“Collect it all”, “exploit it all”: 5 Eyes economic surveillance

karol
10 years ago
Categories: accountability, capitalism, democracy under attack, john key, slippery, Spying, us politics

I am in the process of watching the videos of Glenn Greenwald, as interviewed on Democracy Now about his new book No Place to Hide. It’s posted on the Daily Blog by Selwyn Manning. I am in the middle of the first video.

It’s mind blowing stuff. The extent of the NSA-led 5 Eyes surveillance systems is a leap from sci fi into our daily lives. ( NSA is the US state surveillance agency, and the 5 Eyes include the equivalent agencies in the UK, Aussie, Canada and NZ’s GCSB).

There is a strong focus on economic surveillance in the use of the systems.

The first post and video, as Manning explains the significance of the latest revelations for NZ:

In this interview Glenn Greenwald reveals and describes new collection postures – or new methods of surveillance used by the the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) etc.

The interviewee makes references to dragnet “Sniff it all’, ‘Know it all’, ‘Collect it all’, ‘Process it all’, ‘Exploit it all’, Partner it all’, data surveillance taking place in all parts of the world.

The Partner it all reference raises questions as to the accuracy of New Zealand and Australian government assurances that such surveillance is not targeting citizens of these countries.

A graphic slide follows, demonstrating the surveillance methods.

from the Daily Blog post by Selwyn Manning.

For New Zealand, the latest information indicates that John Key and GCSB boss Ian Fletcher have questions to answer – they appear to have misled the people of NZ. Manning states:

The public interest demands the Prime Minister explain how this information is not incongruous to his assertions that New Zealand citizens are not having their communications data trawled, netted, and processed by the Five Eyes network – operations that appear to include the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

Some of the new stuff Greenwald talks about in the interview:

He outlines the extent of the economic surveillance that includes spying on the UN, oil companies, corporations, and the US department of commerce, and much more. The NSA has spied on the Brazilian company Petrobras, spied on international economic conferences, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Swift banking system. The NSA has “customers” like the CIA, and the US departments of agriculture and commerce, which make requests of the NSA.

After all the fuss that the US authorities, and others have made about the intensive surveillance in commercial technologies, alleged to be done on behalf of the Chinese government, there’s this at about 17 minutes 14 seconds into the video – Greenwald says that his new book describes this intrusive and wide-reaching practice by the NSA:

..all over the world, people buy routers and switchers and servers, which are the devices that let corporations or municipalities or villages provide internet service to large numbers of people at once …

…when somebody orders a product from Cisco [for example as well as other US companies], Cisco then ships it to that person. The NSA physically intercepts the package – takes it from FedEx or from the US mail service, brings it back to NSA headquarters, opens up the package and plants a back door device on one of these devices, reseals it with the packer e-seal and sends it on to the unwitting user, who then provides internet service for large numbers of people – all of which is instantly redirected into the repositories of the NSA.

The Snowden material includes email communications describing how they do this, along with photos of it being done.

Greenwald then talks about the cooperation among the 5 Eyes partners. At about 28 minutes into the video, he says his book includes a letter from a “high level Australian official” who asked the US government to help it to spy on Aussie citizens.

Of importance with respect to the questions John Key and Ian Fletcher need to be asked, Greenwald explains

If you listen to these governments, in response to the stories that we’ve been reporting, what they’ll say is, to their own citizens, “You don’t need to worry because there’s all these restrictions on how we can spy on you. Yes, we can spy on the rest of the world as much as we want, but” these governments say, “when it comes to you, our wonderful citizens, we have all kinds of legal restrictions,..

This is the kind of thing that Key and Fletcher have said to us. Greenwald refers to a document, published for the first time, that he claims shows these governments,

will ask their surveillance partners to spy on their own people, and then give them the fruits of that surveillance. So they can learn everything that they want to know about their own population, while pretending to abide by the legal restrictions that have been imposed on them.

So, Mr Key, what exactly do you know about all this? What haven’t you been telling us?

Part Two of Greenwald’s interview has been posted here on The Daily Blog.

Update: Snowden documents referred to in Greenwald’s book are on a PDF here.