The Sunday Times also reported Thomas-CSF, a French electronics maker, lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with radar because the U.S. intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them to Raytheon, the U.S. firm that makes the Patriot missile. Raytheon won the contract.

“E” is headquartered on British soil on a 560-acre base at Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, the largest listening post in the world, taken over by NSA in 1966.  As well, the U.S. operates an enormous radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich, that is also an NSA intercept station, and a dozen signals intelligence bases in Japan.

NSA also read other peoples’ mail by inking a secret agreement with Crypto AG, a Swiss maker of encryption technology, to rig their machines before sale so that when foreign governments used the random encryption key the enciphered message would be clandestinely transmitted to NSA.

 The result:  when Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia and more than 100 other countries sent messages to their embassies, trade offices, and armed forces around the world via telex, fax, and radio, NSA spooks could read them. NSA, by the way, employs some 30,000 workers and, if it were a private corporation, would rank among the top 50 on the “Fortune 500.”

It’s budget, of course, is secret but it’s a bet NSA is cheerfully gobbling up umpteen billions of your tax dollars every year. Of course, other countries today emulate NSA’s activities. China, for example, is said to have hacked into British defense and foreign policy secrets and the German weekly Der Spiegel recently reported German computers at the chancellery, and foreign, economic, and research ministries are infected by Chinese espionage programs.

Rather than shutting down or curbing NSA activities, President Bush is expanding NSA’s role.

Even if a rubber stamp Congress goes along, not everybody approves. The American Bar Association, our largest lawyer group, has denounced Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program.“The issue is whether the president can unilaterally conduct secret surveillance, taking into his hands the awesome power to invade privacy,”

ABA President Michael Greco said.Greco may be upset because the Bill of Rights declares:

“The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

But what did George Washington know compared to George Bush?                                                            #(Sherwood Ross is an American writer who covers political and military topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com; further information on Blum’s book, www.killinghope.org) 

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