NSA used threat to gather intelligence – analyst
Press TV has conducted an interview with Danny Schechter, the editor of mediachannel.org from Washington, about the United States spying on its European allies.
- Snooping on the citizens of a country is one thing but then their leaders are finding out that they had been spied on. That has obviously drawn the anger of these different officials such as Angela Merkel. But at the end of the day, is the US going to do anything about it?
- You will notice what was actually said. They said we are not spying on you Mrs. Merkel. That did not mean that we have not spied on you in the past or that we will not in the future. In other words, they are saying we are not currently spying on you and we are not planning to spy on you but not saying whether they have spied on her.
You know, I just read a report that said 124 billion phone calls were being monitored in one month by NSA programs. You know, the NSA has basically cajoled all the telecommunications companies, the internet companies, the big websites to cooperate with them under threat and so as a result, privacy agreements between individuals and these companies are null and void for all extensive purposes and the United States has an industrial scale spying effort underway.
That does not necessarily mean that getting all this data means that they can analyze it. You know, we have had many examples of lots of intelligence agencies completely being inaccurate about what is going on because they cannot manage all the information they have and this seems to be another case of it but it is upsetting the world especially in Germany.
Do not forget it was in Germany that the Stasi in East Germany was at that time considered the biggest spy agency in the world, the most thorough, the most invasive. Now the United States seems to be one upping the Stasi in doing not only what it did but worse and this is upsetting our allies.
- What is intriguing about this to me and a big question mark is that the fact is that the NSA has also spied on financial transactions internationally. The first question that comes to minds is that why couldn’t they predict based on their snooping that the financial crisis was going to occur and the meltdown that is so plague in the US and Europe?
- You know, this is intelligence in quotes, not intelligence in reality. These people do not have really a clue about what is going on. They are chasing kind of their stereotyped enemies and as a result, they are living in a culture of paranoia which leads to error and a lack of understanding of what is going on.
That is why we are so out of touch with what people are saying around the world. We know a lot but we really do not know how to apply what we know and make sense of it and this is a deep problem that we have had for many years.