14 DAY TRIAL // During his testimony in front of the Parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Edward Snowden painted a terrifying picture – one where the US government had no boundaries when it came to ruining someone’s reputation.
In the past few months, it has been mentioned several times so far that the NSA and its partners have often dug dirt on their targets in order to discredit them. The first reports indicated that the agency had set eyes on several religious leaders in the Middle East, while more recent ones put the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, at the center of the scandal.
The British agency didn’t just try to find the needed information on various individuals, but it actually took to the Internet to inject false material, giving details on how exactly it would destroy the reputation of its targets.
The NSA, Snowden said, collected “explicit sexual material regarding religious conservatives whose political views it disfavored and considered radical for the purpose of exposing it to damage their reputations and discredit them within their communities.”
He continued, saying that this was an unprecedented form of political interference that he didn’t believe could be seen elsewhere in western governments.
Despite all the measures taken, there is nothing that can be done against the NSA, from a legal standpoint.
This is, mainly, says Snowden, because the NSA has over 100 lawyers who are tasked with manipulating the old laws in such ways that in the end they support the agency’s actions, or, at the very least, they’re not perceived in a way that would prevent the agency from doing whatever it set its mind on.
One very good example of this is the perfectly loose interpretation that the NSA has on the Patriot Act, which has been used to justify some of the mass surveillance programs.
“The NSA had unlawfully compromised the world’s major transaction facilities to include SWIFT and Visa. And in their reports they explicitly noted that such information provided ‘rich personal information’ including data that ‘is not about our targets’,” Snowden told the members of the Parliament who gathered at Strasbourg.
This is not exactly uncommon, considering that a vast majority of the people that the NSA spies on aren’t actual targets of the agency, but rather innocent individuals, who are not involved in any terrorist attacks or plots to undermine national security of the United States or any ally country.