“If my telephone was intercepted when I was prime minister, all that anybody would have heard would have been praise for President Obama” — former prime minister Julia Gillard to a Washington audience, October 2013.
You won’t read praise for Barack Obama in Crikey on this subject.
Revelations in The Guardian that the US National Security Agency allegedly monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders are seriously concerning and deserve a serious response from the Obama administration.
Yes, these claims cover the final years of the George W. Bush administration. But for the present administration to bat away concerns by claiming this practice no longer takes place, while giving few details, is inadequate.
If the allegations are correct, and some evidence is presented by The Guardian, then the US has spied on world leaders, possibly including Australia’s (the leaders who were monitored have not been named publicly).
American exceptionalism, while tolerated by its allies to a certain extent, does not extend to systematic spying on them. This is not about national security or terrorism; there are no al-Qaeda operatives in the office of Angela Merkel, or running Brazil’s Petrobras oil company. Former Mexican president Felipe Calderon was not a Taliban agent. Yet we know all were “monitored” by the NSA.
This is about economic espionage, and about a security mentality that assumes, in order to look for a needle in a haystack, you need to watch the entire farm. Obama and his intelligence chiefs are inflicting serious diplomatic damage on the US. Legitimate questions about their mass surveillance must be answered.
Righteous outrage on behalf of whom?. So Australia doesn’t spy on anybody. Riiight.Wank@rs
The US is run in the interests of massive US commercial interests.
Look at the poverty there – they are short-changing their own people, off the back of propaganda, in those same interests.
As so often, I am only surprised by the (purported) surprise of the bien pissant commentariat.
They aren’t called spooks for nothing.Even before the days of ECHOLON (a relatively benign, clunky communications surveillance) system of the 90s, the amoral, the envious and the plain incompetent rose without trace in the bureaucracy and esp. the alphabet-soup security agencies because the were in Hannah Arendt’s terms, grovelling types who’d have be rejected had they sought to be Good Soldier Schweik’s apprentice on civvy street.
Hands up any moron who imagines that Max “Snowden” Headroom revelations will curb the permanent government’s power in anyway.
I don’t even know why they bother to hide it as Mr & Mrs Pooter can never have enough suppression of the ‘Other’ and, surprisingly, don’t really object when they realise that they are also subject to the purview.
Put simply, enforcers of the State have been around since Hammurabi and will still be sucking on the public teat when the sun goes nova.
The US government is busy looking over everybody else’s fence because it’s a welcome distraction from what’s happening in its own poverty-riddled backyard.
Ive been moderated Zut but AB and Klewso are right. WTF this has been going on since jesus had measles. I dont like the “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear” tactic of the right,and the facism that our new government is embracing; but i can understand when an ally is hiding your public enemy number 1 and is outraged when you find him.