From the “don’t trust but verify” department comes the revelation that the Obama administration went into COP15 negotiation with spy help.
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that
“Analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”
“Second Party partners” refers to the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship. “While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event,” the document says.
The Huffington Post published the documents Wednesday night in coordination with the Danish daily newspaper Information, which worked with American journalist Laura Poitras.
Read the full document here.(PDF)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/snowden-nsa-surveillance-_n_4681362.html
h/t to WUWT reader MichaelWiseGuy
JamesS:
This is a quick reply to your post at February 1, 2014 at 5:46 pm. I have duties this morning but did not want you to think I was averse to replying to your post. Any curtness is haste.
I fail to understand your ‘hit man’ analogy because it seems to be a completely different situation.
As I said, the issue is the meaning of the word “purpose” in the Executive Order. Its common usage would mean that the acceptance by the NSA of information from GCHQ would not be conducting surveillance “undertaken for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons”. It would be accepting information for the purpose of preventing terrorism although that information was gathered by another agency (i,e, GCHQ) from “United States persons”. However, I am not a lawyer so the common usage of “purpose” may not apply because it has a different legal meaning.
I am not accepting what Snowden says. I am accepting what the media report the documents he stole say. Nobody has denied those contents of the documents to my knowledge, and your President has made changes to NSA operations on the basis of those contents.
Given the extremely naive comments about Security Agencies in this thread, it seems a bit of a stretch to call me naive because I don’t dismiss the reported contents of stolen NSA documents. And your reasons for saying I should dismiss them are that the thief is not nice and the media agree on the contents!
Again the app. disclaimer is not relevant. We are discussing behaviour of Security Agencies and not what people do or do not agree when they buy an app.
Must rush. Sorry.
Richard