Australia’s role in NSA spying
New leaks by Edward Snowden have revealed further details of Australia’s role in the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) international spying operations.
Australia used the 2007 UN Climate Change conference in Indonesia to carry out a joint Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and NSA operation to spy on Indonesian security officials.
This revelation comes on the heels of news that Australian embassies across South-East Asia were being used as listening posts for the highly secretive DSD. Telecommunications, internet and radio traffic have been intercepted from embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili and high commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.
One unnamed former intelligence official has made it clear that the purpose of this operation, codenamed Stateroom, is to benefit Australia’s imperialist interests in the region, saying “the main focus is political, diplomatic and economic intelligence”.
While outrageous, these revelations are not surprising. The DSD has long spied on Australia’s neighbours, both friend and foe, in order to give the Australian ruling class an advantage, particularly in economic negotiations.
The Australian government has been accused by the East Timorese of spying during negotiations on the future of the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves, in order to improve the Australian bargaining position in negotiations. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were outraged to discover that the US and its allies were spying on them.
News of the NSA and the DSD spying on foreign government officials has placed the Snowden leaks back onto the front pages of newspapers. However, most of the revelations thus far have shown the extent to which our governments are spying on us, not just each other.
Another NSA program that the DSD has recently been linked to is the Special Source Operations branch’s collection of address book data. Through this program, the Australian spy agency harvests address books from Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook and Gmail accounts. In a single day last year, the program collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other providers.
Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer now teaching at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the program provided ‘‘an encyclopaedia of connections to which they can return for as many years as they want’’.
This program proved such a successful breach of the civil liberties of people across the globe, that it has had to be scaled back. It was simply collecting too much data for the DSD and NSA to process. Australian and US spy agencies are collecting more information on you, me and everyone we know than they can possibly deal with.
