Snowden Leak: The NSA Has Been Monitoring Phone Calls of 35 World Leaders

[Hekate]

147. "The memo, dated October 2006" -- This is BFEE all the way

• George Herbert Walker Bush was head of the CIA from 1976-77; then was in and about the Oval Office from 1981-1993 as VP and POTUS.
• His son, the man who played an idiot but was not really an idiot, was POTUS from 2001-2009.
• Dick Cheney was Defense Sec during Daddy Bush's tenure. As VP for Junior he led the charge into a "security nation" and into war after 9-11.

Do I really need to continue?

We know that Bush/Cheney left moles in the federal government, by converting appointed positions into Civil Service jobs. We know they were obsessed with spying. We know they consolidated most if not all of the information/intelligence/spy agencies and set them up to run automatically. We know they set up a secret room in San Francisco to pull data from our phone calls. Someone spilled the beans, someone leaked a photo. We know that everything they did left a poison trail fit for a toxic clean-up site, that may take generations to fix if ever.

We know these things.

I really want to know why this is being dumped on the world stage now, at the most damaging possible time, in the most damaging possible way. This isn't about clean-up; this is about trying to bring down the government of the man who is in office now.

I don't happen to think the two who are doing this are heroes. They would have been heroes to me if they had done this is 2006, or at any time during the Bush/Cheney administration. But no, they're doing it now and making sure it all gets laid at the feet of Barack Obama.

Lest anyone think I support the NSA, I don't. While I've said repeatedly that we have no privacy left, and part of the reason is that we have literally paid good money to make sure we don't just so we can have our own electronic toys -- what the NSA and other spy agencies have done, are planning to do, is wrong.

It was another time bomb left ticking in a file cabinet by the BFEE. How many more are there waiting to go off?



The memo, dated October 2006 and which was issued to staff in the agency's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), was titled "Customers Can Help SID Obtain Targetable Phone Numbers".

It begins by setting out an example of how US officials who mixed with world leaders and politicians could help agency surveillance.
"In one recent case," the memo notes, "a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders … Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked."

The document continues by saying the new phone numbers had helped the agency discover still more new contact details to add to their monitoring: "These numbers have provided lead information to other numbers that have subsequently been tasked."

But the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced "little reportable intelligence".

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-phone-calls-world-leaders-2013-10#ixzz2j3Q1mPJd