Snowdon is a dummy

New WikiLeaks Documents Allege ‘Economic Espionage’ Against France By US and Allies
By Justin Ling
June 29, 2015 | 7:20 pm

Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand stood to be big beneficiaries of America's alleged economic snooping on France, according to the newest raft of WikiLeaks documents.

The leaked documents reveal long-standing intelligence reports prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA) that chronicle strengths and weaknesses of France's economy and act as open invitations to intercept sensitive intelligence from French ministerial phone lines, WikiLeaks claims.

The intelligence reports are the second part of a document dump that has already hurt the relationship between Washington and Paris and prompted the American president to apologize to his French counterpart last week.

"The president reiterated that we have abided by the commitment we made to our French counterparts in late 2013 that we are not targeting and will not target the communications of the French president," according to a read-out of a phone conversation between the two leaders from last week.

Monday's documents — one entitled: "France: Economic Developments" and the other "Foreign Contracts/Feasibility Studies/Negotiations" — show that the American spy agency was actively collecting information on French trade practices, tendering requirements, and international development plans along with its Five Eye partners (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand), then putting it together in reports that would be shared inside the secretive intelligence alliance.

WikiLeaks says these orders to intercept, which VICE News cannot independently verify, were issued inside the NSA for information collection on French economic and trade policy, and to help domestic companies get a leg-up on the competition.

"The United States has been conducting economic espionage against France for more than a decade," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement. "The United States not only uses the results of this spying itself, but swaps these intercepts with the United Kingdom. Do French citizens deserve to know that their country is being taken to the cleaners by the spies of supposedly allied countries? Mais oui!"

Some of the reports were marked "U/FOUO" (unclassified, for official use only) and imply that they were intended to stay inside the American intelligence community, while others were "S/REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL," (secret, but releasable to the members of the Five Eyes partnership.)

The United States National Security Agency has been massively targeting phone numbers of top German ministers and public officials responsible for commerce, finances, economics and agriculture – including even Angela Merkel's personal assistant. WikiLeaks publishes today, 1 July 2015, a list of 69 German government telephone numbers from a high-priority NSA target interception list demonstrating economic and political espionage against Germany for almost two decades. WikiLeaks is also publishing classified interception reports resulting from the surveillance, showing the US and UK spying on German officials discussing their positions and disagreements on the solution to the Greek financial crisis. ...

One intercept report is based on private communication between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her personal assistant. The other is based on a British intelligence interception of the communications of German Chancellery Director-General for EU Affairs Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut. ... ... ...

A separate report published today by WikiLeaks, based on communications intercepts made by British intelligence (GCHQ) and shared with the NSA, details the German government's position ahead of negotiations on a EU bailout plan for Greece. The report refers to an overview prepared by German Chancellery Director-General for EU Affairs Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut. Germany was, according to the intercept, opposed to giving a banking licence to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), however it would support a special IMF fund into which the BRICS nations would contribute to bolster European bailout activities. The report also cites Meyer-Landrut's belief that a resolution to the Greek crisis would require greater private-sector involvement. He believed a full-term team would have to be placed in Athens to monitor the situation. ... ... ...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An investigation by the German parliament is publicly raising questions as to whether the Obama administration not only spied on journalists in that country but interfered in the exercise of the free press under the guise of U.S. national security.
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Less observed: that this week came news that the NSA was eavesdropping not only on Merkel, but in some capacity on Germany's free press as well, namely DER SPIEGEL.
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The incident raises many questions. That the U.S. government thought it appropriate to spy on journalists doing their jobs is controversial enough. But why would it be appropriate for U.S. officials to use these tools -- given to save lives and protect U.S. national security -- to notify the German government about officials talking to reporters in the normal exercise of a free press?

Asked about the matter, U.S. National Security Council spokesman Ned Price did not deny the facts obtained by CNN, saying on the record only that "people around the world -- regardless of their nationality -- should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security. We also have made clear that we take their privacy concerns into account."

Price would not discuss the specific matter of the Obama administration spying on DER SPIEGEL and then telling Merkel's government about an official cooperating with the press.

"While we are not going to discuss specific targets, we have repeatedly made clear that the United States does not collect intelligence for the purpose of suppressing or burdening criticism or dissent, or for disadvantaging persons based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion," Price said. "Signals intelligence is collected exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose to support these missions and not for any other purposes."

"It feels bitter to learn, that American intelligence agencies spied on reporters in another country and denounced alleged sources to the government," said one reporter involved, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions from his government or the US government. "This is something I expected to happen in authoritarian states like Russia or China but not in a democracy."
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Not surprisingly this German journalist is more focused on the fact that "the German Chancellery is complicit in it." The incident raises questions about what exactly the German Chancellery knew and when it knew it -- specifically that officials were notified by the CIA station chief in 2011, two years before the revelation that the NSA was spying on Merkel's cell phone -- that the U.S. was conducting surveillance that touched on both German journalists and the German government.
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France rejects asylum request from WikiLeaks' Assange
Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has failed in a bid to win asylum in France.

Assange wrote a letter to French President Francois Hollande published in Le Monde on Friday, appealing to France's history as a beacon for the repressed. He noted that WikiLeaks recently revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on Hollande and his two predecessors.

Hollande quickly said "no" to the request. In a statement, his office noted that Assange is under a European arrest warrant and his life is not in imminent danger.

The exchange came after prominent French voices, including soccer legend Eric Cantona and economist Thomas Piketty, appealed for France to grant Assange haven.

Assange is living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning about alleged sexual assaults.