomas Drake still belongs to. I just watched this Sibel thing, and she is doing what she always does. I listened to it, or watched it, whichever you do with these things, which don’t really need to be videos at all, since they’re just talking heads, but anyway, I don’t think Greenwald will be much bothered by this level of criticism. Obviously, Greenwald is following a strategy inside the establishment or at least a part of it, the part that thinks of itself as ‘more progressive than’ other parts, but they still have establishment values, the most important of which is that they are the elite, and Greenwald wants to be part of that. It isn’t really a mystery.
But they differ on fairly fundamental issues from the neocons and the neocons lite who form Obama’s loyal core. They are equally ‘establishment’ types, that is to say, elitists, but they are ‘progressive’ elitists. We should be thoroughly used to this, because it is the essence of the two-party system: you have ‘conservatives’ versus ‘liberals’, within the peculiar meaning they give to those two terms, and they are all elitists, and in some respects they maintain a sort of overall elite solidarity with one another; they will unite to fight of anything that looks remotely ‘anti-establishment’, let alone ‘revolutionary’, because they all enjoy the advantages of bourgeois elitism, and often you find that the core of the ‘progressive’ complaint is that the ‘conservatives’ are heading in a direction that will upset the bourgeois applecart, for instance they will end up handing the country over to a military junta, and the NSA is in a way exactly that, the basis for a military junta.
So it’s quite futile to expect Greenwald to leave the establishment camp and join the hairies outside the fence, he has not the remotest intention of doing that, quite the opposite. Even if, as on Tarpley’s scenario, the ‘progressives’ ended up splitting the Democratic Party in two (Wall Street Democrats vs ‘progressive’ Democrats), the whole thing would still remain on the elite level, because that’s what bourgeois parties are all about, and only a real revolutionary party with a mass base in the working class could ever challenge that in any significant way. And all Sibel’s remarks about how people think Greenwald is Jesus, just the way they thought Obama was Jesus, are pointless shadow-boxing. People who think or ever thought that Greenwald was Jesus, are too naive to be worth even talking about. I think that an audience which is impressed by amateur psychology of this sort is just like the audience of Fox ‘News’, too stupid to be worth bothering with. So I am really turned off by Sibel’s big rave about how people think Greenwald is Jesus. I mean, on the level of tactics, I object to this. Whereas what I said in the previous paragraphs was about the big picture, not about Sibel’s tactics.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Dec 21 2013 16:02 utc | 16
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