United Kingdom hacking
A newspaper report that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and emails has prompted an angry response from traditional rival Russia and provoked demands for an investigation from Turkey and South Africa.
Although spying on diplomats is as old as diplomacy itself, the Guardian’s report laid out in explicit detail steps taken by GCHQ to monitor foreign officials’ conversations in real time, saying that British spies had hacked emails, stolen passwords and gone so far as to set up a bugged Internet cafe in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.
The Guardian cited more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ’s intelligence operations, which it says involved, among other things, hacking into the South African foreign ministry’s computer network, targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London and using the vast spying base at northern England’s Menwith Hill to monitor the satellite communications of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev.
Associated Press
NSA leaker Edward Snowden defended his disclosure of top-secret U.S. spying programs in an online chat Monday with The Guardian and attacked U.S. officials for calling him a traitor.
“The U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,” he said. He added the government “immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home,” by labeling him a traitor, and indicated he would not return to the U.S. voluntarily.
Congressional leaders have called Snowden a traitor for revealing once-secret surveillance programs two weeks ago in the Guardian and The Washington Post. The National Security Agency programs collect records of millions of Americans’ telephone calls and Internet usage as a counterterror tool. The disclosures revealed the scope of the collections, which surprised many Americans and have sparked debate about how much privacy the government can take away in the name of national security.
“It would be foolish to volunteer yourself to” possible arrest and criminal charges “if you can do more good outside of prison than in it,” he said.
Snowden dismissed being called a traitor by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who made the allegations in an interview this week on Fox News Sunday. Cheney was echoing the comments of both Democrats and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, including Senate Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.
“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein … the better off we all are,” Snowden said.
The Guardian announced that its website was hosting an online chat with Snowden, in hiding in Hong Kong, with reporter Glenn Greenwald receiving and posting his questions. The Associated Press couldn’t independently verify that Snowden was the man who posted 19 replies to questions.
In answer to the question of whether he fled to Hong Kong because he was spying for China, Snowden wrote, “Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
He added later, “I have had no contact with the Chinese government.”
Snowden dismissed the U.S. government’s claims that the NSA surveillance programs had helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks in more than 20 countries, including the 2009 al-Qaida plot by Afghan American Najibullah Zazi to blow up New York subways.
“Journalists should ask a specific question: … how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive (sic) that, and ask yourself if it was worth it.”
He added that “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”
Snowden was working as a contractor for NSA at the time he had access to the then-secret programs. He defended his actions and said he considered what to reveal and what not to, saying he did not reveal any U.S. operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but instead showed that the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like universities and private businesses.
U.S. officials say the data-gathering programs are legal and operated under secret court supervision.
Snowden defended his description of his salary as being $200,000 a year, calling that a “career high,” but saying he did take a pay cut to take the job at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked as a contractor at an NSA facility in Hawaii. When Booz Allen fired him, they said his salary was $122,000.
In one of his final replies, Snowden attacked the “mainstream media” for its coverage, saying it “now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicion-less surveillance in human history.”
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