As is now revealed in the documents released by Edward Snowden, Britain's GCHQ, the UK analog of the NSA, was monitoring the telephone calls of delegates at the G-20 economic summit meeting in 2009. The purpose of the monitoring was to review the content of calls and to capture passwords for additional spying. (CNN: New report: Britain spied on G-20 delegates in 2009)
The staggering effrontery of assailing the hideous ways Rupert Murdoch was monitoring private telephone calls is beyond description when the GCHQ was simultaneously doing exactly the same thing. There was a major scandal when it was discovered reporters for Murdoch's newspapers were doing really vile things in hacking private telephone calls on a very large scale. (Wiki: News International phone hacking scandal)
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Sunday, "What we should be focused on is how irresponsible and egregious these recent leaks are. It's impossible to know exactly how much damage is being done by these disclosures, but they will have an effect on our counterterrorism efforts."
The staggering effrontery of assailing the hideous ways Rupert Murdoch was monitoring private telephone calls is beyond description when the GCHQ was simultaneously doing exactly the same thing. There was a major scandal when it was discovered reporters for Murdoch's newspapers were doing really vile things in hacking private telephone calls on a very large scale. (Wiki: News International phone hacking scandal)
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Sunday, "What we should be focused on is how irresponsible and egregious these recent leaks are. It's impossible to know exactly how much damage is being done by these disclosures, but they will have an effect on our counterterrorism efforts."
No, in fact where we should be focused right now is reviewing how egregiously intelligence agencies have lost track of what constitutes terrorism and now use intelligence facilities with wholesale abandon regarding any kind of justice, ethics, or morality.
In what may be the most insensitive thing Dick Cheney has said in a lifetime of insensitivity to any kind of human values, he said that NSA monitoring could have prevented 9/11. (NBC: Cheney says NSA monitoring could have prevented 9/11) In fact 9/11 could have prevented if anyone in the White House had made any effort to monitor the security reports that were already delivered to them but they ignored. The egregious incompetence and immorality of Bush and his cabinet is almost without parallel. (New York Times: The Deafness Before the Storm, ABC: Bush Warned of Hijackings Before 9-11)
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