Thomas Gaist

The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prove the NSA spied on internal communications at the United Nations headquarters in New York City during the summer of 2012. The NSA has also targeted the European Union and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to Der Spiegel.

Documents published by Der Spiegel show that the NSA tapped into the UN’s internal video conferencing system and deployed decryption technology to gain access to the video stream. Within weeks of penetrating the video stream, the NSA ramped up the number of communications being decrypted and monitored from 12 to 458.

“The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” read one of the documents quoted in the report.

Der Spiegel further reported on a US intelligence program called the “Special Collection Service,” which operates in diplomatic facilities across the globe. “The surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists,” the magazine wrote.

Previous revelations have shown systematic spying by the US on EU governments. American intelligence operatives apparently gained access to the virtual private network (VPN) relied on by EU embassies in the US. Files copied from NSA servers by Snowden include detailed plans of the EU’s information technology infrastructure and other internal EU documents.

The latest revelations of the massive and international scope of the US government’s illegal spying operations come only two weeks after a White House press conference in which President Obama repeated the official lies about the supposedly limited and legally sanctioned character of the secret NSA programs.

More »

Julian Assange

It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Democracy exists in name only. Modern day McCarthyism harms everyone. State terror threatens everyone. Humanity's endangered.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) targeted alleged communist sympathizers. Uncorroborated hearsay alone mattered.

Prominent Hollywood figures were named. Hundreds of actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, and other artists were accused of communist sympathies. They were blacklisted.

Notable ones were called the Hollywood Ten. They included screenwriter Alvah Bessie, screenwriter/director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Lester Cole, director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., screenwriter John Lawson, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, producer/screenwriter Adrian Scott, and author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

McCarthyism signifies baseless slander, unscrupulous fearmongering, and political lynchings. Communist hearings got headlines. They were televised. They were witch-hunt prosecutions.

More »