Espiar mola

Agentes secretos en plena acción.

The History of America’s Secret Wars: Corporate Espionage and the Outsourcing of National SecurityBy Greg Guma

Lo de espiar es "trending topic". Mola.Se armó tamaño revuelo por las escuchas británicas en la reunión en la cumbre. Antes había salido a la superficie que la administración estadounidense de Obama "controlaba" las comunicaciones de varios medios de comunicación, grandes servidores de internet, y usuarios de varias compañías telefónicas. Es decir, que casi todo el mundo era espiado en mayor o menor medida por el gobierno. Por su parte, se ha fomentado la idea de una hipotética unidad del Ejercito chino ha practicado "ciberataques" contra los ordenadores de objetivos estratégicos estadounidenses. Por no ser menos, en España tuvimos un caso de espionaje muy cutre salchichero, contra (o sobre) políticos catalanes. Hace muchos años, una abogada estadounidense que luchaba  por conseguir hacer turismo sanitario gratuito en España, me previno contra el uso de ciertas palabras, por teléfono y en internet, vocablos que según la buena señora, eran señales "para el sistema de escuchas" estadounidense. El artículo de Guma está mejor documentado que las advertencias de la letrada asustada. Pero es bueno darse cuenta de una buena vez que nada de lo que publiquemos en internet dejará de ser, de alguna manera, registrado, visto y  evaluado. Que el correo electrónico nos expone a una insospechada falta de intimidad. Recuerdo el caso de un bobo profundo español a quien se le ocurrió colgar en su muro de Facebook un comentario que mezclaba al Jefe del Estado español con ETA. El pringao, terminó siendo acusado de (creo) falta de respeto y apología del terrorismo.
Pues lo dicho, que todos somos profundamente espiados.

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-history-of-americas-secret-wars-corporate-espionage-and-the-outsourcing-of-national-security/5338982

This text is excerpted from Big Lies: How Our Corporate Overlords, Politicians and Media Establishment Warp Reality and Undermine Democracy
Pre-9/11 Flashback

When NATO’s US and British troops in Macedonia began evacuating Albanian rebels in June 2001, officials claimed that they were merely trying to help Europe avert a devastating civil war. Most media dutifully repeated this spin as fact. But the explanation only made sense if you ignored a troublesome contradiction; namely, US support for both the Macedonian Armed Forces and the Albanians fighting them. Beyond that, there was a decade of confused and manipulative Western policies, climaxing with NATO bombing and the imposition of “peace” through aggression in Kosovo. Together, these moves effectively destabilized the region.

In Macedonia, the main “cut out” – spook-speak for “intermediary” –was Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), then a major private military company (PMC) whose Macedonian field commander was a former US general with strong ties to Kosovo Liberation Army Commander Agim Ceku and Macedonian General Jovan Andrejevski.

MPRI and other PMCs that have succeeded it receive much of their funding from the US State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. For example, MPRI trained and equipped the Bosnian Croat Muslim Federation Army with a large State Department contract. Over the years, the company claimed to have “helped” Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia – in effect, arming and training all parties. In 2000, it pulled in at least $70 million from its global operations.

Working closely with the Pentagon, MPRI also arranged for the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) training and weapons in the run up to the war on Yugoslavia. Later, the same firm channeled token military aid to the Macedonian army, new US weapons to the rebels, and military intelligence to both sides.

Actually, it was a standard procedure, applied with great success in the Middle East for decades: Keep warring parties from overwhelming one other and you strengthen the bargaining power of the puppeteer behind the scenes. Better yet, combine this with disinformation; that is, tell the public one thing while doing the opposite.

It’s not a question of allies and enemies. Those designations can change for any number of reasons. In 1999, ethnic Albanians were victims and freedom fighters. In 2001, they were “officially” a threat. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were just three of the friends-turned-pariahs who learned that lesson.

And what was the real objective in Macedonia? The country was in a financial straight jacket, its budget basically controlled by the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of international creditors. Since the IMF had placed a ceiling on military expenditures, the only funding option left was privatization. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the process started with the sale of the government’s stake in Macedonian Telekom.

Even more was at stake – things like strategic pipeline routes and transport corridors through the country. But that wouldn’t become obvious for years, if ever. This is another traditional tactic: Keep the true agenda under wraps for as long as possible.

Pretexts for War

Despite 24-hour news and talk about transparency, there’s much we don’t know about our past, much less current events. What’s worse, some of what we think we know isn’t true.

The point is that it’s no accident. Consider, for example, the proximate circumstances that led to open war in Vietnam. According to official history, two US destroyers patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam were victims of unprovoked attacks in August 1964, leading to a congressional resolution that gave President Johnson the power “to take all necessary measures.”

In fact, the destroyers were spy ships, part of a National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program operating near the coast as a way to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their radar and other communications channels. The more provocative the maneuvers, the more signals that could be captured. Meanwhile, US raiding parties were shelling mainland targets. Documents revealed later indicated that the August 4 attack on the USS Maddox – the pretext for passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – may not even have taken place.

But even if it did, the incident was still stage managed to build up congressional and public support for the war. Evidence suggests that the plan was based on Operation Northwoods, a scheme developed in 1962 to justify an invasion of Cuba. Among the tactics the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered then were blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay, a phony “communist Cuba terror campaign” in Florida and Washington, DC, and an elaborate plan to convince people that Cuba had shot down a civilian airliner filled with students. That operation wasn’t implemented, but two years later, desperate for a war, the administration’s military brass found a way to create the necessary conditions in Vietnam.

NSA and Echelon

For more than half a century, the eyes and ears of US power to monitor and manipulate information (and with it, mass perceptions) has been the NSA, initially designed to assist the CIA. Its original task was to collect raw information about threats to US security, cracking codes and using the latest technology to provide accurate intelligence on the intentions and activities of enemies. Emerging after World War II, its early focus was the Soviet Union. But it never did crack a high-level Soviet cipher system. On the other hand, it used every available means to eavesdrop on not only enemies but also allies and US citizens.

In Body of Secrets, James Bamford described a bureaucratic and secretive behemoth, based in an Orwellian Maryland complex known as Crypto City. From there, supercomputers linked it to spy satellites, subs, aircraft, and equally covert, strategically placed listening posts worldwide. By 2000, it had a $7 billion annual budget and directly employed at least 38,000 people, more than the CIA and FBI. It was also the leader of an international intelligence club, UKUSA, which includes Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Together, they monitored and recorded billions of encrypted communications, telephone calls, radio messages, faxes, and e-mails around the world.

Over the years, however, the line between enemies and friends blurred, and the intelligence gatherers often converted their control of information into unilateral power, influencing the course of history in ways that may never be known. No doubt the agency has had a hand in countless covert operations; yet, attempts to pull away the veil of secrecy have been largely unsuccessful.

In the mid-1970s, for example, just as Congress was attempting to reign in the CIA, the NSA was quietly creating a virtual state, a massive international computer network named Platform. Doing away with formal borders, it developed a software package that turned worldwide Sigint (short for “signal intelligence”: communication intelligence, eavesdropping, and electronic intelligence) into a unified whole. An early software package was code named Echelon, a name later connected with eavesdropping on commercial communication.

Of course, the NSA and its British sister, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), refused to admit Echelon existed, even though declassified documents appeared on the Internet and Congress conducted an investigation. A European Parliament report also confirmed Echelon’s activities, and encouraged Internet users and governments to adopt stronger privacy measures in response.

In March 2001, several ranking British politicians discussed Echelon’s potential impacts on civil liberties, and a European Parliament committee considered its legal, human rights, and privacy implications. The Dutch held similar hearings, and a French National Assembly inquiry urged the European Union to embrace new privacy enhancing technologies to protect against Echelon’s eavesdropping. France launched a formal investigation into possible abuses for industrial espionage.

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