Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

The personal side of taking on the NSA: emerging smears

Distractions about my past and personal life have emerged – an inevitable side effect for those who challenge the US government

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  • Glenn Greenwald
    
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 June 2013 16.21 EDT
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When I made the choice to report aggressively on top-secret NSA programs, I knew that I would inevitably be the target of all sorts of personal attacks and smears. You don't challenge the most powerful state on earth and expect to do so without being attacked. As a superb Guardian editorial noted today: "Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment."


One of the greatest honors I've had in my years of writing about politics is the opportunity to work with and befriend my long-time political hero, Daniel Ellsberg. I never quite understood why the Nixon administration, in response to his release of the Pentagon Papers, would want to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychoanalyst and steal his files. That always seemed like a non sequitur to me: how would disclosing Ellsberg's most private thoughts and psychosexual assessments discredit the revelations of the Pentagon Papers?
When I asked Ellsberg about that several years ago, he explained that the state uses those tactics against anyone who dissents from or challenges it simply to distract from the revelations and personally smear the person with whatever they can find to make people uncomfortable with the disclosures.So I've been fully expecting those kinds of attacks since I began my work on these NSA leaks. The recent journalist-led "debate" about whether I should be prosecuted for my reporting on these stories was precisely the sort of thing I knew was coming.


As a result, I was not particularly surprised when I received an email last night from a reporter at the New York Daily News informing me that he had been "reviewing some old lawsuits" in which I was involved – "old" as in: more than a decade ago – and that "the paper wants to do a story on this for tomorrow". He asked that I call him right away to discuss this, apologizing for the very small window he gave me to comment.Upon calling him, I learned that he had somehow discovered two events from my past. The first was my 2002-04 participation in a multi-member LLC that had an interest in numerous businesses, including the distribution of adult videos. I was bought out of that company by my partners roughly nine years ago.


The lawsuit he referenced was one where the LLC had sued a video producer in (I believe) 2002 after the producer reneged on a profit-sharing contract. In response, that producer fabricated abusive and ugly emails he claimed were from me – they were not – in order to support his allegation that I had bullied him into entering into that contract and he should therefore be relieved from adhering to it. Once our company threatened to retain a forensic expert to prove that the emails were forgeries, the producer quickly settled the case by paying some substantial portion of what was owed, and granting the LLC the rights to use whatever it had obtained when consulting with him to start its own competing business.


The second item the reporter had somehow obtained was one showing an unpaid liability to the IRS stemming, it appears, from some of the last years of my law practice. I've always filed all of my tax returns and there's no issue of tax evasion or fraud. It's just back taxes for which my lawyers have been working to reach a payment agreement with the IRS.Just today, a New York Times reporter emailed me to ask about the IRS back payments. And the reporter from the Daily News sent another email asking about a student loan judgment which was in default over a decade ago and is now covered by a payment plan agreement.


So that's the big discovery: a corporate interest in adult videos (something the LLC shared with almost every hotel chain), fabricated emails, and some back taxes and other debt.I'm 46 years old and, like most people, have lived a complicated and varied adult life. I didn't manage my life from the age of 18 onward with the intention of being a Family Values US senator. My personal life, like pretty much everyone's, is complex and sometimes messy.


If journalists really believe that, in response to the reporting I'm doing, these distractions about my past and personal life are a productive way to spend their time, then so be it. None of that – or anything else – will detain me even for an instant in continuing to report on what the NSA is doing in the dark.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...onse-to-smears

If journalists really believe that, in response to the reporting I'm doing, these distractions about my past and personal life are a productive way to spend their time, then so be it. None of that – or anything else – will detain me even for an instant in continuing to report on what the NSA is doing in the dark.

There needs to be more like him.

National Security-Industrial Complex: Companies Profiting from 'Top-Secret Work' Give Generously to Congress

http://maplight.org/content/73266

Submitted by Donny Shaw on Jun 18, 2013

As the federal government's collection of data has expanded in the past decade under the Patriot Act and other surveillance programs, one set of companies has seen a big financial benefit: the private contractors that work with the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency (NSA) to analyze the data. According to the Washington Post, as much as 70% of the NSA's budget goes to pay private contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, the company Edward Snowden, the leaker who released information about the PRISM surveillance program, worked for. Since passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, Congress has repeatedly voted to extend the government's authority to collect data on citizens.
Today, the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a closed oversight hearing on the National Security Agency electronic surveillance program and the Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight and the Senate Subcommittee on Efficiency and Effectiveness of Federal Programs and the Federal Workforce will hold a hearing to examine the clearance process for determining which federal contractors and employees can access classified information.
Data: A MapLight analysis of campaign contributions from employees and PACs of select companies listed as doing 'top-secret work' according to the Washington Post Top Secret America Project to campaign committees of current members of the 113th Congress, from January 1, 2007—December 31, 2012. Contributions data source: OpenSecrets.

COMPANY	CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS TO CONGRESS
Lockheed Martin	$5,024,244
Boeing	$4,589,154
Northrop Grumman*	$3,356,354
SAIC, Inc.	$1,374,561
Accenture	$1,057,582
Computer Sciences Corporation	$ 609,273
Booz Allen Hamilton	$ 81,174
Total:	$16,092,342

• Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., the Ranking Member on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, has received $422,854, more than any other member of Congress.
• Representative Charles Albert "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., the Ranking Member on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has received $225,919, the second most in Congress.
• Congressional Republicans have received $9,004,805 from the companies.
• Congressional Democrats have received $7,049,887 from the companies.

*Includes contributions from Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding prior to its spinoff on March 31, 2011.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Former STASI Lieutenant Colonel On NSA Surveillance: “You Know, For Us, This Would Have Been A Dream Come True”


http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2013/...ntent=FaceBook

Global News, Politics, Society Add comments

See also:
- German News Magazine DER SPIEGEL On The NSA Spying Scandal: “National Security Is At Stake”

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Protestors greeted President Obama when he visited in June. They are upset over the NSA spying.
- Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs (McClatchy, June 26, 2013):

BERLIN — Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
“So much information, on so many people,” he said.
East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.
Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.
“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.
Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.
As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”
The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”
“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”
For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.
“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”
Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.
“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.”
Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.
Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.
“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”
Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.
“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.
Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.
“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.
“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/2...#storylink=cpy

Is the NSA Blackmail Inc. for the military industrial complex?

Jon Rappoport
No More Fake News
June 29th, 2013
Reader Views: 294
Comment (1)

Every director of the NSA is a general or an admiral.
The NSA is organized under the US Dept. of Defense.
Imagine that you are a powerful player who straddles two worlds—the Dept. of Defense and the private sector where corporate defense-contractors live and flourish.
You’ve served many times in both arenas. Your name is Mr. Military Industrial Complex.
Your mission is war.
The reasons for war don’t matter. Reasons can be invented at the drop of a hat. You want endless armed conflict.
That’s how you make your money. That’s how you express your impulses. That’s your single obsession. That’s how you forward Empire.
You don’t have to justify what you do or consult your conscience. Those days, if they ever existed, are long past. You’re a war-monger and you’re proud of it.
Your basic challenge, on behalf of the military industrial complex, is working the political machinery in Washington—the Congress, the president, the two major Parties—in order to make war happen.
One day, you look around and you say, “I have a whole super-agency at my disposal. It’s organized under the Dept. of Defense. It-called the NSA. It spies on everybody all the time.”
You realize you can use the NSA to collect endless amounts of information on Congress, the White House, the president, the press, and the Democratic and Republican leadership.
Well, the NSA is already doing that.
So the question is: will you use that explosive information, that very private information gained through spying, to coerce these politicians to go to war when you want to go to war?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Of course you’ll use it. You’d be a complete fool not to.
In fact, in the long run, this may well be the most important function of NSA.
Yes. Given your overriding mission in life, it is the most important function of NSA.
It’s job number one.
So you’re going to make sure the resources of the NSA are tuned up quite effectively to extract the information you need.
It’s called blackmail.
It’s called extortion.
It’s beautiful.
It’s the natural use of the NSA, within the overall structure of the military industrial complex.
There are always recalcitrant members of Congress and reluctant presidents who could use a push to go to war.
These politicians, the overwhelming majority of them, are criminals. Let’s face it. They’re remarkably indifferent to human life.
They cheat and lie and steal. They have private secrets. They commit acts that would, if exposed, embarrass them and destroy their pathetic careers.
They’re wonderfully fertile targets for spying and blackmail.
You have the spear. The leading point that can penetrate those secrets.
The NSA.
The logic is perfect and complete.
So you really have two enemies or targets. One, the foreign nation you intend to invade, and two, the politicians you need to convince to support that war.
In light of your latter target, the politicians, these words of Sun Tzu (The Art of War) take on new meaning:
“Attack [your enemy] where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” For example, in a Senator’s hotel suite, with video capability, while he is in the arms of a hooker.
“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle.” For example, calculations focusing on politicians’ offshore bank accounts.
In the era of kings and queens, the monarch’s court was rife with intrigue and extortion. We labor under the misapprehension that this has all been cleared up and swept away in the time of “open government.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Only means and tools have changed.
Relentless <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> projected at the public makes a case for honest, honorable, and embattled politicians. Secondary layers of <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> make the case that rabidly morbid partisanship infects political life.
Both of these psyops are cover stories.
The core truth is harsher. Politicians are, overwhelmingly, creatures who have decided whom to sell their souls to.
That’s who they are. People of this stripe always wander off course in their private lives.
The NSA is there to record the wanderings and compile the secrets.
NSA is the elephant in the infested room called Washington.
It remembers everything.
War is war, and preparing to go to war is also war. The military industrial complex needs the NSA to close the deal.
Spying, blackmail.
This is how politicians’ arms are twisted and war is guaranteed.
Things aren’t left to chance. It isn’t, “Maybe some day we’ll go to war or maybe we won’t.”
The military industrial complex sells death. It’s backed up by the largest spying agency in the world, who has red-hot files on politicians’ scandalous private behavior.
From Russ Tice, former intelligence analyst with 20 years of experience at NSA, the US Air Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, in a June 2013 interview with Boiling Frogs:
“They [NSA] went after [spied on] — and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things — they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the — and judicial…
“They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of — heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House — their own people.
“Here’s the big one… this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, D.C. That’s who they went after, and that’s the president of the United States now.”

Jon Rappoport Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

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Contributed by Jon Rappoport of No More Fake News.
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.


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From the Web

http://www.thedailysheeple.com/is-th...complex_062013

http://www.alipac.us/f19/breaking-do...5/#post1353254

GOVERNMENT

LIKE ‘THE COLD WAR’: NSA REPORTEDLY BUGGED EUROPEAN UNION OFFICES

Jun. 30, 2013 12:56pm Madeleine Morgenstern

BERLIN (AP) — Senior European officials expressed concern Sunday at reports that U.S. intelligence agents bugged EU offices on both sides of the Atlantic, with some leftist lawmakers calling for concrete sanctions against Washington.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said he was “deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices” made in a report published Sunday by German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine said the surveillance was carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency, which has recently been the subject of leaks claiming it scanned vast amounts of foreign Internet traffic. The U.S. government has defended its efforts to intercept electronic communications overseas by arguing that this has helped prevent terror attacks at home and abroad.

In this picture, taken Saturday June 29, 2013, a demonstrator protests with a poster against NSA in Hanover, Germany. Germany’s top justice official says reports that U.S. intelligence bugged European Union offices remind her of “the methods used by enemies during the Cold War.” Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was responding to a report by German news weekly Der Spiegel on Sunday June 30, 2013, that claimed the National Security Agency has eavesdropped on EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels. The magazine cited classified U.S. documents taken by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that it said it had partly seen. The documents reportedly describe the European Union as a “target” for surveillance. (AP)

Schulz said that if the allegations that the NSA bugged European Union offices were confirmed “it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.”

Green Party leaders in the European Parliament, Rebecca Harms and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, called for an immediate investigation into the claims and suggested that recently launched negotiations on a trans-Atlantic trade treaty should be put on hold.

They also called for existing U.S.-EU agreements on the exchange of bank transfer and passenger record information to be canceled. Both programs have been labeled as unwarranted infringements of citizens’ privacy by left-wing and libertarian lawmakers in Europe.

In Germany, where criticism of the NSA’s surveillance programs has been particularly vocal, a senior government official accused the United States on Sunday of using Cold War methods against its allies by targeting EU offices in Washington, New York and Brussels.

“If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War,” German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. “It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies.”

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger called for an “immediate and comprehensive” response from the U.S. government to the claims in the Spiegel report, which cited classified U.S. documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the magazine said it had partly seen.

Telecom network cables are pictured in Paris, on June 30, 2013. The European Union angrily demanded answers from the United States over allegations Washington had bugged its offices, the latest spying claim attributed to fugitive leaker Edward Snowden. German weekly Der Spiegel said its report, which detailed covert surveillance by the National Security Agency on EU diplomatic missions, was based on confidential documents, some of which it had been able to consult via Snowden. (Getty Images)

Spokespeople for the NSA and the office for the national intelligence director in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU’s diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building’s computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU’s mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said.

Der Spiegel didn’t publish the alleged NSA documents it cited nor say how it obtained access to them. But one of the report’s authors is Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who interviewed Snowden while he was holed up in Hong Kong.

The U.S. has been trying to track down Snowden, who is believed to currently be at Moscow’s main airport with plans to travel to Ecuador to seek asylum.

The magazine also didn’t specify how it learned of the NSA’s alleged eavesdropping efforts at a key EU office in Brussels. There, the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters nearby to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior EU officials’ calls and Internet traffic, the Spiegel report said.

Also Sunday, German federal prosecutors said they were examining whether the reported U.S. electronic surveillance programs broke German laws. In a statement, the Federal Prosecutors’ Office said it was probing the claims so as to “achieve a reliable factual basis” before considering whether a formal investigation was warranted.

It said private citizens were likely to file criminal complaints on the matter, but didn’t comment on the possible legal merits of such complaints.

Der Spiegel reported that at least one such complaint was lodged with prosecutors in the state of Hesse last week.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...union-offices/

GOVERNMENT

NEW PRISM SLIDES APPEAR TO REVEAL NUMBER OF ACTIVE SURVEILLANCE TARGETS

Jun. 30, 2013 8:34am Madeleine Morgenstern

The Washington Post on Saturday published four new top-secret government slides with details about the National Security Agency program known as PRISM, including the number of individual surveillance targets being monitored in the database.

One slide, according to the Post, confirms the NSA’s ability to conduct real-time surveillance. The Post describes how “depending on the provider, the NSA may receive live notifications when a target logs on or sends an e-mail, or may monitor a voice, text or voice chat as it happens.”

Image source: Washington Post

Also detailed is the process for an analyst to begin monitoring a new target, including automatic oversight by a supervisor to ensure the target is not an American citizen or on American soil. Another (above) shows the flow of how data obtained from Internet companies, such as Google or Yahoo!, is processed and analyzed.

Another slide appears to show how as of April 5, there were 117,675 “records,” described by the Post as “active surveillance targets” in the PRISM database.

See all four new slides at The Washington Post.
–
Other Must Read Stories:

• Here Is the Pro-NSA Surveillance Argument
  
• Revealed: The Code Name the NSA Leaker Used with the Washington Post
  
• What Is the Prism Program, the Latest Development in Investigations of Surveillance of Private Business
  
• Why the NSA Collecting Your Phone Records Is a Problem (op-ed)
  
• Net firms lash out at anti-net neutrality bill (zdnet.com)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...lance-targets/

EU demands ‘full clarification’ over NSA spying on European diplomats, warns of severe impact on relations

RT
RT.com
June 30th, 2013
Reader Views: 45
Comments (2)

European Parliament in the eastern French city of Strasbourg (AFP Photo)

The president of the European parliament has demanded an explanation from US authorities over the latest revelation that EU diplomatic missions in Washington, New York and Brussels were under electronic surveillance from the NSA.
“I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices,” said the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz. “If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.”

“On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations,” he added.
EU commissioner for justice, Viviane Reding, said the Union has contacted the US authorities in Washington and Brussels about a report in Der Spiegel magazine.
“We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington DC and in Brussels and have confronted them with the press reports,” she said in a statement. “They have told us they are checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will come back to us.”
“Partners do not spy on each other,” Reding, suggesting that talks for a free trade agreement between the EU and the US should be halted until Washington provides explanations.
“We cannot negotiate over a big transatlantic market if there is the slightest doubt that our partners are carrying out spying activities on the offices of our negotiators,” she said.
Reding’s stance was backed by the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee head, Elmar Brok.
“The spying has taken on dimensions that I would never have thought possible from a democratic state,”he told Der Spiegel. “How should we still negotiate if we must fear that our negotiating position is being listened to beforehand?”
Germany and France want answers

Meanwhile, Germany’s justice minister also called for an immediate explanation from the United States saying the news that Washington bugged European Union offices was “reminiscent of the Cold War.”
“It must ultimately be immediately and extensively explained by the American side whether media reports about completely disproportionate tapping measures by the US in the EU are accurate or not,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement.
It was also revealed on Sunday that the extent of NSA’s spying on Germany was bigger that previously thought as the US combed through half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages every month.
France also wants Washington to clarify their intentions after the news that the NSA put EU offices under electronic surveillance.
“France has today asked the American authorities for an explanation,” Laurent Fabius, French foreign minister, said in a statement. “These acts, if confirmed, would be completely unacceptable.”
“We expect the American authorities to answer the legitimate concerns raised by these press revelations as quickly as possible,” he added.
The US has refused to comment publicly on the Der Spiegel story, saying it will discuss EU spying charges through diplomatic channels.

“We will also discuss these issues bilaterally with EU member states,” a spokesperson from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. “While we are not going to comment publicly on specific alleged intelligence activities, as a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”
Der Spiegel, quoting from a September 2010 “top secret” US National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden, reported on Saturday the NSA was eavesdropping on the EU’s internal computer networks in Washington, as well as at the 28-member bloc UN office in New York.
The German magazine also reported that five years ago, the NSA also targeted telecommunications at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home to the European Council, where all EU member states have their offices.
Snowden, 30, fled the US for Hong Kong in May, just weeks before The Guardian and Washington Post published details he provided about a top-secret US government surveillance program that accumulated internet and telephone traffic both at home and abroad.
The whistleblower is presently in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where it is believed he is attempting to gain political asylum in Ecuador.
Lode Vanoost, former deputy speaker of the Belgian parliament, believes that the main purpose of the US surveillance program was “economic spying” on the EU.

“At the moment, the EU is negotiating a new free trade agreement with the United States,” the former deputy speaker noted. “Well, [now the US can gather] what their opponent is already discussing internally of strategy. That is one of the possibilities.”
Vanoost also believes that part of the reason for the spying was due to the decline in US economic strength.
“On the economic level, [the US] is losing ground everywhere,” he said. “Look at what the BRIC countries are doing. The EU is having stronger ties with Russia, with Africa, with Latin America. And the US doesn’t seem to get its economic priorities imposed as it used to. So what I see is a big risk for economic spying.”

He added that there is “too much at stake” for there to be a total breakdown in US-EU bilateral relations, however, “behind closed doors there will be some very tough words” exchanged between EU and American officials. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

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Contributed by RT of RT.com.

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EU Parliament "Shocked" At NSA "Bugging" Diplomatic Offices; Threatens Trade Talks
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/30/2013 13:14 -0400

• European Union
• Hong Kong
• national security

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said he was "deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices" made in a report published Sunday by Der Spiegel. The latest round of NSA 'transparency' suggests U.S. intelligence agents bugged EU offices on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving some EU lawmakers calling for concrete sanctions against Washington - calling for an immediate investigation into the claims and suggesting that recently launched negotiations on a trans-Atlantic trade treaty should be put on hold. "If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War," notes one German minister, adding that, "it is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies." Schulz concludes, "It would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations."

Via The NY Post,


Senior European officials expressed concern Sunday at reports that U.S. intelligence agents bugged EU offices on both sides of the Atlantic, with some leftist lawmakers calling for concrete sanctions against Washington.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said he was "deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices" made in a report published Sunday by German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine said the surveillance was carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency, which has recently been the subject of leaks claiming it scanned vast amounts of foreign Internet traffic.

...

Schulz said that if the allegations that the NSA bugged European Union offices were confirmed "it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations."

... called for an immediate investigation into the claims and suggested that recently launched negotiations on a trans-Atlantic trade treaty should be put on hold.

They also called for existing U.S.-EU agreements on the exchange of bank transfer and passenger record information to be canceled.

...

"If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War," German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. "It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies."

...

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU's diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building's computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU's mission to the United Nations in New York, the magazine said.

Der Spiegel didn't publish the alleged NSA documents it cited nor say how it obtained access to them. But one of the report's authors is Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who interviewed Snowden while he was holed up in Hong Kong.

...

The magazine also didn't specify how it learned of the NSA's alleged eavesdropping efforts at a key EU office in Brussels. There, the NSA used secure facilities at NATO headquarters nearby to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior EU officials' calls and Internet traffic, the Spiegel report said.

Also Sunday, German federal prosecutors said they were examining whether the reported U.S. electronic surveillance programs broke German laws. In a statement, the Federal Prosecutors' Office said it was probing the claims so as to "achieve a reliable factual basis" before considering whether a formal investigation was warranted.

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...ns-trade-talks