Published on
Sunday, October 20, 2013 by Common
Dreams
NSA
Spied on Mexican Government for Years
New
Snowden leaks reported on by German magazine Der Spiegel show Mexico was
systematic target of NSA surveillance
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
The
National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on top Mexican officials,
including the president, for years, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.
Der Spiegel reports that a spying operation dubbed "Flatliquid" was carried out by the NSA's "Tailored Access Operations" (TAO) department, which accessed in 2010 what the agency found to be "a lucrative source"—an email domain used by then-President Felipe Calderon and cabinet members.
The paper also revealed that in 2009, a separate successful NSA operation dubbed "Whitetamale" allowed the agency to hack into the emails of high-ranking officials in Mexico's Public Security Secretariat. Der Spiegel reports:
This hacking operation allowed the NSA not only to obtain information on several drug cartels, but also to gain access to "diplomatic talking-points." In the space of a single year, according to the internal documents, this operation produced 260 classified reports that allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments.
The tone of the document that lists the NSA's "tremendous success" in monitoring Mexican targets shows how aggressively the US intelligence agency monitors its southern neighbor. "These TAO accesses into several Mexican government agencies are just the beginning -- we intend to go much further against this important target," the document reads. It goes on to state that the divisions responsible for this surveillance are "poised for future successes."
Last
month, other documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA
accessed the email accounts and telephones of both current Mexican President
Enrique Pena Nieto and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
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1 comment:
There is no such thing as privacy or security. Those are red herrings that the people in power use to get us to waste our energy and misdirect our efforts. Someone somewhere on earth knows every single secret thought you've had. The good news is that that person couldn't care less about your secrets unless you step on his toes. If you do, he'll use them as a pretext to crush you, but he still won't care about them; and, while the public will condemn your morals and legality, the person behind the pretext will make no moral judgment on them at all. But we are supposed to obsess on privacy and security so that we will make ourselves visible and more easy for those in power to pick out in the vast sea of seven billion humans on earth, which normally make any private individual difficult to notice no matter what she is doing. If you're worried about your safety, stay off the toes of those in power, and don't worry about anyone snooping or hacking you. I hope this helps.
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