German TV: Snowden Says NSA Also Spies on Industry

[Maedhros]

93. Industrial espionage is illegal regardless of how many countries may engage in it.

Allowing that "the Government of my country" should be able to engage in illegal activities because of our superior moral position or some other shaky premise flirts with Nationalism, and I'm opposed to that as well.

I'm not "swallowing every word" from Snowden, I'm looking at the evidence he's released. Evidence the veracity of which the NSA has not disputed. Yes - this evidence should be looked at very closely, yet you and your cabal try and shout down anyone doing so.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/09/1222306/-The-NSA-and-commercial-espionage

The GCHQ revelations-- which are part of the NSA revelations, since there's such close cooperation--clearly hit a nerve because of the eavesdropping on commercial negotiations at the G-8.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras

Fantástico revealed a top secret NSA file – given by Snowden to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – which shows Petrobras is among several targets for the agency's Blackpearl program, which extricates data from private networks.

Titled "Private networks are important", the slide names Petrobras along with the Swift network for global bank transfers, the French foreign ministry and Google. Several other targets on the list, which may have links to terrorist organisations and other operations that potentially threaten the US, were redacted.

In a similar vein, it presented a "network exploitation" document from Britain's GCHQ, which works closely with the NSA, that affirms the importance of targetting companies in strategic industries. One slide, headed "Results – what do we find?", notes that private network traffic is collected from energy companies, financial organisations and airlines, as well as foreign governments.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131112/08223925211/if-nsa-isnt-engaged-economic-espionage-why-is-ustr-considered-customer-intelligence.shtml

Of course, it's a very blurry line between using that information to create policies that help US companies and just giving the information to them directly. Perhaps it's true that the NSA doesn't hand out the information it gleans from foreign companies directly to US companies to help them understand, say, how a foreign product is built -- but reverse engineering is pretty good these days, so it's doubtful that too many US companies need that kind of help anyway. Instead, it seems to be just as nefarious, and certainly a form of economic espionage, to use this information to create trade policies that clearly boost certain US interests.

But that's certainly happening. The NY Times' giant profile of the NSA's activities that came out earlier this month included a list of "customers" for the NSA. Pay close attention to the last two on the list:

This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency’s “customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.

Now, one can make a (potentially compelling) argument that of course it's US policy to try to improve situations for American companies. And that's perfectly reasonable -- but it seems like a clearly bogus argument for the NSA to say it "does not do economic espionage" just because it (allegedly) does not do one particular tidbit of economic espionage: directly handing companies information. If, instead, it's spying on foreign companies and then providing that information to the USTR, you can assure that two things are happening: economic policies that help the special interests that have a close relationship with the USTR are getting extra favorable policies in their place, and some of that information is seeping out of the USTR to those companies anyway.