The NSA's Quest for Total Surveillance
Ewen MacAskill & James Ball: The NSA [allegedly] gathers intelligence to keep America safe. But leaked documents reveal the NSA's dark side – and show an agency intent on exploiting the digital revolution to the full. ■ Barack Obama hailed United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon as a "good friend" after the two had sat down in the White House in April to discuss the issues of the day: Syria and alleged chemical weapons attacks, North Korea, Israel-Palestine, and climate change. But long before Ban's limousine had even passed through the White House gates for the meeting, the US government knew what the secretary general was going to talk about, courtesy of the world's biggest eavesdropping organisation, the National Security Agency. Spying on Ban and others at the UN is in contravention of international law, and the US, forced on the defensive this week over the Snowden leaks about worldwide snooping, ordered an end to surveillance of the organization, according to Reuters. The incident is consistent with the portrait of the NSA that emerges from the tens of thousands of documents leaked by Snowden. Page after page shows the NSA engaged in the kind of intelligence-gathering it would be expected to carry out: eavesdropping on Taliban insurgents planning attacks in remote Afghanistan valleys, or listening in on hostage-takers in Colombia. But the documents reveal, too, the darker side of the NSA. It is indiscriminate in the information it is collecting. Nothing appears to be too small for the NSA. Nothing too trivial. Rivals, enemies, allies and friends – US citizens and 'non-Americans' – are all scooped up.
New York Times: No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.