Given all that we now know about the scale of NSA spying and the lack of oversight of the agency, isn’t it possible that even President Obama could fall victim to it? For Germany’s Die Zeit, columnist Martin Klingst raises perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of NSA mass surveillance: in the wrong hands, it would amount to a gigantic blackmailing machine.
For Die Zeit, Martin Klingst starts off this way:
And now even Angela Merkel’s cell phone? Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, as well as former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, diplomatic representatives of the E.U. in Washington, and various European embassies, have all been victims of eavesdropping by the U.S. National Security Agency. The NSA also spied on the telecommunications traffic of millions of French citizens, accessed phone conversations in Germany, and examined e-mails. Apparently, the U.S. trusts its allies to the point of wanting to know, day and night, what they are saying and thinking.
Of course, President Obama immediately denied reports that the chancellor’s cell phone had been tapped, and assured her that the U.S. “is not monitoring and will not monitor” her in the future. There really wasn’t much more he could say. But even if we were to believe him, this is only a partial denial. After all, what happened before yesterday? Was Merkel’s cell phone a target for U.S. intelligence agency employees in the past?
Since Edward Snowden brought the NSA’s practices to light, America’s intelligence agencies have been trying to reassure us with the claim that the data and contents were being collected and stored, only to be searched with specific keywords in the event of a genuine suspected act of terror.
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