Posted 11:07 PM by Blah blah

More on America Spying on UN Security Council Members

Interview with Martin Bright (Australian Broadcasting Corp.), journalist with The Observer. He's the man who broke the story about America spying on UN Security Council members. Shocking and dismaying. Damaging to the reputation of the United States:

MARTIN BRIGHT: Electronic surveillance is what the NSA [National Security Agency] does in the States. It's absolutely crucial to the operations of the American espionage community. It's a huge, huge operation. We know that there are at least 18,000 car parking spaces for instance at the NSA headquarters. So when you say, "just electronic monitoring," that is absolutely central to any country's spying operations.

TONY JONES: Do you know what they were hoping to get? Was it personal information about the people? Was it national information about strategies these countries were adopting?

MARTIN BRIGHT: It's quite clear what they were going for was not only the voting patterns and the voting plans and the negotiations with other interested parties such as the French or the Chinese, it wasn't just the bare bones, it was also the office telephone communications and email communications and also what are described as 'domestic coms,' which is the home telephones of people working within the UN.

This can only mean that they were looking for personal information. That is, information which could be used against those delagates.

It's even clear from the memo that this was an aggressive operation. It wasn't simply a neutral surveillance operation.....

TONY JONES: One of the very intriguing things about this story is it seems to have got very little coverage in the US. You'd think it would have been huge coverage there. Is it true that a number of US television networks which scheduled interviews with you cancelled them at the last minute?...

MARTIN BRIGHT: It happened with NBC, Fox TV and CNN, who appeared very excited about the story to the extent of sending cars to my house to get me into the studio, and at the last minute, were told by their American desks to drop the story.