America's Little Spy Helpers Down Under Create an Uproar
Monday November 25, 2013
Indonesians are usually an easy-going, amiable people. But this week, they are boiling with anger and a sense of betrayal after revelations that Australia’s Signals Directorate had been tapping the phones of senior Indonesian government officials, including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and, worst of all, his wife, First Lady Ani Yudhoyono.
Aussie intelligence was also spying in the very same senior Indonesian cabinet officials who, like the president, are regarded as staunch allies of the US and Australia. This electronic spying was part of the by now notorious, top secret Five Eyes joint intelligence operation between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – aka “the white man’s spy agency.”
Five Eyes is run by the US National Security Agency; its other Anglo-Saxon members act as loyal junior partners, spying on their neighborhoods and, often, their own people. How much of their local data is passed to Washington is unknown, but it is likely substantial. Disturbingly, it was recently revealed that the US NSA passes information on US citizens to another ally, Israel.
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convened in Geneva. There’s the issue of Iran’s nuclear rights, and how they get acknowledged or not acknowledged in an interim agreement. There is disagreement about how to handle, during an interim deal, this heavy water reactor facility at Arak which the Iranians are building. There are still disagreements about the disposition of Iran’s stockpile of near-20 percent enriched uranium.
For that matter, why does a police department in a city of 35,000 people need a military-grade helicopter? And what possible use could police at Ohio State University have for acquiring a heavily-armored vehicle intended to withstand IED blasts?