NSA being used to influence UN votes on Iraq

[John Gilmore]

JI questioned:
> Why is this even newsworthy?  It's the NSA's responsibility to provide
> sigint and comint.  Furthermore, if the delegates are not US citizens,
> and at least one end of the communication is outside the US, they are
> not even breaking any laws in doing so.

If the US found a similar memo from the French government, you can be
sure it would be published immediately as newsworthy.  At least in the
lapdog US press.

NSA's instructions to find tidbits usable to sway Security Council
members were newsworthy in the UK, because the UK government is
warmongering to suck up to the US, while the UK populace is opposed to
the war.  So "dirty tricks" being played by the US and UK governments
to impose their will on the world are interesting to the UK populace.

Most people regard wiretapping their opponents as an evil act,
violative of privacy norms.  Some people condone it in international
relations on self-defense grounds; if your own life is threatened,
then you gouge the other guy's eyes out, or chop off his hand, despite
being revolted by doing that in normal life.  But when wiretapping is
used to overturn a legitimate sovereign government, which poses no
obvious threat, then wiretapping is not justifiable on self-defense
grounds.  Civilized morality, rather than brute survival, becomes the
defining standard.  And the US is violating the standards of civilized
morality by wiretapping its opponents (and its allies and neutrals) in
an attempt to start a war of aggression.

> If the delegations can't be bothered to protect their own
> communications, it's their tough luck if they get intercepted.

Tell me, how well have the cypherpunks done, after a decade, at
protecting their own communications?  We're still mostly talking in
the clear, as far as I can tell.  And no cypherpunk, to my knowledge,
is well defended against the kinds of miniature bug that would
routinely be planted in every suit jacket laundered anywhere near the
UN Building.

What was most interesting for me about that NSA message was that it
said they needed to add "surge capacity" on some countries on the
Security Council.  Notably absent from the list was Mexico, which is
on the Security Council.  I guess NSA is already monitoring Mexican
diplomatic communications so well that they didn't need to add any
capacity.

	John

PS: I spent a few weeks in Mexico last month.  The majority of
Mexicans want peace, as does their populist leader.  Spain tried to
sway Mexican president Vicente Fox from the peace position, and got
nowhere.  People who have recently experienced war first-hand tend to
view it as more of a last resort, compared to people who have only
experienced war via TV, videogames, and economic downturns.

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