A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan’s photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.” Courtesy of the Intercept

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, May 12 2015 (IPS)

Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan doesn’t deny that he’s had contact with terrorist groups. In fact, it would have been rather difficult to do his job otherwise.

But the fact that Zaidan is a respected investigative journalist and the Islamabad bureau chief for Al Jazeera didn’t seem to faze the U.S. National Security Agency, which not only spied on him, but went as far as to brand him a likely member of Al Qaeda and put him on a watch list.“This is the reality under which we live. Government agencies are relatively autonomous and attempts to control them are ludicrous." -- Bob Dietz of CPJ

The revelations emerged late last week as part of the thousands of classified documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden.

“Given that Pakistan has been consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, the news of Zaidan’s surveillance further adds to the fear, restricting press freedom,” said Furhan Hussain, manager of the Digital Rights and Freedom of Expression programme at Bytes for All, a Pakistani human rights group.

“Equally alarming, in this case, is the fact that by compromising the information of respected journalists, such spying also weakens the safety of their sources and media networks,” he told IPS. “Zaidan’s communications intercept took place through the invasive gathering and analysis of his metadata, a technique which has been frequently responsible for drone-led non-transparent persecution of hundreds of people.

“While it is often claimed that the state of Pakistan has failed to effectively protest against these violations, it may also be important to raise questions about the possible role of the state in facilitating the NSA to access vast amounts of data of those residing within its borders, in the context of its third-party SIGINT partnership.”

Other press freedom groups said the case was just one more in a long-running pattern of civil liberties abuses.

“Given the flood of disclosures over the past two years about the NSA’s vast range of mass and intrusive surveillance techniques and targets, it is unsurprising, but nevertheless shocking, that the intelligence agency thought it appropriate to use its capabilities to spy on an eminent journalist,” Carly Nyst, Legal Director of Privacy International, told IPS.

“This case is illustrative of the grave dangers of allowing security services to exercise immense powers in the absence of proper scrutiny. By placing members of the media, who themselves play an essential accountability role, particularly in areas of conflict, under surveillance, the NSA has undermined the very values it is charged with promoting – security, democracy, and free flow of information.

“Without democratic accountability, spy agencies will continue to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of strategic gain, without sparing a thought to the critical journalistic freedom caught in the cross hairs,” she added.

It’s not the first time the NSA has targeted Al Jazeera. Based on leaked documents, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported in 2009 that it had hacked into the news agency’s internal communication system.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice claimed in 2009 that in fact, the agency makes it a point to target journalists and news agencies.

Zaidan was targeted under the ominously titled SKYNET programme, which monitors bulk call records and searches the metadata for particular patterns.

“It’s this kind of big, sweeping data gathering that worries us the most,” Bob Dietz, Asia programme coordinator for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, told IPS.

“If someone were to track my behavior and all the people I’ve come into contact with over the last 20 years, I imagine I would come up on some sort of chart ranking very high,” he said wryly.

Dietz doesn’t expect the situation to change anytime soon, regardless of who occupies the White House.

“This is the reality under which we live. Government agencies are relatively autonomous and attempts to control them are ludicrous…whether or not there are laws protecting us,” he said.

Thomas Hughes, executive director of the London-based ARTICLE 19, said his group is deeply concerned by the Zaidan spying revelations.

“According to statements from Al Jazeera and colleagues from other networks, Zaidan is a journalist of longstanding professional reputation. Surveillance of journalists has a serious chilling effect on freedom of expression, impeding the crucial role journalists play in uncovering wrongdoing and holding governments to account for their actions,” he told IPS.

“Compromising the confidentially of sources also seriously undermines the ability of journalists to perform their work and potentially endangers the wellbeing and safety of those sources.”

Indeed, as noted by the Intercept, which broke the allegations, Zaidan’s reporting focused on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, including several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders.

In strenuously denying the allegations, he patiently explained, “For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information.

“Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote in a response to the Intercept. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Map showing the NSA’s collection of intelligence from computer networks around the world. The colour scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Credit: Creative Commons

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

A lack of controls, regulation and transparency marks the monitoring and surveillance of electronic communication in Mexico, one year after the revelations of cyberespionage shook the world.

This Latin American country of 118 million people was one of the targets of the massive illegal cyberespionage practiced by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). But no substantial changes have been made in response, to prevent further interception.

“There is no legislation on surveillance and intervention, no good practices for companies,” Jesús Robles, with the non-governmental organisation Propuesta Cívica, told IPS. “There is a legal vacuum. They could be gathering metadata.”

Metadata is information that describes other information – data generated as people use technology, such as the date and time of a phone call, the location where someone last accessed their email, who sent or received an email, or where someone made a phone call and how long it lasted.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported on Jun. 5, 2013 that the NSA had been collecting the telephone metadata of the customers of Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile phone provider, both within and outside the United States.

It was just the first of a series of leaks to the press about the secret operations of the agency, made by Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor, now hiding under guard in Russia, which granted him political asylum.

The NSA used the PRISM internet surveillance programme to spy on a number of countries, including Mexico, in areas like anti-drug efforts, energy and security.

And with BLARNEY, the international version of the PRISM programme, the United States intercepted the communications of several embassies in Washington, including Mexico’s. Using another tool, Boundless Informant, it illegally intercepted phone calls and email that passed through U.S. telecoms networks.

On Sep. 1, 2013, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that in 2012 the NSA had spied on the email of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the latter case during his presidential campaign.

The United States has ignored Mexico’s protests, including a diplomatic note demanding an investigation and a condemnation by Congress.

Greenwald’s online U.S. publication The Intercept reported on May 19 that a surveillance programme, Mystic, collects metadata on the nearly 100 million cell phones operating in Mexico.

“Not much has been done,” Cédric Laurant, one of the four founders of the Mexican non-governmental group Son Tus Datos (It’s Your Information), dedicated since 2012 to advocating the protection of privacy in communications, told IPS. “If the public knew more, they could pressure local and foreign businesses to exert more pressure on the government.”

Mexico also acquired computer programmes to record voices and track phone calls, emails, chat conversations, visited website addresses and social networks.

Since 2010, Mexico’s Federal Law for the Protection of Personal Information Data guarantees the right to privacy and establishes that, if an institution wants to transfer information to third parties at home or abroad, it must give the owners of the information notice and explain the purpose for which it was authorised.

But the law’s guarantees were undermined when a Law on Geolocalisation entered into force in 2012. This legislation allows the government to gather, without notification and in real time, geographic data from cell-phone users.

Furthermore, the new national penal procedures code in effect since March allows the authorities to access real-time geo-location data without a court order.

In March 2013, the interdisciplinary Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada
reported that FinFisher surveillance software command and control servers, made by the U.K.-based company Gamma Group, were hosted on two Mexican Internet service providers: Iusacell, a small provider; and UniNet, one of the largest in Mexico, a subsidiary of Teléfonos Mexicanos (Telmex).

After this was discovered, Propuesta Cívica and the digital rights collective ContingenteMX asked the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI) to investigate the Obses company for the use of the programme.

In March IFAI approved sanctions against Obses for selling FinFisher to the government at more than double the market rate. Obses is a Mexican firm that has received dozens of no-bid governmental projects.

On May 12 a British court ruled that UK Revenue & Customs acted unlawfully in refusing to disclose information on the status of an investigation into the export of British Gamma International’s FinFisher surveillance technology, paving the way for a review of the programme’s sales abroad.

In February, Citizen Lab produced two reports on the use of spy programmes. In one of them, “Mapping Hacking Team’s ‘Untraceable’ Spyware”, it reported that agencies in 21 countries used or use the Remote Control System (RCS), sophisticated computer spyware marketed and sold exclusively to governments by the Milan-based Hacking Team, including Mexico, Colombia and Panama.

The RCS can copy files from a computer’s hard disk, record Skype calls, emails, instant messages, and passwords, and turn on a device’s webcam and microphone to spy on a target.

Citizen Lab reported that it mapped out “covert networks of ‘proxy servers’ used to launder data that RCS exfiltrates from infected computers, through third countries, to an ‘endpoint,’ which we believe represents the spyware’s government operator. This process is designed to obscure the identity of the government conducting the spying.

“For example, data destined for an endpoint in Mexico appears to be routed through four different proxies, each in a different country.”

And in another article, “Hacking Team’s U.S. Nexus”, Citizen Lab said that in at least 12 cases, U.S.-based data centres are part of a “dedicated foreign espionage infrastructure.”

Citizen Lab states that in tracing these “proxy chains,” it found that U.S.-based servers appeared to assist the governments of 10 countries, including Mexico and Colombia, in espionage and/or law enforcement operations.

Citizen Lab found 14 IP addresses, 12 of which are apparently still active.

Mexico’s legislation does not require telecommunications companies to reveal government requests about the activities of Internet users.

“The action taken has not proven to be effective; rights are violated,” Robles said.

“Awareness-raising is needed among users so that a larger number of them exercise mass pressure on companies, in order for users to take privacy into their own hands, using new tools that are available,” Laurant said.

In a highly anticipated speech on Friday, President Barack Obama introduced a series of reforms that will place new limits and safeguards on U.S. intelligence gathering, including additional protections for foreign nationals overseas. 

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2014. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

After weathering months of new disclosures and increasingly strident public criticism about the extent of U.S. spying, Obama on Friday recognised that the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies may have overreached in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks and the ongoing “war on terror”.

At the same time, Obama also stated that the particularly controversial bulk gathering of Internet and phone records would remain in place.

“We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world, while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals and our Constitution require,” Obama said Friday.

The new directive will “strengthen executive branch oversight of [U.S.] intelligence activities … reform programmes and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

In an unanticipated attempt to quell loud criticism from foreign governments and U.S. allies, Obama also introduced a series of changes aimed at protecting non-U.S. citizens abroad – the first time that a U.S. president has taken such steps.

“People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” the president said.

“In this directive, I have taken the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas [including] safeguards [that] will limit the duration that we can hold personal information, while also restricting the use of this information.”

In particular, the new directive seeks to ensure that “information about persons whose activities are not of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence value” will not be collected, “whatever their nationality and regardless of where they might reside.”

It is still unclear how exactly these protections will be implemented, but for now, the directive states that the United States will collect data only for the purposes of detecting espionage, cyber crime, threats to U.S. or allied armed forces, and threats from terrorism, weapons proliferation and sanctions evasion.

Yet there remains wide disagreement about the soundness of extending constitutional protections to foreign nationals.

“Although I agree that we should be sensitive to foreign nationals, the question is whether they have equal protection under the Constitution,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation, a think tank here, told IPS. “And the answer is that they really don’t.”

Others note that although foreign nationals may not be protected under the U.S. Constitution, their privacy still needs to be respected as a broader human rights issue.

“It may be the case that foreigners overseas do not enjoy constitutional protections, but they do enjoy basic human rights,” Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty & National Security Programme at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law, told IPS. “And privacy is one of them.”

Distance to go

The president’s announcements comes in the midst of a historic public debate that first broke out in June when a former NSA contractor, Edward J. Snowden, publicised documents revealing the intrusiveness of U.S. intelligence gathering. And while many have welcomed Friday’s speech, the new reforms did little to quell all calls for action.

“The president took several steps toward reforming NSA surveillance, but there’s still a long way to go,” Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, said following the president’s speech. “Other necessary reforms include requiring prior judicial review of national security letters and ensuring the security and encryption of our digital tools, but the president’s speech made no mention of these.”

Others expressed disappointment at the president’s decision to simply reform, but not eliminate, the government’s bulk collection of telephone records, also known as metadata.

“The president should stop bulk collection, approach Congress and support the USA Freedom ACT,” the Brennan Center’s Goitein says, referring to a legislative proposal that, if approved, would substantially rein in the NSA’s activities through an official act of Congress.

The president did note on Friday that he would include Congress in the new overhaul, either by asking legislators to codify the new changes or by ensuring that lawmakers were part of a rigorous oversight mechanism.

However, Goitein warns that Congress should be included only if this will lead to actual reforms, and not as a way to avoid progress.

“The president should go to Congress to tighten the law and to ensure that no other administration will do this in the future,” she says, noting that if the president had really wanted to end bulk collection, he could have done so during Friday’s speech.

Obama also noted that the bulk collection of telephone records would be substituted by an alternative mechanism, although the details of this remain unclear. The president proposed a two-stepped transition that would initially see a more limited surveillance of phone calls, one that would “pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organisation, instead of the current three.”

During this initial period, the attorney-general and the rest of the intelligence community will look for an alternative mechanism to replace the NSA’s storage mechanism. It is still unclear whether this will be a single third party conducting the government’s surveillance or a group of private companies and contractors.

Ultimately, Friday’s speech was a notably public look at some of the United States’ most highly classified programmes, highlighting an already startling distance from the days prior to Snowden’s leaks.

“Intelligence collection is always a delicate business in a democracy, and it should be,” the RAND’s Jenkins told IPS. “Public debate and argument is the only way we have of achieving something that will be more or less acceptable to the public and that will provide the protection to our civil liberties.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at the 2013 Annual Awards Dinner and Dance of the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA), honouring winners of prizes for best media coverage of the U.N. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 27 2013 (IPS)

When the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA) held its annual award ceremony last week, one of the video highlights was a hilarious skit on the clumsy attempts to bug the 38th floor offices of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Three days later, the New York Times ran an updated story about the widespread electronic surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which had targeted over 1,000 political leaders, diplomats, and international institutions."Let's hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N." -- James Paul

These included the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the Geneva-based U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

At last week’s award ceremony, the secretary-general was given an unsolicited piece of light-hearted advice: if you want to figure out whether your office is bugged, you only have to sneeze loudly, and a voice from inside the walls would instinctively and courteously respond, “Bless you.”

Jokes apart, the 193-member General Assembly last week adopted a unanimous resolution highly critical of electronic surveillance and demanding “the right to privacy in the digital age.”

Not surprisingly, the resolution was co-sponsored by Brazil and Germany, whose leaders were wiretapped by the NSA.

Although both countries publicly lambasted the surveillance, the resolution does not single out either the United States or Britain by name.

“This was due to two reasons,” a Third World diplomat told IPS. “One, to ensure the resolution was adopted unanimously, with no negative votes and abstentions, and two, both Brazil and Germany were obviously under strong political pressure not to name names.”

As a result, he noted, the resolution was “lamentably weak – and the culprits got away.”

Asked for a response, the Brazilian ministry of external relations, through its public relations firm in New York, remained tight-lipped.

James A. Paul, who served for 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS it was long past due for this issue to be addressed at the United Nations.

“Electronic espionage has been especially abusively practiced in the U.N. environment and cases are very well known,” he said.

He pointed out that diplomats have been furious about this for years but many have been reluctant to take up the matter and risk the ill-will of the mighty, especially the United States and UK – “the prime offenders”.

“In addition to the resolution, let’s hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N., where much needs to be done to bring the powerful into conformity with international law,” said Paul, who has written extensively on the politics of the world body.

Samir Sanbar, a former assistant secretary-general who was primarily responsible for the U.N. presence on the internet with the 1995 launch of the U.N. website, told IPS, “My general impression is that while political officials make public statements, security representatives arrange for discreet deals.”

And that may explain eventual changes in negotiated texts of the resolution, he said.

In certain circles, bugging was so common that a diplomat excluded from monitoring may have felt insulted, said Sanbar, who served under five different U.N. secretaries-general.

He recalled a long telephone conversation once between a former secretary-general and a pivotal head of state in the Middle East on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

After the call, the secretary general wondered with a wry smile: How many countries would have been listening [to our conversation]?”

He said on occasions even those directly involved resorted to public exposure when it suited them.

Still, Paul told IPS the General Assembly resolution is a very welcome initiative in the worldwide battle over mass electronic information-gathering.

He said recent revelations have made it clear there is an increasing intrusion of states – particularly the U.S. – into the private lives of all citizens, not only those within their national jurisdictions but worldwide.

“This battle involves first and foremost public opinion. Citizens must bring pressure on states to end or at least greatly restrict these practices,” he said.

Paul pointed out that a U.N. resolution will not have a binding effect but it will be part of a shift of opinion.

A recent open letter by famous authors is also part of this process as is the initiative of top executives in the internet industry, he noted.

“The resolution may disappoint some who would like to see stronger language. But in fact this resolution is well-crafted to win broad support and thus to have the maximum moral authority,” he added.

In a statement released last week, the Brazilian ministry of external relations said it was “greatly satisfied” with the consensus resolution.

And it “demonstrates the recognition, within the international community, of universal principles upheld by Brazil, such as protecting the right to privacy and freedom of expression, especially against extraterritorial actions of States in regard to data collection, monitoring and interception of communications.”

The statement also noted the resolution was “innovative in affirming the recognition that the rights of citizens must be protected both ‘offline’ and ‘online’, and provides for steps to continue the dialogue and to deepen discussions over the coming months, at the United Nations, on the right to privacy in electronic communications.”

Meanwhile, the resolution requests U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to present a report on “the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extra-territorial surveillance and/or interception of digital communications and collection of personal data, including on a mass scale.”

This report is to be submitted to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly in 2014, “with views and recommendations, to be considered by Member States.”

Virtually all of the revelations of electronic spying have been sourced to documents released by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, currently living in exile in Russia, and a fugitive from U.S. law enforcement agencies who have accused him of espionage.

By Johan Galtung
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 2013 (Columnist Service)

The linchpin of an empire is the link between two elites, one in the imperial centre, the others in the peripheries. Symmetric alliances exist, but not when there is a superpower at the centre.

The periphery elites do jobs for the centre: killing, say, in Libya or Syria, when they are asked to do so; securing the centre’s economic interests in return for a substantial cut; serving as a bridgehead culturally – called Americanisation; or delivering obedience in exchange for protection.

For this to work, the elites have to believe in the empire. They put words up front – like democracy, human rights, rule of law – serving as human shields. But the costs may be heavy, the benefits may be decreasing, they may have difficulties with restless students, working classes, other countries. Or worse: they may sense that the empire is not working, is heading for decline and fall, and want to get out.

And even if this is not the case the U.S. elites, the policy officials, may suspect it to be so, and spy on empire-alliance leaders. The director of the National Security Agency (NSA), General Keith Alexander, said the agency was asked by policy officials to discover the “leadership intentions” of foreign countries. “If you want to know leadership intentions, these are the issues,” he said.

Clear from the beginning – beyond “threats to privacy”, “they all do it”, “it was technically feasible”, and similar smoke screens. Spying on the intentions of enemy leaders – the “humint” to complement capabilities – is an obvious part of the state system. But on allies?

Johan Galtung

Look at this through Angela Merkel’s eyes. She hated East Germany’s Stasi surveillance. But they were amateurs; these people are professionals. This went unnoticed for a decade, till Edward Snowden. Imagine her rage, comparing.

And imagine the non-rage over the same in Spain: beyond Francisco Franco, yes, but Rajoy’s party is the – highly corrupt – heir to the 1939-1975 Franco dictatorship.

But just as there is an inner circle of self-appointed elites, there is an inner circle of allies that can presumably be trusted, the “Five Eyes”: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – Anglo-America writ large.

Who are they? A club of countries selected on a racist-culturalist basis, white and Anglo; killers of indigenous peoples all over: of native Indians in the U.S. and in Canada to a slightly lesser extent; of Aborigines in Australia and in New Zealand a little less; on the part of the UK – all over, getting the others launched on that slippery slope of genocide and sociocide.

They know this: that the world majority is the kind of people they killed, and they feel strongly that they have to keep together, distrusting non-members. But the U.S. spies on UK Labour and Parliament, and the U.S.-UK together on the other three.

Germany wants to join the club for another 5+l, like in the case of the United Nations Security Council veto powers. Race isn’t a problem, but culture is: they are not Anglo.

We would expect more spying to identify the enemy within, the more the empire declines. In what state is the empire? Not good.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. won bases and a pipeline and nothing else, and may lose both after the 2014 withdrawal.

Iran is gaining more influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, being seen as more legitimate than Saudi-Qatar and the G7 in general, with its Islamism.

In Iraq, the U.S. won bases and access to oil and seems to be losing both. And it managed to do what Iran did not, turning Iraq into a Shia country.

In Syria, dividing the country into three, four or smaller parts does not seem to be working; at any rate the leading anti-Assad faction is Islamist Sunni.

In Egypt, the U.S. misread the situation totally, stranded in a choice between two evils they do not master.

In Libya, another misreading, not understanding how Western secular imperialism (Italy-UK-France-U.S.-Israel) had ignited an Islamist (rather than Arab) and a Berber-Tuareg (rather than Arab) awakening;

In Israel, spying on U.S. elites, tail-wags-dog politics, more U.S. anti-Semitism than ever (watch Youtube), media increasingly critical of Israel; and Israel in the agony between a Jewish state and democracy, sooner or later forced to declare its Eastern border, facing a South Africa-like scenario, and being declared a liability for Washington.

Now, how about the other force in the world, BRICS? Not bad: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was the first to speak at the United Nations General Assembly with a devastating critique of the NSA spy programme, calling for alternative internet servers.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin may have put an end to the Syrian crisis as part of a general Middle East crisis – like Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to the Cold War; not the U.S. with perennial war and threats of war – calling for an end to weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, in the region.

In China, the Xinhua news agency called for general de-Americanisation and an end to the dollar as the “world reserve currency”, in particular favouring a basket of currencies rather than any single country’s currency.

But it is unlikely that the Washington politics-media conglomerate will come up with solutions to calamities that dramatic. Few regimes have.

Halvdan Koht, Norway’s foreign minister, spent the night that Germany invaded Norway with his mistress; Vidkun Quisling, who took over, spent the last cabinet meeting discussing police uniforms, then surrendered to the police. One wonders what Washington DC will do with the double, triple, debacle.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs included monitoring of the state oil company, Petrobras. Credit: Molly Mazilu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

As the first formal probe by an international rights body into allegations of U.S. mass surveillance began here Monday, privacy advocates from throughout the Americas accused Washington of violating international covenants and endangering civil society.

Monday’s hearing took place before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes the United States."The unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region." -- Joy Olson of WOLA

The heads of Brazil and Mexico are among the 35 world leaders on whose personal calls the NSA has reportedly been eavesdropping, according to new information made public last week but leaked earlier this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Indeed, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has offered perhaps the most strident diplomatic response yet, cancelling a state visit to Washington in September upon being notified of U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs, including monitoring of the state oil company. Brazil is also leading a push to institute a new international agreement on privacy.

“I was in Brazil right after these revelations came out, and my sense is that this goes back to this idea of U.S. exceptionalism – that it operates by one standard and everyone else operates by another. Other countries are increasingly less willing to accept that this is how the U.S. functions in the world,” Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“Further, the unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region. That just served as confirmation that the U.S. doesn’t understand its evolving relationship with Latin America.”

The IACHR investigation could now indicate a more concerted reaction from Latin American countries, joining new opprobrium from European and other world leaders as well as an ongoing national discussion here over the scope of U.S. spying on private citizens.

“While the United States is having a huge debate over the legality or constitutionality of domestic mass surveillance, there’s been very little discussion of the legality of international mass surveillance,” Danny O’Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy advocacy group, told IPS.

“The worrying truth is that we have almost no safeguards in place regarding the surveillance of anyone outside of the U.S. That’s problematic because domestic laws were written with the assumption that the people we targeted were agents of a foreign power, spies or even major political figures abroad – not, say, everyone in a particular country.”

For its part, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has maintained that its surveillance programmes, which could be gathering data on the phone or online activities of upwards of a billion people, follow U.S. law and do not violate the privacy of U.S. citizens or foreigners within the United States.

In fact, increasing evidence suggests that regular exceptions have been made to these guidelines, but globally activists are increasingly frustrated with the U.S.’s refusal even to indicate that it is adhering to the spirit of international human rights norms.

The Washington-based IACHR, for instance, oversees the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969, which explicitly guarantees the right to privacy. (While the United States has not ratified the American Convention, it did sign it in 1977.) Critics now want the IACHR to censure the United States for violation of this and other international norms.

“According to the U.S. explanations, all measures have supposedly been taken to respect the privacy of American citizens and those in US territories, however no legal protections apply to foreign nationals,” the Brazilian office of Article 19, an anti-censorship group, told IPS in a statement.

“By basing its justifications and actions solely on domestic law … the U.S. government has shown disregard for the universality of human rights and the fact that international human rights standards on privacy and freedom of expression and information apply to all, irrespective of borders.”

The United States was represented by four officials at Monday’s session, but none offered any formal response. Stating that the recent 16-day shutdown of the U.S. federal government had halted preparations for the hearing, the officials only promised a written response within a month.

While President Obama himself has suggested that politically sensitive spying on allied leaders would stop, on Tuesday two bills were slated to be proposed on Congress to rein in broader aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities. Neither of those, however, would offer additional safeguards for those outside of U.S. territory.

Questioning exceptionalism

In a formal submission made to the IACHR on Monday, EFF, Article 19 and several Latin American civil society groups warned that several countries in the region were already struggling under heavy-handed government surveillance tactics, and expressed concern over the ramifications of the new U.S. revelations.

“For many individuals throughout the Americas region, especially journalists and dissidents, the Internet and mobile telephony have been transformed into a threat. The use of these mediums is difficult or almost impossible without the risk of state interference,” the submission states.

“Even if no single person is actually listening, the chilling effects of surveillance are felt, as the risk of revealing a journalistic source or legal client, for example, may be too high … Freedom of expression and freedom of information allow human rights defenders to challenge abuses to human rights; without the privacy to conduct investigations and communications away from the prying eyes of the state, this becomes impossible.”

It is unclear whether Washington’s spying could now embolden government surveillance in parts of Latin America. Yet even in the current climate, in which governments and civil society together are decrying U.S. snooping, EFF’s O’Brien warns that the focus on the United States could divert some important focus.

“Given the United States’ previous involvement in Latin American politics,” he says, “one of the biggest consequences could be that any surveillance discussion is going to emphasise the U.S.’s surveillance, while potentially underplaying the future risk of more local surveillance.”

The IACHR commissioners could now take a range of actions. Either way, the commission will publish a report on its findings, yet advocates are hoping that the commission will also refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica.

Although the United States does not recognise the Inter-American Court, more than 30 other countries do. A decision against the U.S. there would be damaging and could do much to influence the decisions of other human rights institutions as well as the roiling diplomatic atmosphere surrounding the surveillance allegations.

When Clare Short, Britain’s former minister for international development, revealed that British intelligence agents had spied on former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan by bugging his office just before the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.N. chief was furious that his discussions with world leaders had been compromised.

Some say electronic spying at the U.N. is a logical part of the worldwide espionage programme by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant

And as she talked to Annan on the 38th floor of the U.N. Secretariat building, Short told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), she was thinking, “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this, and people will see what he and I are saying.”

Nearly 10 years later, the accusing finger is now pointed towards the United States, not Britain.

James A. Paul, who monitored the politics of the United Nations for over 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS U.S. electronic spying at the U.N. is a logical part of the worldwide espionage programme by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

The programme has come to light following documents released by Edward Snowden, a U.S. whistleblower who was a NSA contractor, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and is currently living in political exile in Russia.

“It shows us the latest electronic approaches to surveillance ‘listening’, including the reports that the US has cracked into the UN’s encrypted video system and that there is very aggressive monitoring of UN officials and high-ranking diplomats,” he said.

Paul said none of this can be a surprise (though it is no less outrageous) in view of the tapping of the phones of 35 heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the collection of information from some 70 million calls during one month in France.

“The U.N. has argued that surveillance targeting the organisation is contrary to international law and to the U.S.’s responsibility as the host country, but such claims have been systematically and flagrantly disregarded,” he noted.

Addressing the General Assembly in September, Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff publicly castigated the United States for illegally infiltrating Brazil’s communications network, surreptitiously intercepting phone calls, and electronically breaking into the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations. 

As Western Europe expressed its collective outrage Thursday over U.S. spying on governments and political leaders in France, Germany, Italy, Brazil and Mexico, the United Nations was politically cautious in its comments about the large-scale spying.

Asked whether the world body will take a stand on the ongoing charges of U.S. spying, U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters Friday, “These are clearly bilateral matters involving individual member states.”

He said the allegations of spying were a matter for the General Assembly and its 193 member states – not the Secretariat.

And there is growing speculation that some member states may introduce a resolution condemning widespread NSA spying as a violation of national sovereignty,

But one diplomatic source told IPS, the United States, not surprisingly, is lobbying against it.

Asked about the charges of spying inside the United Nations, U.N. Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS the United Nations has consistently maintained the inviolability of diplomatic missions, including the United Nations and other international organisations.

According to a statement released by the United Nations, the functions of these organisations are protected by the relevant international conventions like the Vienna Convention and well-established international law.

“Therefore, Member States are expected to act accordingly to protect the inviolability of diplomatic missions,” the U.N. said, in response to an article titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.” in the Germany magazine Der Spiegel last August.

The German magazine also referred to a 29-page U.S. State Department report, titled “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations”, which called on U.S. diplomats to collect information on key players at the United Nations.

According to this document, the diplomats were asked to gather numbers for phones, mobiles, pagers and fax machines. They were called on to amass phone and email directories, credit card and frequent-flier customer numbers, duty rosters, passwords and even biometric data.

Paul told IPS that there were a number of private accounts in 2002-2003 of U.S. bugging of delegations, including surveillance of private meeting rooms where high-level discussions were taking place to plan common action in the Security Council to block a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq.

“These revelations were connected to very aggressive U.S. efforts to oust diplomats who were opposing the war, several of whom were in fact abusively recalled,” Paul said.

Washington’s electronic spymasters seem to have no sense of restraint, no realisation that they might be destroying the possibility of a civil order on which a democratic future depends, he noted.

Instead, they are rushing to create a world in which they control the ultimate “panopticon” with everyone and everything under their surveillance and control.

“Their counterparts in the UK, France, Russia, China, Israel and other states are rushing in the same direction. It is a frightening future that is before our eyes”.

But can it be stopped? Certainly not by those who cynically say: it has always been thus, Paul said.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly on Sep. 24, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

Throwing diplomatic protocol to the winds, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff launched a blistering attack on the United States for illegally infiltrating its communications network, surreptitiously intercepting phone calls, and breaking into the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations.

Departing from a longstanding tradition of closed-door diplomacy on bilateral disputes, she dropped a political bombshell on a room overflowing with world leaders, foreign ministers and ambassadors from 193 countries sitting in rapt silence.

Justifying her public criticism, she told delegates Tuesday that the problem of electronic surveillance goes beyond a bilateral relationship. “It affects the international community itself and demands a response from it.”

Rousseff said recent revelations concerning the activities of a global network of electronic espionage have caused indignation and repudiation in public opinion around the world.

But in Brazil, she said, “The situation was even more serious, as it emerged that we were targeted by this intrusion.”

She said that personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information, often of high economic and even strategic value, was at the centre of espionage activity.

At the same time, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the president’s office, had their communications intercepted, she charged.

Rousseff unleashed her attack even as U.S. President Barack Obama was awaiting his turn to address the General Assembly on the opening day of the annual high-level debate, which concludes Oct. 4.

By longstanding tradition, Brazil is the first speaker, followed by the United States.

Even though Obama had the right of reply, he did not address the issues raised by Rousseff, who also cancelled a proposed official visit to the White House last week protesting the electronic surveillance of her country.

“We have let the U.S. government know our disapproval, and demanded explanations, apologies and guarantees that such procedures will never be repeated,” she said.

According to documents released by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, the illegal electronic surveillance of Brazil was conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

There has been considerable speculation that Brazil may initiate a General Assembly resolution condemning surveillance of member states by outside intelligence agencies. If it is brought before the Assembly, the United States and its Western allies may oppose it.

There have been reports that the NSA had also conducted similar surveillance of European countries and also the office of the European Union located in the U.N. neighbourhood.

Rousseff called on the United Nations to play a leading role in the effort to regulate the conduct of member states with regard to these technologies and the importance of the internet and social networks as a way to build democracy worldwide.

She said Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web.

The Germany-based Der Spiegel magazine reported last month that NSA technicians have managed to decrypt the U.N.’s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system, as part of its surveillance of the world body.

The combination of this new access to the U.N. and the cracked encryption code have led to “a dramatic improvement in VTC data quality and (the) ability to decrypt the VTC traffic,” the NSA agents reportedly said.

In the article, titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.”, Spiegel said that in just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458.

Rousseff said she was publicly taking up the issue of surveillance because it was a matter of great importance and gravity.

Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront to the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations, she added.

“A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation,” she said.

The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating the fundamental human and civil rights of another country’s citizens, she added.

And it’s even worse when private sector companies participate in this type of spying activity, she said.

Responding to the U.S. argument that any surveillance outside the United States was aimed only at monitoring terrorist activities, she said, “Brazil knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbour terrorist groups.”

P-51, the first 100 percent Brazilian platform, has a capacity to produce 180,000 barrels of crude and six million cubic metres of gas per day. Credit: Divulgação Petrobras/ABr

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 16 2013 (IPS)

Reported U.S. spying on Brazil’s Petrobras oil firm revived the controversy over opening up the company, a symbol of Brazilian sovereignty since the 1950s, to foreign investment.

“The oil is ours” was the cry that arose with the discovery of oil and gas during the government of Getulio Vargas (1930-1945) and that became the slogan of the founding of Petrobras in 1953.

It took on new force in 1997, when then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) declared the end of the state monopoly and opened the company up to local and foreign private investment.

It began to be heard again in 2007, when Petrobras discovered massive offshore oil reserves 180 km from the coast and 7,000 km below sea level, under a thick layer of salt.

And then again in 2010, when then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) replaced the current concessions system, under which companies bid for the rights to explore new oil blocks, with a production-sharing regime between the state and private companies.

The Brazilian government is the largest shareholder in Petrobras, a publicly traded company whose closely guarded secrets – such as the volume of reserves or the deep water exploration technology it has developed – may already be in the hands of the U.S. government and its allies.

Rio-based U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed earlier this month that leaked National Security Agency (NSA) documents indicated that it had spied on Petrobras – Brazil’s largest company and the world’s fourth largest oil company.

Secret documents from 2012 that were given to Greenwald by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reportedly show that Petrobras was at the top of a list of targets for intelligence gathering.

The documents, part of a presentation used to train new agents on how to breach private computer networks, do not show to what extent NSA deciphered secret information from Petrobras’ computers.

But they do undermine the explanation presented by the U.S. agency with respect to earlier reports that it had intercepted the private communications of Brazilian citizens and of President Dilma Rousseff herself.

“Without a doubt, Petrobras does not represent a threat to the security of any country,” Rousseff said. “What it does represent is one of the world’s largest oil assets, a heritage of the Brazilian people.”

Petrobras has an annual turnover of around 90 billion dollars.

“It is clear that the motive was not security or fighting terrorism, but economic and strategic interests,” the president added.

The vulnerability of the company’s secrets has once again fanned the sentiment that “the oil is ours”, as well as arguments in favour of and against a greater opening to private investment in Petrobras.

One of the focuses of the controversy is the Libra oil field in the Santos Basin, one of Brazil’s richest offshore sub-salt deposits, set to be opened up to bidding in October.

The Brazilian government denied that the bidding would be suspended due to fears that leaked information could favour U.S. or British companies, as newspaper reports claimed.

The president of the association of Petrobras engineers, Silvio Sinedino, told IPS that “We are opposed to any bidding. We have long demanded that our oil should not be handed over the way it is here, and especially not in a fabulous oilfield where there is no risk because it has already been explored and has a confirmed capacity of 12 to 15 billion barrels of oil.”

Brazil’s sub-salt reserves are estimated at 80 to 100 billion barrels – enough to supply the country for 40 to 50 years, he noted.

Sinedino said the Cardoso administration’s “privatisation” of Petrobras and telecommunications left Brazil more exposed to espionage.

“Even our military communications go through U.S. satellites, which are obviously controlled by agents from that country,” he added.

Adriano Pires, a consultant with the Brazilian Infrastructure Centre, said Petrobras was targeted by spying because “after 50 years of monopoly…no one knows the technological secrets of deep water oil drilling like Petrobras does.”

Describing the company as “number one” in that area, Pires told IPS that “no one knows more about the probability of finding oil.”

That knowledge, he said, is coveted at a time when possible sub-salt reserves off the coast of West Africa are being disputed.

But using the revelations of espionage to once again discuss the merits of opening up Petrobras to private investment is “foolishness” characteristic of “extreme nationalist” rhetoric, he argued.

“There is a great deal of noise and speculation about the espionage, fuelled even by people inside the government, to once again allege that the United States is trying to seize Brazil’s wealth,” he said.

“The sub-salt reserves are huge, and Petrobras cannot exploit them by itself, with its liquidity issues. We need U.S., Swedish, British, Norwegian or Australian companies to tap the reserves,” Pires said.

Tullo Vigevani, a political science professor at the São Paulo State University, said he was not surprised by the news of the alleged industrial espionage because “the energy question is a central focus of U.S. policy.”

“It is one of the key issues of politics at a global level,” he told IPS. “And information is an essential element. The new discoveries in Brazil, especially in the sub-salt area, require tight surveillance.”

Vigevani said that above and beyond the Brazilian government’s demand for explanations, any solution to defend the country’s strategic interests must be long-term in nature.

In view of what appears to be inevitable, he said, Brazil should invest more in developing science and technology “autonomously, in developing skills, and in developing systems that are more immune to intrusions.”

Edward Snowden’s revelations have given rise to criticism of the governments of many countries, including Mexico. Credit: The Guardian/Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

Non-governmental organisations are urging the United Nations Human Rights Council to demand explanations from the Mexican state for the weak protection it provided its citizens from large-scale spying by the United States.

On Oct. 23, the U.N. Human Rights Council will review Mexico’s human rights record at its Universal Periodic Review, during its 17th session, to be held Oct. 21-Nov. 1 in Geneva.

The other countries to be reviewed in the session are Belize, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Congo, Jordan, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Monaco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.

“The issue is on the radar now more than ever due to Edward Snowden’s revelations and the recent developments,” said Carly Nyst, head of international advocacy at Privacy International (PI), a UK-based registered charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world.

She was referring to Snowden, the low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) global electronic surveillance.

“The U.N. is slowly acknowledging the implications of the surveillance,” she told IPS. “Mexican civil society has the best opportunity to ask the Council to hold its government accountable.”

In March, PI presented the report “The Right to Privacy in Mexico”, warning of the risks of government meddling in this country’s electronic communications.

“Despite Mexico’s efforts to strengthen and embed protection of personal data both in its constitutional and legislative framework, there are concerns over certain surveillance practices and laws that have come into force since Mexico’s last UPR,” the report says.

“However, there is in general a lack of information and transparency surrounding the purchase and use of surveillance software by the Mexican government,” it adds.

The British newspaper the Guardian reported in June that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of customers of the Verizon phone company, both within the United States and between the U.S. and other countries.

The source of that information was Snowden, who is wanted by Washington on charges of espionage and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.

Since then, a river of ink has flowed on the U.S. surveillance of private communications around the world, including Mexico.

Mexico has also acquired software to monitor telephone calls, email, chats, social media activity and browsing history.

“The [U.N. Human Rights] Council could hold it accountable for failing to react,” said Cédric Laurant, one of the four founders of the Mexican NGO Son Tus Datos (It’s Your Information), which has been advocating protection of privacy since 2012.

“It would be good if it did so. It would be good if pressure were put on the Mexican government,” he told IPS.

In its report to the Human Rights Council, Mexico makes no mention of protecting privacy or personal information.

The Federal Law on the Protection of Personal Data, which went into effect in 2010, guarantees privacy and regulates the collection, use and disclosure of personal data, applying to both private and public entities.

But the law’s guarantees were undermined when a Law on Geolocalisation entered into force in 2012. This legislation allows the government to gather, without notification and in real time, geographic data from cell-phone users.

In its March report “You Only Click Twice: FinFisher’s Global Proliferation”, the
Citizen Lab – an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto, Canada – identified command and control servers for intrusive surveillance technology called FinFisher, sold by Gamma International UK Ltd, in a number of countries, including two in the networks of private Mexican phone companies.

After the report was released, two Mexican organisations, Propuesta Cívica and ContingenteMX, asked the Federal Institute of Access to Information (IFAI) in June to investigate the use of the FinFisher spyware.

U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on Sept. 1 that the NSA monitored the communications networks of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, including telephone, Internet and social network exchanges, during their election campaigns.

Only then did the Mexican government react sharply, calling on the U.S. administration of Barack Obama to conduct a thorough investigation, although in a less strongly worded statement than the one issued by the Brazilian government.

“I’m not sadly surprised, because governments have one perspective when it’s about the citizens and another about the politicians,” Nyst said.

“It’s important Mexican society takes this opportunity and targets the government so that it doesn’t create more insecurity. We’re not going to get rid of surveillance, but we can ask for more transparency and accountability,” she added.

PI, which also drew up reports on Senegal and China, is preparing a legal offensive against Gamma International for exporting FinFisher.

It is working with Mexican civil society organisations to get the IFAI to take in-depth action on intrusive surveillance by the government and private parties.

The issue will also be raised at the 35th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, to take place Sept. 23-26 in Warsaw with the participation of civil society.

PI warns that “without adequate safeguards, such legislation, which endows government authorities with broad surveillance powers, compromises Mexican citizens’ right to privacy, and is in any event an inappropriate and disproportionate response to the intended purpose.”

It also recommends ensuring “that the use of surveillance software is strictly regulated and monitored by the Department of Defence and overseen by judicial and other independent authorities.”

In addition it calls for ensuring “that appropriate mechanisms and reviews are put in place to guarantee that use of surveillance software is and remains necessary, legitimate and proportionate…[and demonstrating] transparency with respect to the purchase and use of surveillance software by government authorities.”

Civil society “can demand to be allowed active participation in legislative processes, and ways for different sectors to be represented. They can send letters to the Mexican state, the presidency, Congress, as people do in the United States,” Laurant said.