In effect, the Europeans were hypocrites. Was Clapper right?
The answer – up to a point – was yes. Western intelligence agencies also spied, albeit with fewer resources than the NSA. They worked closely with the US intelligence community, and had done so for decades. Germany’s domestic intelligence body, the BND, for example, shared information with Fort Meade including metadata and had even handed over copies of its two digital spy systems, Mira4 and Veras. Snowden himself flagged these close connections, telling the journalist and internet freedom activist Jacob Appelbaum that the NSA was ‘under the same roof’ as the Germans, and ‘most other western states’.
The extent of this collaboration could be confusing. One BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slide, shared by Greenwald with the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet, suggests the NSA is hoovering up 1.2 million Norwegian telephone calls daily. Norway’s military intelligence service, however, said the slide had been misread. It said Norway itself collected the calls from Afghanistan, and passed them on to Fort Meade. This claim, however, is difficult to reconcile with NSA’s own PowerPoint, subtitled: ‘The mission never sleeps.’ It makes clear that collection of metadata under the program is against a country rather than from it. There is a separate slide for each country, including Norway and Afghanistan.
The big picture was obvious. And troubling. With or without help, the NSA was sucking in everyone’s communications. One document seen by Le Monde said that between 8 February and 8 March 2013 the NSA collected 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items. These figures were for the entire world. In an editorial the paper noted that new technology had made possible a ‘Big Brother’ planet. There were no prizes for guessing which nation played the role of Winston Smith’s nemesis.
The NSA’s core mission was national security. At least that was the idea. But by the end of 2013 it appeared that the agency’s intelligence-gathering operations were about something much simpler – global power.
Merkel, it transpired, wasn’t the only foreign luminary whose phone the NSA had hacked. An NSA memo from 2006, published by the Guardian, showed it was bugging at least 35 world leaders. The agency had appealed to other ‘customer’ departments such as the White House, State and the Pentagon to share their ‘Rolodexes’ so it could add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to the NSA’s surveillance system. One eager official came up with 200 numbers, including the 35 world leaders. The NSA immediately ‘tasked’ them for monitoring.
The NSA subsequently targeted other leaders as well, including the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and her Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto. On the face of things this tasking was bizarre, since both countries enjoyed positive relations with the US. Rousseff’s predecessor, the leftist populist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had annoyed Washington by inviting Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a visit. After taking office in 2011, however, Rousseff sought to improve ties with the White House. She distanced herself from Tehran and hosted Obama, who had previously cancelled his Brazil trip.
The NSA wasn’t interested in these good vibrations; what interested US spies was Rousseff’s private thinking. An NSA slide obtained by Der Spiegel shows that analysts managed to get access to Rousseff’s messages. Fort Meade investigated ‘the communication methods and associated selectors of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and her key advisers’, Spiegel reported. It also discovered other ‘high-value targets’ inside her inner circle.
As well as bugging democratically elected leaders, the NSA was secretly targeting the country’s most important company, the state-run oil firm Petrobas. Petrobas is one of the 30 largest businesses in the world. Majority-owned by the state, it is a major source of revenue for the Brazilian government. It is developing several massive new oilfields, which are in a region deep under the Atlantic.
Files given by Greenwald to Brazil’s news programme Fantástico show the NSA managed to crack Petrobas’s virtual private network. It did this using a secret program codenamed BLACKPEARL. Other targets identified by BLACKPEARL include the Swift network for global bank transfers, the French foreign ministry and Google. A separate GCHQ document, titled ‘network exploitation’, suggests that UK–USA routinely targets the private network traffic of energy companies, financial organisations, airlines and foreign governments.
Unsurprisingly, Rousseff took a dim view of the NSA’s snooping, seeing it as an outrageous violation of Brazil’s sovereignty. The White House responded to her protests with generalities; it used the same template with the Germans and the French. In September, Rousseff announced she was cancelling her official visit to Washington, due to take place on 23 October. Obama called Rousseff in a vain attempt to get her to change her mind. In the absence of a ‘timely investigation… there aren’t conditions for this trip to be made,’ the Brazilian government said.
At best, the NSA’s activities in Brazil looked distinctly un-fraternal. At worst, they appeared to be a clear-cut example of industrial espionage, and precisely the kind of economic spying the US heartily condemned when the Chinese or the Russians did it. The NSA said it was doing something different, telling the Washington Post: ‘The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain including cyber.’ In a somewhat pained statement, Clapper insisted that the US didn’t steal trade secrets from foreign entities and pass them to US companies, so as to give them a competitive advantage.
But Clapper’s vague defence of the NSA’s goals did little to assuage Rousseff. In a blistering speech to the UN in September, the president said the US’s now exposed ‘global network of electronic spying’ had caused worldwide anger. Not only was this ‘meddling’ an affront to relations between friendly states, it was a breach of international law, she said. Rousseff stamped on the idea that the NSA was somehow fighting terrorism. ‘Brazil knows how to protect itself,’ she said.
If anything, the US’s southern neighbour Mexico was the subject of even greater intrusion. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA mounted a sophisticated spying campaign against President Nieto, and his pro-US predecessor Felipe Calderón. A special NSA division, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), carried out this delicate mission.
In May 2010, TAO managed to hack into the mail server hosting President Calderón’s public email account. Other members of Mexico’s cabinet used the same domain. The NSA was delighted. It could now read ‘diplomatic, economic and leadership communications’ which provided ‘insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability’. The operation was called FLATLIQUID. Two years later the NSA was at it again; it managed to read Peña Nieto’s private emails, when he was a presidential candidate, according to Brazil’s TV Globo.
The US’s main clandestine objective in Mexico was to keep tabs on the country’s drug cartels. A secret April 2013 document seen by Der Spiegel lists Washington’s priorities from 1 (high) to 5 (low). Mexico’s drug trade is 1; its leadership, military capabilities and foreign trade relations 3; with counter-espionage at 4. In another August 2009 operation the NSA successfully hacked the email accounts of top officials from Mexico’s public security secretariat, yielding useful information on drug gangs and ‘diplomatic talking points’.