NSA Spying Undermines Obama's Call for Foreign Firms to Do Business Here
October 31, 2013
When America's prestige abroad is in the gutter over National Security Agency's eavesdropping on world leaders,
President Obama incongruously is urging foreign companies to do business here in the United States. Could his timing be
worse?
Polls show his prestige at home is at an all-time low, so can you imagine the depths to which it has plummeted as
foreign heads of state are howling over NSA's criminal spying on them? Some must know this is nothing new, that America
has been spying on them for years through NSA's ECHELON system, in part to steal lucrative business contracts, and now
Mr. Obama is asking for their business?
Two days ago, McClatchy News Service reported, "the storm battering Obama over the revelations of U.S. data-gathering
and communications monitoring in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Brazil showed no sign of abating." NSA is
charged with tapping the telephone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and 34 other world leaders, as well
as millions of Europeans.
President Obama is contending he was in the dark about NSA's activities (pu-leeze!). The feisty McClatchy reporters say
U.S. intelligence officials "pushed back…against assertions that Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level
eavesdropping" and are angry "believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the
disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with allies."
Spain became the latest U.S. ally to demand an explanation for the spying after a Spanish newspaper broke the story that
NSA monitored more than 60 million phone calls in that country in a single month! German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she believed "the Americans were using the information to gather economic intelligence"
quite apart from "terrorism," McClatchy said.
Germany has been spied on by NSA since 2002, published reports say, but U.S. spying pre-dates that---in part to gain
illegal business advantages.
President Obama may deny knowledge of current NSA spying but he can’t claim he doesn’t know the U.S. is the lead partner
in ECHELON, which, according to Washington journalist Bill Blum, is a “network of massive, highly automated interception
stations” that is eavesdropping on the entire world, and has been doing so since the 1970s.
“Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone,
cellular phone, email, fax, telex…satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links, voice,
text images (that are) captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth and then processed by high-powered
computers,” Blum writes in his book “Rogue State” (Common Courage Press) published in 2005, eight years before the
Snowden revelations.
Calling it the greatest invasion of privacy ever, Blum says the ceaseless, illegal spy system sucks up perhaps billions
of messages daily, including those of prime ministers, the Secretary-General of the UN, the pope, embassies, Amnesty
International, Christian Aid, and transnational corporations and that “if God has a phone, it’s being monitored.”
Blum also said that during the countdown to its invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. listened in on the conversations of
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, “and all the members of the UN Security Council…when
they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.”
ECHELON has also been used to give U.S. firms inside information on their competitors, so that, for example, they could
underbid their rivals for contracts. America's partners in this snooping scheme include UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. As it dates back two decades before the War on Terror, it likely had little or nothing to do with American
security and everything to do with making money illegally.
Now, will all the people who think the U.S. is the indispensable and exceptional nation out to spread democracy around
the world please raise their hands?
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Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consult who publicizes books and worthy causes. He is an award-winning
journalist, award-winning poet, and award-winning runner.