Glenn Greenwald, Intercept - Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”
After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”
But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that.
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2 comments:
Once the NSA, or for that matter, any other government organization or corporation, admits to lying about one thing, we can't trust their integrity in other matters. So, anything they say from now on, might be the truth or might be a lie. Their credibility is gone forever! We would be fools to trust anything they say. Caveat emptor!
The Feds were bugging attendees of the 1999 WTO in Seattle, including business and corporate representatives, and was passing that information to American business insiders.
This NSA stuff goes back a long ways, it was not a product of only the past decade or so. What did change was the ease of tapping into and availability of electronic information due to new technologies becoming widely available and integrated with the internet. But the intent of vacuuming up everything possible has been a long standing policy.
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