While the NSA remains one of the most secretive organizations in the United States, its surveillance around the world will only get worse and worse, political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall told RT.
After a number of leaked documents revealed the scale of American
spying on French citizens, US President
Barack Obama called the French leader on Monday to ensure him
that the US had “begun to review” the way they gather
intelligence.
RT:President Obama called President Hollande about
this – and admits there are legitimate questions about US
intelligence gathering. Does he have the answers though?
Ted Rall: It is pretty hard to undo listening to tens of
millions of phone calls, isn’t it? At this point, I think what is
shocking the French and the Brazilians is not just the extent to
which the US is spying on their people, but also the fact that
they consider themselves to be US allies - and if this is the way
the US treats its friends, well, what is the point of being a
friend?
RT:French politicians and high-profile business
leaders were allegedly monitored by the US. Why would the NSA
target them?
TR: Obviously the only people that know are the Obama
administration and the top officials at the NSA, but my
speculation would be that industrial espionage might be part of
the target. I mean, why else would we be interested in business
leaders, and certainly in terms of the CIA and the NSA who have
been revealed to be cooperating closely on drone strikes and
other matters, obviously have a joint interest in knowing what is
going on in the highest corridors of power. It is just in
the past, there was sort of a presumption that we weren’t going
to be quite as brazing about our espionage and this sort of goes
too far, I think for most world leaders.
RT:The US State Department has claimed the NSA's
operations are transparent, but said it isn’t a black-and-white
issue. "I think we can use any definition of transparent we
want," said Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf. What do you think
President Hollande’s reaction to this claim would be?
TR: I would imagine he’d laugh the first time he would
hear that. I’m half French and I’m laughing. Maybe he is laughing
twice as hard. It’s absurd, really. Transparency is not a word
that has a lot of different meanings, either it is or it isn’t.
The entire process of the way the NSA makes its decisions is
completely not transparent. The entire agency’s budget is off the
books. It officially does not even exist in government
directories and the court that governs its decisions, the
so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts (FISA) court,
has barely been revealed to exist. We’ve just seen the very first
few declassified court decisions coming out of it. It is
non-adversarial which means that the defendant, the person who
would be spied upon, has no voice or advocate whatsoever. It is
only the prosecutor - the government - who gets the voice, which
is why the court approves 99 percent of requests put before it.
So yeah, there is no transparency in this matter at all.
RT:The EU is set to introduce new legislation limiting
data transfers to the US. Will that be enough to prevent the NSA
from snooping on France and others?
TR: I do not think so. I think that as long as the NSA is
around they’re going to be gathering an ever-increasing amount of
information. The film 'The Lives of Others' about the East German
Stasi was quite popular in art houses here in the United States.
And everybody here keeps saying that East Germans would love to
have had this level of intrusion into people’s personal lives. It
is going to get worse and worse.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.