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Jim Dean, managing editor of the Veterans Today, has joined Press TV’s Debate from Atlanta, to shed more light on the US espionage scandal.

Press TV: Mr. Dean first of all, your response to that part of the argument that our guest in London (George Lambrakis) put forward, that this is a tit for tat response that China is getting; China has also been accused of conducting these kinds of cyber-attacks, so to speak, as the US puts it, and now it is getting a taste of its own medicine, is what our guest in London is suggesting.

Do you think that this is actually a cyber-war taking place and that it is because, as our guest in London says, the fact that there is democracy in the US that this information is being made clear and that countries like China or other countries are even worse in terms of the surveillance that they do?

Dean: Well, it is certainly they are putting on both sides; all parties are trying to make a show out of this as much as they can, playing the victim; but just a couple of highlights: Cyber warfare was really initiated on large-scale by the Americans and they pretty much had an idea, a supremacist idea, that because people in the US were smarter than everybody else, if they got into it earlier, they would be the leader in the game and nobody would ever catch up. But obviously they forgot that India has a billion people, China has got a billion people ..., and have a lot of smart folks.

So we, really initiated the real aggressive cyber warfare, which the other countries obviously had to gear up to defend themselves from.

Then China, their first --espionage-- was industrial espionage because they were able to advance as quickly as they did technology-wise by evading doing five or ten years of our ... work; because they found that they could just steal research and development through cyber warfare as it was being built and which gave them the ability to catch up very quicker and the third, the third thing that nobody really touched here, is that Israel’s espionage in the US dwarfs anything that China has done, and Israel is the only ...[entity] that we know of who is an espionage wholesaler.

They steal everything they can get their hands on, they use what they can use for their own purposes and then what they cannot, they will go up to the international market and sell it and they will sell things to China, which we have known that they have done; and they sold things to the Russians back in the Soviet days because Jonathan Pollard, was really tasked with getting first strike information for the Soviets, which the Israelis did get and transferred to them and that was part of the deal of the Jackson when they brought all the Jews out of Russia to Israel, that was part of the deal. You do the espionage, get us first strike information on the Israelis and we will give you a million soviet Jews to increase your population.

Press TV: Mr. Dean what is your response to what Mr. Lambrakis said?

Dean: Well, it is an understandable question and my answer is that Veterans Today is an intelligence, primarily intelligence, website and our core people who operated and sources, go all the way back to the Cold War era people from the Reagan era, including the first national security advisor that a president ever had; including people from national security council people, not too far away and have worked in intelligence for 30 and sometimes 40 years.

So what I am passing on to you is not Jim Dean’s opinions but these are people who worked in these administrations during the time when they worked for the government and then also have continued working as contractors and have extensive sources within the community and are still active defense contractors and counterintelligence contractors today.

So it is not Jim Dean’s, I am just passing it on to you collectively with what we have been following these stories for years at the Veterans Today.

Press TV: Mr. Dean, there are a lot of arguments raised there by Mr. Lambrakis. I will start by this question, he said that there is effective and justified means of getting information from the world and speaking about the US spying operations, concerning the rest of the world, for instance; is there a justified reason to hack into the emails of the German chancellor for one, or the Chinese president for another?

Do you think that that is going too far or we have to say, as our guest in London says: Well, I have nothing to hide so I do not care if they read my emails!

Dean: Well, it is a very, very good point and I would say that if all the countries are really concerned about this, they have the gold standard form, template, anyway for trying to resolve what limitations we are going to have on spying on allies’ leaders’ communications and that is really under the Admiralty Law which has worked wonderfully for generations and generations, disputes are settled constantly worldwide with no political interference whatsoever, much of it by arbitration.

You have never heard of one single scandal of anybody trying to pressure anyone, there has been no bribe taking and whatever and everyone has always accepted whatever the ruling have been, even though some of the cases have been very, very complicated.

But part of the hypocrisy, which has been mentioned earlier, if you were to approach these countries and say, let us try to set up some limitations about cyber spying on each other, particularly leaders’ personal communications and let us turn the policing of that over to something like the way the Admiralty Law set up ... where nobody that has any political connections whatsoever that has ever worked for the government, worked for a think-tank, just absolute total professionals that people have trust in, and let them make the decisions on this and have some substantial penalties for violators; and I would bet you that almost absolutely no one would be interested in having a forum like that.

So, I think we are going to be doomed to the free for all of everybody doing as much as they can do and the Chinese, like your former guest had said, they are just hoping that a Chinese Mr. Snowden does not come forward and release a whole bunch of what they have been doing, also.

Press TV: We are quickly running out of time. I just want to bring up one question and that is about the situation inside the US as spying is affecting American citizens themselves.

A lot of people have described this as a police state and they are saying that there is no Fourth Amendment Right against unreasonable search and seizure. Is that how you would describe it? Mr. Dean what is your idea about that statement?

Dean: Well, people are worried about the trend because it is all in the eye of the beholder but another concern, if that they have not been aware of, is when it comes to security, we really do not have very much because of the outsourcing, so much outsourcing of the intelligence collection. You have 2,000 companies that are contracted, intelligence defense contractors and you have 500,000 people with top security clearances and if anybody thinks that that is not a sieve for having no security whatsoever, they must be smoking dope because there is wayway too much people who have access to way too much and there is zillions of ways people are able to steal our secrets.