Londres terá "espiado" reunião do G20 em 2009.
18/06/2013 -
É mais um episódio das revelações feitas por Edward Snowden, o whistleblower que passou documentos internos da Agência de Segurança Interna dos EUA ao jornal britânico Guardian. Desta vez, os documentos secretos mostram que políticos e outros responsáveis que participaram em 2009 na cimeira do G20 em Londres foram espiados por agentes britânicos. E o então primeiro-ministro, Gordon Brown, teria conhecimento do caso.
Ontem, no início da cimeira do G8 na Irlanda do Norte, o primeiro-ministro britânico, David Cameron, recusou-se a responder a perguntas sobre esta revelação. "Não faço comentários sobre questões de segurança e de serviços de informação. Nenhum outro país o faz e não sou eu que vou abrir um precedente", disse Cameron.
Escreve o Guardian que os computadores de políticos como o ministro das Finanças turco, Mehmet Simsek, ou o então ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros sul-africano, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, foram monitorizados e as suas chamadas telefónicas foram interceptadas. O objectivo dos serviços secretos britânicos seria conhecer as posições negociais destes países na cimeira.
O esquema incluiu não só a quebra dos mecanismos de segurança dos telemóveis BlackBerry e de computadores mas também a criação de cibercafés programados para interceptar emails e palavras-passe dos delegados. O objectivo era fornecer informação em tempo real aos analistas britânicos, para que a delegação do Reino Unido tivesse informação privilegiada durante a cimeira. No total, terão chegado a 45 o número de analistas dos serviços secretos britânicos que estiveram mobilizados 24 horas por dia nesta operação
Um dos principais visados pelo esquema de vigilância, operado pelo GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, agência de espionagem britânica), foi o ministro das Finanças turco, Mehmet Simsek. Ontem, o Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros turco chamou o embaixador britânico em Ancara para lhe pedir explicações sobre aquilo que considera ser "revelações escandalosas".
O Guardian escreve ainda, com base nos documentos fornecidos por Edward Snowden, que a delegação da Agência de Segurança Nacional norte-americana (NSA) no Reino Unido também interceptou as comunicações ultra-secretas da delegação russa na cimeira do G20. A comitiva era liderada pelo então Presidente da Rússia, Dmitri Medvedev, que chegou a Londres a 1 de Abril, dia em que se encontrou pela primeira vez com Barack Obama. Os espiões norte-americanos interceptaram as comunicações horas depois dessa reunião.
A informação recolhida levou os agentes da NSA a crer que tinham descoberto "uma mudança na forma como os sinais da liderança russa são normalmente transmitidos". Essa conclusão foi partilhada com altas patentes britânicas, australianas, canadianas e neozelandesas.
"A actividade do sinal foi descoberta a emitir da embaixada russa em Londres e crê-se que as comunicações servem de apoio ao Presidente russo", lê-se no documento, que abre com duas fotografias de Medvedev com Obama e Gordon Brown.
O Guardian escreve que este caso sublinha a importância do centro de espionagem dos EUA nas instalações Menwith Hill da RAF (Força Aérea Real britânica), em Harrogate, Yorkshire do Norte, onde estão centenas de analistas da NSA, trabalhando ao lado de agentes de ligação do GCHQ.
G20 summits: Russia and Turkey react with fury to spying revelations.
Ankara summons UK ambassador and says GCHQ allegations are 'scandalous' if confirmed
Julian Borger, Luke Harding, Miriam Elder in Moscow and David Smith in Johannesburg
guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 June 2013 15.37 BST / http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/turkey-russia-g20-spying-gchq
Turkey, South Africa and Russia have reacted angrily to the British government demanding an explanation for the revelations that their politicians and senior officials were spied on and bugged during the 2009 G20 summit in London.
The foreign ministry in Ankara said it was unacceptable that the British government had intercepted phonecalls and monitored the computers of Turkey's finance minister as well as up to 15 others from his visiting delegation. If confirmed, the eavesdropping operation on a Nato ally was "scandalous", it added.
The ministry summoned the UK's ambassador to Ankara to hear Turkey's furious reaction in person. A spokesman at the foreign ministry read out an official statement saying: "The allegations in the Guardian are very worrying … If these allegations are true, this is going to be scandalous for the UK. At a time when international co-operation depends on mutual trust, respect and transparency, such behaviour by an allied country is unacceptable."
The Guardian revealed that the UK secret wiretapping agency, GCHQ, targeted Mehmet Şimşek, the Turkish finance minister and a former Merrill banker, during a G20 economics meeting hosted in London in September 2009. It also considered monitoring the communications of 15 named members of his staff and of Turkey's central bank. It is not clear which if any of the staff members was ultimately placed under surveillance.
The goal was to collect information about the Turkish position on the reform of the global financial infrastructure in the wake of the world banking crisis.
The revelations come at a fraught time for Turkish-British relations. The country's embattled prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has blamed the international media, and in particular the BBC, for fomenting violent unrest and protests against his rule. Erdoğan has spoken repeatedly of an "international conspiracy". News that his finance minister really was the victim of a British surveillance operation will strengthen his view.
The South African foreign ministry, which was a target of a GCHQ hacking operation launched in 2005, also voiced its concern. A ministry statement said: "We do not yet have the full benefit of details reported on but in principle we would condemn the abuse of privacy and basic human rights particularly if it emanates from those who claim to be democrats."
The statement added: "We have solid, strong and cordial relations with the United Kingdom and would call on their government to investigate this matter fully with a view to take strong and visible action against any perpetrators."
GCHQ documents seen by The Guardian showed the British hacking operation was designed to get information from foreign ministry computer networks on briefings given to ministers for G20 meetings and also G8 summits attended by South Africa as an observer.
In Moscow Russian officials said the Guardian revelation that US spies had intercepted top-secret communications of Dmitry Medvedev at a G20 summit in London in April 2009 would further harm the struggling US-Russia relationship and cast a shadow over the G8 summit in Northern Ireland on Monday and Tuesday.
Details of the spying, set out in a briefing prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA), were leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and revealed by the Guardian late on Sunday. Documents show that US spies based in Britain spied on Medvedev, then the Russian president and now prime minister.
Medvedev's spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, declined to comment. But speaking to state-run media, senior Russian officials said the revelations had deepened mistrust between the US and Russia, whose relations have already sunk to a post-cold-war low following a brief and largely unsuccessful "reset" during Medvedev's four-year reign in the Kremlin.
Igor Morozov, a senator in Russia's Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, suggested that the Obama administration's attempts to improve relations were clearly insincere: "2009 was the year the Russian-American 'reset' was announced. At the same time US special services were listening to Dmitry Medvedev's phonecalls."
He added: "In this situation, how can we trust today's announcements by Barack Obama that he wants a new 'reset'? Won't the US special services now start spying on Vladimir Putin, rather than correcting their actions?" he told RIA-Novosti, a state-owned news agency. "This isn't just an act of inhospitality, but a fact that can seriously complicate international relations," he said. "Big doubts about Obama's sincerity appear."
The revelations were the lead story on Russia Today, the Kremlin's international propaganda TV channel.
It also featured elsewhere. Domestic NTV, owned by the state gas giant Gazprom and run by the Kremlin, commented: "The spy scandal can cast a cloud over the G8 summit opening today."
Former top-ranking Russian spies, meanwhile, suggested the behaviour by their US and UK counterparts amounted to bad form. "From a technical point of view, spying on those negotiating on the territory of a country doesn't present any great difficulties," Nikolai Kovalev, the former head of the FSB, Russia's powerful domestic spy agency, pointed out. Kovalev added however: "To avoid diplomatic and international scandal security agencies are forbidden from doing this. And usually they don't do it."
Russia and the US have been plagued by spy scandals for years – just last month Russia expelled a US embassy employee in Moscow charged with being a CIA spy, and in 2010 the US busted a ring of Russian sleeper spies posted throughout the country.
But news of the high-level spying in a third country comes at a time when Putin has made whipping up anti-Americanism a top priority. The two countries remain at odds over Syria, and Putin has repeatedly accused the US state department of funding and directing opposition to him at home.
Alexey Pushkov, the head of the Duma's international affairs committee and one of the loudest anti-American voices in the Russian government, took to Twitter to write: "Scandal! In 2009 at the G20, US and UK special services listened to Medvedev's telephone calls. The US denies it, but we can't believe that. That's complete fraud."
Others were more sanguine. Viktor Ozerov, head of the Federation Council's defence and security committee, said: "Russia shouldn't take this [spying] for granted, but shouldn't dramatise the situation either. Intelligence agencies exist to spy not only on private citizens but on top government leaders too."
I fear the chilling effect of NSA surveillance on the open internet.
Snowden's NSA leak revelations are changing people's assumptions about online privacy, killing trust in web freedom.
Jeff Jarvis
guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 June 2013 19.00 BST / http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chilling-effect-nsa-surveillance-internet
I fear the collateral damage the NSA's spying via technology will do to that technology. The essential problem is not the internet or internet companies or even the spies. The real problem is the law and what it does not prevent the American government from doing with technology, and how it does not protect the principles upon which this nation was founded.
The damage to the net and its freedoms will take many forms: users may come to distrust the net for communication, sharing, and storage because they now fear – with cause – that the government will be spying on them, whether or not they are the object of that surveillance. International users – properly concerned that they are afforded even less protection than Americans – may ditch American platforms. The European Union and other national governments, which already were threatening laws targeting US technology companies, will work harder to keep their citizens' data away from the US. Technologists may find it necessary to build in so many protections, so much encryption and caution, that the openness that is a key value of the net becomes lost.
If we trust the net less, will we use it less? Will it become less of an engine for innovation and economic development? Will it be a diminished tool for speech and assembly among citizens?
If governments use this event as an excuse to exercise more oversight and control over the net, will that not then, in turn, reduce citizens' trust in the net and their freedom using it? Governments present themselves as the protector of our privacy, but as the NSA story demonstrates, governments present the greatest threat to our privacy as they have the means both to surveil us and to use our information against us.
And note well that governments' relationship with the net is necessarily influenced by the net's disruptive force on government: witness the internet's use in organizing protests against governments in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, and more nations by the day. Isn't a weakened, controlled, distrusted net in governments' interests?
So far, much of the negative coverage and emotion in this story have centered on the technology companies alleged by Edward Snowden's leaked PowerPoint slides to have cooperated with the NSA. The Washington Post has yet to correct its contention that the NSA and FBI are "tapping directly" into the servers of internet companies, though that simplistic characterization has been soundly denied by Google, Facebook, and others. The Associated Press has given a more nuanced and sensible interpretation of the slides, explaining that some Prism data is the product of warrants served on those companies, producing data from their servers that is delivered by file transfer, or disc in Google's case, and some is the result of apparent wholesale eavesdropping on internet fibre.
That tapping into the net's full flow of communications is far more troubling even than the US government's secret warrants. For a savvy description of how that can occur, listen to security expert Steve Gibson's podcast. I've yet to hear internet bandwidth providers (Level3, Verizon, et al) questioned as internet service companies have been about whether and how they are cooperating with the spies. That is a next phase of this story.
What the NSA is doing may be legal, made so by the Patriot Act. But even on Fox News, regular contributor Andrew Napolitano has questioned whether its actions and this law are constitutional. That is the key question Edward Snowden and company now put before us: what principles are being violated or upheld by the government's actions? That is the discussion we must have. I see these core principles at stake.
First, privacy: in the United States, first-class letters and parcels are protected from search and seizure except by warrant. That should be the case, but is not, for any private communication using any technology: other classes of mail, email, internet telephony, Twitter direct message, or means yet to be invented.
Second, the balance of powers: the NSA is overseen by a secret court and gagged legislators. Thus, save for Snowden's leaking, we the people are excluded from the information we need and the opportunity we deserve to keep our representatives and agents in check.
A third principle riding atop these is transparency: the notion that government should be transparent by default and secret by necessity (and there are necessary secrets). Today, government is secret by default and transparent by force, whether from whistleblowers and journalists. When government threatens to torture the whistleblowers and prosecute the journalists who share information with us, then that puts a chill on speech and a choke on the transparency citizens depend upon to assure their rights and monitor their governments.
The first two are principles enshrined in the US constitution: in the fourth amendment that guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and in the structure of American government itself. The third is a principle whose value I have learned from the net and the power it gives any citizen to speak publicly; to find, organize, or join a public; and ultimately, to choose what is public and what is not. The NSA's actions and the laws that enable them – as well as some occasionally overblown conjecture around this – threaten to diminish the power and freedom of the net.
I worry that the damage is done.
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