Full Text: The United States' Global Surveillance Record
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E-mail Xinhua, May 26, 2014
According to documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA has spied on delegations from and embassies of Brazil, Bulgaria, Columbia, the European Union, France, Georgia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Venezuela and Vietnam, among others.
Apart from the UN Headquarters, the information technology infrastructure and servers of the EU and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have also been grasped by the U.S. . When the EU moved its UN office, the U.S. relocated its bugs.
A document released by Snowden to the Guardian reveals that American spies based in North Yorkshire in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the 2009 G20 Summit. This was just hours after Obama and Medvedev reached a consensus to build mutual trust during their talks.
A classified document dated June 2012 shows that then Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto's emails about naming some cabinet members were read by the NSA. The U.S. secret service also monitored the communications of Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff and used a special software to track her emails and online chat.
Australian spy agency the Defense Signals Directorate worked alongside the NSA in mounting a massive surveillance operation on Indonesia during the UN climate change conference in Bali in 2007.
During the G20 Summit in Toronto in June 2010, the NSA ran a six-day spying operation at the U.S. embassy in Canada.
Leaked documents also show that Japan, Brazil and Iraq are key intelligence targets of U.S. eavesdroppers for their "economic stability and impact" mission. For the "emerging strategic technologies" mission, Russia is a focus, along with India, Germany, France, South Korea, Israel, Singapore, Sweden and Japan. China, Germany, France, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Japan and another 10 countries, plus the UN, are listed as key targets of the "foreign policy" mission.
The New York Times concluded that the NSA "spies routinely on friends as well as foes" to achieve "diplomatic advantage over such allies as France and Germany" and "economic advantage over Japan and Brazil."
2. The United States spies on the public all over the world
The U.S. surveillance on the Internet is so massive that it is able to monitor nearly everything a targeted user does on the Internet. According to the Guardian, American intelligence uses a secret surveillance system known as XKeyscore, comprising 500 servers distributed around the world, to mine intelligence from the Internet. Leaked documents boast that XKeyscore is the NSA's "widest reaching" system covering "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet."
Documents released by Snowden show that the NSA gathers around 5 billion records each day on the whereabouts of cell phones and these records comprise a vast database of information. Also, the NSA collected about 2 billion cell phone text messages each day from around the world.
Some U.S. media have remarked that intercepting suspects' telephones to obtain information is nothing new, but collecting such vast amount of intelligence overseas is astonishing.
The Washington Post reported that the NSA secretly broke into the main communication links that connect Yahoo and Google's respective data centers around the world. By tapping these links, the agency positioned itself to collect data at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts. By analyzing the data, the NSA can discover who sent or received emails, when and where, as well as email contents, including audio and video as well as text.
According to the Brazilian website Fantastico, the NSA has carried out so-called Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks using fake security certificates to pose as a legitimate web service, bypass browser security settings, and intercept data that unsuspecting persons are attempting to send to that service. Google is among the services the NSA has impersonated.
The Guardian has revealed that the NSA routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about U.S. citizens. This is despite of earlier promises by the Obama administration to rigorously protect the privacy of innocent U.S. citizens caught in the dragnet.
On Dec. 31, 2013, the German news magazine Der Spiegel quoted NSA papers describing how the agency collected sensitive data from Sea-Me-We 4, the key undersea telecommunication cable system linking Europe and Asia, as well as its plans to continue eavesdropping on other undersea cables.
The French daily Le Monde reported that the U.S. spy agency tapped more than 70.3 million phone calls made in France between December 10, 2012, and January 8, 2013.
In an internal NSA document, smart phone operating systems such as iOS and Android are described as the "gold nugget of data resources." The NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been collaborating on mobile phone surveillance since 2007, when the budget of the NSA was increased from 204 million U.S. dollars to 767 million U.S. dollars, allowing the agency to dig even deeper.
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