Mass Spying: How the US Stamps Its Supremacy on the Pacific Region
ASIA--PACIFIC, 14 Oct 2013
Antony Loewenstein – The Guardian
The US is keen to convince its Pacific friends to fear a spy-friendly Beijing. The irony? Washington’s spying network is far more widespread than anything coming from the Chinese.
‘We still don’t know the exact extent of intelligence sharing between Australia and the US, except it’s very close and guaranteed to continue’.
Photograph: Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters
What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice?
While Washington distracts itself with shutdown shenanigans and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is quietly filling the gap, signing multi-billion dollar trade deals with Indonesia and calling for a regional infrastructure bank.
Meanwhile in recent years, New Zealand has been feeling some of the US’s attention, and conservative prime minister John Key is more than happy to shift his country’s traditional skepticism towards Washington into a much friendlier embrace. Canberra is watching approvingly. It’s almost impossible to recall a critical comment by leaders of either country towards global US surveillance. We are like obedient school children, scared that the bully won’t like us if we dare push back and argue harder for our own national interests.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), warmly backed by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and New Zealand, is just the latest example of US client states allowing US multinationals far too much influence in their markets in a futile attempt to challenge ever-increasing Chinese business ties in Asia. German-born, New Zealand resident and internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom tweeted this week:
This erosion of sovereignty goes to the heart with what’s wrong with today’s secretive and unaccountable arrangements between nations desperate to remain under the US’s security blanket, and New Zealand provides an intriguing case-study in how not to behave, including using US spy services to monitor the phone calls of Kiwi journalist Jon Stephenson and his colleagues while reporting the war in Afghanistan.
There’s no indication that Australia isn’t following exactly the same path, with new evidence that Australia knew about the US spying network Prism long before it was made public. We still don’t know the exact extent of intelligence sharing between Australia and the US, except it’s very close and guaranteed to continue. Frustratingly, the “Five Eyes” relationship between English-speaking democracies has only been seriously discussed publicly in the last years by Greens senator Scott Ludlam.
New Zealand is a close Australian neighbour, but news from there rarely enters our media. This is a shame because we can learn a lot from the scandal surrounding the illegal monitoring of Dotcom and the public outcry which followed, something missing in Australia after countless post-Snowden stories detailing corporate and government spying on all citizens.
Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload (today called Mega), a file sharing website that incurred the wrath of US authorities. Washington wanted to punish him but Dotcom obtained New Zealand residency in late 2010, bringing a close US ally into the mix. Intelligence matters usually remain top-secret, leading New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager tells me, but this case was different, blowing open the illegal spying on Dotcom. His lawyers scrutinised all the police warrants after the FBI-requested raid on his house. The government communications security bureau (GCSB) has always claimed it never monitored New Zealand citizens; Dotcom soon discovered this was false. Public outrage followed, and an investigation revealed many other cases of GCSB over-reach since 2003. Prime minister Key responded by simply changing legislation to allow spying on residents.
Hager explained to me what his investigations uncovered:
With Dotcom, GCSB helped the police by monitoring Dotcom’s e-mail. What this largely or entirely meant in practice was that the GCSB sent a request through to the NSA to do the monitoring for them and received the results back. This means that the NSA used either wide internet surveillance (essentially “Echelon for the Internet”) or else requests to the internet companies (Gmail etc) directly, ie the Prism type operations. It’s not clear which it was.
The Key government now wants to increase its monitoring capabilities even more, and New Zealanders are showing concern.
I spoke at a public meeting in Auckland’s town hall before the GCSB bill was passed. It was the biggest political meeting I can remember attending, with three levels of the large town hall completely full, and hundreds of people turned away. It’s been a big thing here, becoming one of those issues that is a lightning rod for general unhappiness with the government.
New Zealand journalist Martyn Bradbury has also been a vocal critic of the Dotcom case. He’s pushing for a New Zealand digital bill of rights and tells me that “the case against Dotcom is more about the US stamping their supremacy onto the Pacific by expressing US jurisdiction extends not just into New Zealand domestically, but also into cyberspace itself.”
I talked to one of Dotcom’s lawyers, Ira P Rothken, who went further:
The US government’s attack against Megaupload bears all the hallmarks of a political prosecution in favour of Hollywood copyright extremists. The US used its influence with New Zealand to unleash a military style raid on Dotcom’s family, to spy on him, and to remove his data from New Zealand without authorisation – all of which has been found to be illegal. Megaupload and Kim Dotcom are today’s targets, but the US crosshairs can just as easily be trained on anybody globally who dares challenge or inconvenience a special interest that holds sway in Washington, and the US – with its notoriously insatiable appetite for demonstrating political and global power – seems all too willing to cooperate.
This brings us back to China and the US’s attempts to convince its Pacific friends to fear a belligerent and spying Beijing. The irony isn’t lost on the informed who realise Washington’s global spying network is far more pernicious and widespread than anything the Obama administration and corporate media tell us is coming from the Chinese.
Neither China nor the US are benign in the spying stakes. Both are guilty of aggressively pursuing their interests without informing their citizens of their rights and actions. Australia and New Zealand are weak players in an increasingly hostile battle between two super-powers, and many other nations in our region are being seduced by the soft power of Beijing (including Papua New Guinea, partly due to its vast resource wealth).
A lack of transparency abounds. What is desperately needed is an adversarial press determined to demand answers about Australia’s intelligence relationship with the US – and whether all citizens should now presume they’re being monitored on a daily basis.
Go to Original – theguardian.com
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The China threat is a hoax!!! By promoting the China threat of military expansion towards South East Asia, the US has managed to convince some stupid ASEAN countries to let the US to base its fighter planes & military inside their own countries. The US plans is actually to scare the shit out of the ASEANs. And when the ASEANs are scare shit of the Chinese, they unconsciously let the Americans occupy their countries with its military.
The same thing happen to the Arab Gulf countries. The US managed a propaganda war against the Iraqis for decades, saying the Iraqis have chemical weapons, developing the nuclear weapons & etc. If you let the Iraqis developed the nuclear weapons, sooner or later the Iraqis will be a threat to whole the Arab Gulf States. Sooner or later the Iraqis might start a war & occupy the smaller & defendless Arab Gulf states.
Thus, to prevent the future Iraqi aggression against them, these stupid Arab countries with their corrupted leaders agree to let the Americans to base its military personnals and fighter planes inside their countries, in the pretext to protect them from the Iraqis. But the Arab Gulf states are fool Arabs. It’s all a hoax. In the end, the Americans managed to occupied all of the Arab Gulf states without even firing a single bullet!!!
Now, once the US already have a foothold in these stupid Arab states, you think that it will be easy to kick the Americans out? U think those stupid Arab sheikhs, willing to go to war against the Americans? No way. Let me become a billionaire, buy some English football clubs while the majority of my fellow citizens suffers.
In Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem, he said “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”
Another of his words, ” Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.”
In addition, he says, “With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.”
Thus, it looks like the greatest triumph of the US military is not the occupation of Iraq, but the occupation of the stupid Arab Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait & Oman, without even firing a single bullet & without even losing a single American soldier. The Arabs leaders have been deceived and they are such morons!
By the way, I’m a Malaysian & a Muslims, and I detest the wasteful & corrupted habits of the Arab leaders. These are the Wahabbis, spreading their extreme “Islamic” ideology to the rest of the Muslim world. The Libyas, Iraqis, Afghanistans & Syrias have all been living peacefully together for generations. Until these stupid Arab morons coming to these peaceful Islamic countries & spreading their extreme brand of Wahabbi ideology, which is not Islamic at all.
Islam, or “Salam” means peace. But the Wahhabi ideology only existed during the 1st World War, by Muhammad Abdul Wahab in Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi ideology spread terror & sectarian wars between the Sunnis & the Syiahs. Whereas, before this, the Sunnis & Syiahs have been living peacefully in Iraq, Syria & Afghanistan for generations.
– DON’T BE DECEIVED BY THE STUPID WAHHABI IDEOLOGY.
– DON’T BE DECEIVED BY THE MORONS ARAB LEADERS OF THE GULF STATES.
– & DON’T BE DECEIVED BY THE CUNNING PROPAGANDA WAR BY THE US AGAINST THE CHINESE.
– CHINA IS NOT A THREAT TO ASEAN. BUT IT IS THE US THAT ARE A THREAT TO THE ASEANS & ALL THE PEACEFUL NATIONS OF THE WORLD.