19-04-2024 01:53 PM Jerusalem Timing

Glenn Greenwald: NSA Documents on Middle East to Be Revealed

Glenn Greenwald: NSA Documents on Middle East to Be Revealed

Numerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, Greenwald said

GreenwaldNumerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist leading the reporting on the explosive NSA leaks, told Al-Akbar newspaper.

In his new book, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State,” Greenwald released new documents highlighting the scope of surveillance conducted by the NSA on foes and allies alike, including evidence of what the NSA designated as ‘approved SIGNIT partners’ such as Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

According to al-Akhbar, Greenwald revealed that there was a Memorandum of Understanding between the Israeli surveillance agency and the NSA that we published, detailing how close the relationship was, and also part of that story there were also documents saying that although the US gives huge amounts of aid to the Israelis the Israelis are actually one of the most aggressive eavesdroppers on the US government and America generally, and that they try to make the relationship completely one-sided on behalf of Israel, so there is that that we published.

Answering a question about why this did not make a big deal in the US, Greenwald said that anything which reflects poorly on Israel is systematically ignored by most of America’s media.

Greenwald added that there will be reporting on the "NSA cooperation with some of the worst tyrants in the Gulf region, both to augment their own domestic surveillance capabilities and also for the NSA to share with those regimes information they get about those countries."

On Yemen, Greenwald said that NSA had a major role in targeting people with lethal drone attacks through the use of sim cards and the like, and the ways in which that’s so unreliable, and virtually guarantees the death of civilians or kills they are not even certain who they are killing. Look, sometimes the NSA intercepts communication between people who, regardless of the ambiguity of the word ‘terrorism’, would be regarded as legitimate targets of the NSA, but the problem is the vast majority of what they do isn’t about that.

"It’s about putting entire populations under surveillance, targeting people and companies for economic interests; it is a matter of domination."
Greenwald pointed out that NSA may use surveillance as a means of to ruin personal lives through rumors and scandals.

Asked about the influence of these leaks, Greenwald noted that every single year since 9/11 an overwhelming number of Americans have said ‘I fear terrorism more than I do the threat of the government infringing on my rights’, until 2013 when that completely reversed, obviously due to the Snowden disclosures.

According to the Lebanese paper, Greenwald stated that the US government will never limit its surveillance activities, expecting that a combination of other countries around the world standing together to introduce international regimes or build an infrastructure so the US doesn’t control the physical regime of the internet. Also, American tech companies who are really afraid of the perception of American communications are unsafe will cause them to lose huge numbers of future users, but mostly it will come from individuals around the world who will realize that their privacy is being compromised systematically and will start using basic encryption tools that really do keep the NSA out of their computers, and out of their internet usage, and out of their emails, and that will make it much much harder for the NSA to do what they want to do.