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Documents show NSA efforts to spy on Iran

iranigirl2

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This 2007 list of the National Security Agency’s major missions illustrates the sweep of the agency’s goals for signals intelligence (Sigint) or electronic eavesdropping, which include not only such obvious targets as terrorist groups and Iran’s nuclear program, but the diplomacy and economic policy of friendly countries.



The influence of Venezuela’s leftist leaders and their allies in Latin America are a surprising priority, here described as “Bolivarian Developments.”







More here :http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...spy-on-both-enemies-and-allies.html?ref=world

Mapping Message Trails

In May 2009, analysts at the agency learned that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was to make a rare trip to Kurdistan Province in the country’s mountainous northwest. The agency immediately organized a high-tech espionage mission, part of a continuing project focused on Ayatollah Khamenei called Operation Dreadnought.

Working closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which handles satellite photography, as well as G.C.H.Q., the N.S.A. team studied the Iranian leader’s entourage, its vehicles and its weaponry from satellites, and intercepted air traffic messages as planes and helicopters took off and landed.

They heard Ayatollah Khamenei’s aides fretting about finding a crane to load an ambulance and fire truck onto trucks for the journey. They listened as he addressed a crowd, segregated by gender, in a soccer field.

They studied Iranian air defense radar stations and recorded the travelers’ rich communications trail, including Iranian satellite coordinates collected by an N.S.A. program called Ghosthunter.

The point was not so much to catch the Iranian leader’s words, but to gather the data for blanket eavesdropping on Iran in the event of a crisis.

This “communications fingerprinting,” as a document called it, is the key to what the N.S.A. does. It allows the agency’s computers to scan the stream of international communications and pluck out messages tied to the supreme leader. In a crisis — say, a showdown over Iran’s nuclear program — the ability to tap into the communications of leaders, generals and scientists might give a crucial advantage.



The Limits of Spying

The techniques described in the Snowden documents can make the N.S.A. seem omniscient, and nowhere in the world is that impression stronger than in Afghanistan. But the agency’s capabilities at the tactical level have not been nearly enough to produce clear-cut strategic success there, in the United States’ longest war.

A single daily report from June 2011 from the N.S.A.’s station in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day’s work.

The agency listened while insurgents from the Haqqani network mounted an attack on the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, overhearing the attackers talking to their bosses in Pakistan’s tribal area and recording events minute by minute. “Ruhullah claimed he was on the third floor and had already inflicted one casualty,” the report said in a typical entry. “He also indicated that Hafiz was located on a different floor.”

N.S.A. officers listened as two Afghan Foreign Ministry officials prepared for a meeting between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iranian officials, assuring them that relations with the United States “would in no way threaten the interests of Iran,” which they decided Mr. Karzai should describe as a “brotherly country.”



Mining All the Tidbits

In the Afghan reports and many others, a striking paradox is the odd intimacy of a sprawling, technology-driven agency with its targets. It is the one-way intimacy of the eavesdropper, as N.S.A. employees virtually enter the office cubicles of obscure government officials and the Spartan hide-outs of drug traffickers and militants around the world.

Venezuela, for instance, was one of six “enduring targets” in N.S.A.’s official mission list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. The United States viewed itself in a contest for influence in Latin America with Venezuela’s leader then, the leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself with Cuba, and one agency goal was “preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global interests.”

A glimpse of what this meant in practice comes in a brief PowerPoint presentation from August 2010 on “Development of the Venezuelan Economic Mission.” The N.S.A. was tracking billions of dollars flowing to Caracas in loans from China (radar systems and oil drilling), Russia (MIG fighter planes and shoulder-fired missiles) and Iran (a factory to manufacture drone aircraft).

But it was also getting up-close and personal with Venezuela’s Ministry of Planning and Finance, monitoring the government and personal emails of the top 10 Venezuelan economic officials. An N.S.A. officer in Texas, in other words, was paid each day to peruse the private messages of obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats, hunting for tidbits that might offer some tiny policy edge.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/w...-for-all-consuming-nsa.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
 
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Why are you surprised, they even spy on Germany, Switzerland, and Uno building in Geneva.
 
I'm nt. I would be more surprised if they werent spying on everyone..
Yeah your right, Russia and China also spy on everyone, thats politics.
I dont know why everyones acting so surprised.
 
Your right but only because they dont have the money and sources like USA, otherwise they would spy the s*hit out of us, believe me. :lol:


Who do I have to see if I don't want my phone tapped? LOL:lol:

The point here is that privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN declaration of human rights.

Countries spying on diplomats, foreign companies, suspicious people is totally normal, everyone does it. But NSA spies on everyone all over the globe from the moment they turn on their computer.
 
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Who do I have to see if I don't want my phone tapped? LOL:lol:

The point here is that privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN declaration of human rights.

Countries spying on diplomats, foreign companies, suspicious people is totally normal, everyone does it. But NSA spies on everyone all over the globe from the moment they turn on their computer.

Human Rights is only important if someone/country has benefit over it.
Allmost all countrys violate Human Rights, some of them more than others but in the end, no one gives a damn about it.
Its sad but, thats the truth.
 
Human Rights is only important if someone/country has benefit over it.
Allmost all countrys violate Human Rights, some of them more than others but in the end, no one gives a damn about it.
Its sad but, thats the truth.

I totally agree with your statement.
 

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