Snowden’s files revealed the negligent attitude of the American “ally” towards not only key European, Latin American, Asian political leads, but towards strategical European, Asian, Latin American economic interests as well. Including the negligent attitude towards the problems of access of genetically modified and “pesticided” products to the market, towards European principles of the “welfare state”, the currency sovereignty of the EU and many other things. These files also unveiled the absolute American espionage against all significant people and organizations which participate in discussing TTIP and TPP.
In the previous parts of the article we have discussed the content of the American concept of “suppression by involvement” of allies and enemies and the key ways (and facts) of application of this concept by Americans. We have also discussed the largest events which explain why Russia turned out to be the main strategical enemy of the United States and its closest geopolitical partners.
However, there are some other reasons for the current decisive turn of America towards a full-scale war (for now — only a Cold war) against Russia.
Russian spies and cyber spies are coming?!
WikiLeaks website, created by Australian Internet journalist Julian Assange, was launched in 2006. It publishes the leaks of secret information obtained from anonymous sources and as a result of hacks of computer networks. In 2007 Assange claimed that his group posses an information base of 1,2 million documents which they have gathered in the first year of the website’s life.
In 2010 Assange was accused of sexual assault, then freed of all charges, but soon the investigation was reinstated. In 2012 after a long trial in London (where the founder of WikiLeaks lives after the allegations) the High Court of Great Britain made the decision for Assange’s extradition to Sweden. Assange stated that this is political prosecution, was granted asylum in Ecuador embassy in London and remains there ever since.
Since a significant part of the documents published by WikiLeaks (including diplomatic correspondence) had exposed the United States and had anti-American content, Assange was declared an enemy of the United States in 2012.
A number of high-profile American politicians and representatives of the intelligence community declared that Assange is, probably, a “Russian spy” and a team of Russian military hackers is working on filling his website with materials. Senator Joe Lieberman lobbied a law which allowed to accuse Assange of espionage. Alaska governor Sarah Palin urged to find a way to “hunt down” Assange.
Nevertheless, WikiLeaks website is very broadly supported by the global Internet community and regularly publishes exposing documents. Among other things, a hacking group Anonymous which called itself “the enemies of enemies of WikiLeaks” is actively helping Assange. Anonymous, according to some experts, not only conducts powerful cyber attacks against “enemies of WikiLeaks”, but also update Assange’s exposing dossier with the help of their own sources.
In August 2013 WikiLeaks published links for download of 400 Gb of delicate documents, however these files are not accessible right now. They are protected by a cipher, the key to which Assange promised to publish if any of the members of his organization will be harmed. He specified that this “guarantee of security” concerns, first and foremost, Assange himself and Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden is the second famous anti-American whistleblower, but, unlike Assange, he is a professional of American cyber-intelligence. He did this kind of work in CIA, NSA, and later in companies which do cyber spying by contract with NSA and CIA.
In spring 2013 Snowden decided that the secret electronic surveillance of American intelligence agencies all over the world, including total surveillance of foreign governments, officials, businessmen, international organizations, foreign and own citizens is not only illegal, but is a blatant offense of civil rights. Having resigned from an NSA-affiliated company and left the United States he took a large amount of top secret information with him. After which he started to “leak” this information to newspapers in batches — first of all, to the British “Guardian” and American “New York Post”.
The first of Snowden’s materials were published on June 6, 2013. In these he revealed the information regarding secret American and British electronic surveillance programs PRISM, X-Keyscore and Tempora, as well as that major corporations, Internet and electronic communication services are involved in the surveillance: Microsoft (Hotmail), Google (Gmail), Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple and Paltalk and others.
The secret (though revealed in January 2014) Pentagon report stated that Snowden stole approximately 1,7 million top secret files. For this reason the United States charged Snowden with espionage and theft of government property in June 21, 2013. However, later some American intelligence officers claimed that the actual scale and content of secret information in Snowden’s possession is not fully clear “and this is what is most terrifying”.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts to receive political asylum in Hong Kong, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and a number of other countries Snowden stayed in Moscow in the beginning of July 2013, having accepted the condition of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “he must stop the work directed at harming our American partners, no matter how strange this might sound when said by me.” Then the Russian Foreign Ministry and President Vladimir Putin emphasized that Snowden is not a Russian agent and that after he arrived to Moscow “Russian intelligence agencies don’t work with Snowden“.
However, American politicians and intelligence officers think otherwise. The Chairs of both House Intelligence Committees of the U.S. Congress have instantly claimed that Snowden couldn’t have opened and stolen hundreds of thousands of secret documents on his own for technical reasons. And that these actions of Snowden, as well as his unrestricted travel around the world after fleeing USA, could have been secured by Russian intelligence agencies.
In October 2013 Snowden said in an interview that he gave all the documents he copied to journalists back in Hong Kong in spring 2013 and that he didn’t take any secret documents in whatever form with him. Which is why, Snowden emphasized, “there’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.” At the same time, the files Snowden handed to The New York Post and Guardian were confiscated from the servers of the newspapers by official representatives of the intelligence agencies and destroyed back in July-August 2013.
However, the United States didn’t believe in Snowden’s claims. From the perspective of the United States the “cost” of this runaway was extremely high. On July 2, 2013 the U.S. forced a number of European governments to commit and unprecedented and scandalous violation of diplomatic protocol in order to catch Snowden. The plane of the Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Vienna and searched because Americans suspected that Snowden was intending to leave Moscow on that plane. Snowden wasn’t there. On August 7, 2013, when Russia officially granted Snowden political asylum, U.S. President Barack Obama cancelled two previously agreed meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg in a sign of protest.
What did Snowden reveal?
According to the aforementioned Pentagon report, most of the 1,7 million secret and top secret files stolen by Snowden (not only American files: at least 60 thousand files are British) are military secrets. Pentagon report claims that most of the documents concern vitally important operations of the U.S. army, navy, marines and the air force.
We don’t if this is true and who and to what extent obtained and can use military secrets stolen by Snowden. However, this, in our opinion, is not the most important thing.
First of all, Snowden’s files made the “world community” rethink its attitude towards the “democratic” intentions of the United States. The fact of American absolute spying against both its enemies and allies showed the unpleasant “backstage” of American “global domination” to the elites and citizens of all countries of the world. This fact cannot be simply covered by some words about the “democratic leadership” and “protection of human rights”.
Next, Snowden had also exposed a significant part of the “tool box” by which the United States conduct their totalitarian cyber espionage.
First of all, Snowden exposed not only the existence of global networks of American electronic espionage, but also the layout of the disposition of key secret centers of information interception and analysis in almost all countries of the world.
Secondly, Snowden quite specifically described the main “weakness points” through which the United States conduct cyber spying: through networks and providers of wired and wireless telephony and Internet-traffic, trunk optical fiber cables and optical fiber communications hubs, global Internet hubs, servers of regional, corporate and government computer networks.
Thirdly, Snowden named and described the main software tools of illegal accumulation and analysis of information on enemies and allies used by the USA and Great Britain: from PRISM and GENIE to X-Keyscore, from Tempora to Fingerprints, from US-985D and Blarney to Rampart-T.
Which means that Snowden has exposed the key mechanism of American “suppression by involvement” to a required degree (and by exposing it he significantly depreciated it).
Snowden’s unmasking of American electronic surveillance doesn’t limit itself to revealing tools alone.
The most important part, apparently, is that the “Snowden files” have catastrophically undermined the remaining trust that the elites and citizens of most countries (including strategic and tactical allies of the U.S.) had to American partners. The very possibility of trust-based and beneficial long-term partnership with Americans was undermined as well.
The documents revealed by Snowden regarding the control over confidential phone calls and email communications of leading figures of world politics — German chancellor Angela Merkel, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Mexican President Peña Nieto, French, Italian, German, Austrian, Swedish, Romanian, etc. ministers — created a not too broadly displayed, but serious crisis in the relations of many countries with America. Many experts are convinced that this is a very deep crisis and it will not go away by itself in the foreseeable future.
There is another aspect of information revealed by Snowden which almost isn’t discussed, but which has very important long-term global consequences.
At least minimal explanations are required here.
The last decade of global politics has showed that the United States is not only incapable of supporting a full-scale “military” component of its global power. It also more and more evident that it is losing the economic component of global domination. The continuing global crisis shows that the attempt of the United States to “outplay” the competitors in the area of financial operations doesn’t lead to a decisive success. State and corporate debt of America is constantly rising and promises an unavoidable collapse, even though a delayed one. This means that the only “non-military” chance of the United States to preserve global domination is to try to win back the largest global markets, most of which it had lost in the past 20 years. It is losing in these markets to its competitors: Europe, China, India, Brazil, etc. — based on many parameters of global competitive performance.
The ties between EU and Russia turn out to be the main problem of America in Europe. The volume of trade between Russia and Europe is over $400 billion per year. The united Europe, with all of its looseness and military weakness, but with its single currency and strengthening alliance with Russia, becomes a global economical entity comparable to the United States.
China becomes the main issue of American economic domination in the Asia-Pacific region. China is taking over global markets of low added value products not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in Europe and the USA. China is shifting from export of low-tech products with a low added value to higher technological levels. China is increasing trade and investment expansion all over the world, at the same time conducting most of its foreign financial operations in national currencies. In other words, it also reduces the use of the dollar in world circulation and makes the yuan another real global currency.
For these exact reasons the United States is actively developing the economic aspect of the global “suppression by involvement” for several years already. The core of this conceptual project is the creation of two trans-ocean economic blocs — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe, TTIP, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with South-East Asia, TPP.
The goal of TTIP and TPP is to secure American domination in these two gigantic markets in the free-trade zone mode, beneficial for the United States. It is no coincidence that the first of the planned alliance was described by journalists as “economic NATO”, while the second one was described as “Asian NATO”. Both of the agreements were drafted and discussed in great secrecy: “published” were only general phrases regarding the unseen before economic advantages which the countries that will join the future zones of global “free trade” will receive.
The scandal erupted in summer-fall of 2013, when Julian Assange’s website “WikiLeaks”, and many mass media after that, published Edward Snowden’s files on TTIP and TPP.
These files extremely clearly revealed the negligent attitude of the American “ally” towards not only key European, Latin American, Asian political leads, but towards strategical European, Asian, Latin American economic interests as well. Including the negligent attitude towards the problems of access of genetically modified and “pesticided” products to the market, European principles of the “welfare state”, the currency sovereignty of the EU and many other things. These files also unveiled the absolute American espionage against all significant people and organizations which participate in discussing TTIP and TPP.
From this moment on European partners of the United States started to become more and more distinctly relentless during the TTIP negotiations. Europe’s position was most clearly expressed by Viviane Reding, EU Vice-President responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, who had claimed, referring to Snowden’s files, that “friends don’t spy on each other“. In fall 2013 TTIP negotiations were virtually ceased. The negotiations were very slackly resumed in 2014, not at all in the spirit which the Americans counted on.
The strike of Snowden’s unveiling turned out to be even more painful for TPP negotiations. This project, which was being top-secretly forced through by Americans, turned out to include trade preferences for the United States earlier unthinkable of even in trade agreements with banana republics.
It turned out that only five out of 29 chapters of the secretly created trade agreement were about “free trade”. The rest 24 chapters are a detailed list of measures which are supposed to secure the unilateral advantages of the U.S. (and the harsh limitations imposed upon other member countries) in economic areas which are of priority to the United States: modern industrial technology, intellectual property, pharmaceutical market, financial services markets, etc.
It turned out that the agreements requires member countries to absolutely limit all forms of government interference in national economies. It turned out that the agreement requires to relax the labor, social and ecologic legislation in favor of private businesses regardless of risks of appearance of social-economical and political risks.
It turned out that the TPP agreement includes tightening of the system of protection of patent and author rights, which virtually opens the possibilities of monopolizing the Asia-Pacific Region markets by Hollywood movie productions, pharmaceutical products of largest American corporations such as Pfizer, electrical-computer and software products of leading American companies.
This agreement also includes the creation of a special TPP court which has the right to demand member countries to change the national legislation following lawsuits from transnational corporations in order to secure the “required liberty of trade”. The project of the agreement reads that court hearings might be conducted based on secret witness testimonies.
As a result of publication of Snowden’s files the negotiations on TPP were also virtually ceased in October-November 2013.
In early December 2013 Assange’s “WikiLeaks” published documents which showed that the renewed TPP negotiations came to a dead end. And that Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei, all of which joined the American initiative to create TPP, can’t come to an agreement on 119 (!!!) points of the deal.
Specialists emphasize that this literally enraged American representatives during the negotiations, since they planned to triumphantly sign the TPP agreement before the start of 2014 (the deal was finally drafted on October 5, 2015 — Editor).
New documents on TPP published by “WikiLeaks” meant that Snowden, who was in Moscow for half a year by that time, had nothing to do with this. Then the United States, and not the United States alone, started talking that “Russia’s spies” are responsible for the new revealing publications, for stalling the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and for the virtual fiasco of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
Those Russian spies again?!
We don’t know if Russian intelligence agencies are to blame for the aforementioned failures of the United States. We only assume that Russia doesn’t have such an all-encompassing system of electronic espionage like the United States with its PRISM, X-Keyscore, Tempora, etc.
However, Russia, apparently, demonstrated that it has something serious in this area after all. And not those past possibilities presented to it by Snowden, but with its own abilities, quite modern and effective.
In any case, in spring 2014 the U.S. started talking that both the time of revealing and the content of a number of scandalous recordings which appeared in the Internet and in the media during the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” are to Russia’s favor alone.
The audio recordings were actually more than scandalous.
On February 7, 2014, an audio recording and a transcript of a phone talk between Assistant Secretary of State of the U.S., Victoria Nuland, and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt appeared online. They have discussed whom of the Ukrainian opposition leaders the United States want to see as the Prime-Minister in the future government of Ukraine. Nuland stated that Vitaly Klitchko, being a man of the EU, is unacceptable and that America needs exactly, and only, Yatsenyuk as the head of the future Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers. At the same Nuland dropped the F-bomb regarding the role of the European Union from the viewpoint of American interests in Ukraine and expressed the hope that the UN will help the United States to “teach EU a lesson”. Pyatt agreed with Nuland’s position and expressed the readiness to support its realization: “I think we’re in play“.
This scandal, of course, significantly cast a gloom on EU-U.S. relations. But it wasn’t the last one.
An audio recording and a transcript of a phone talk between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton appeared online on March 5 2014. Paet emphasizes during this phone talk that all evidence that he had a chance to familiarize himself with in Kiev proves the following:
- both the protesters and the law enforcement officers in Kiev were murdered by the same snipers;
- the snipers who shot the people in Kiev were hired by some of the Maidan leaders, not sent there by the authorities;
- the new coalition which came to power after overthrowing Yanukovich doesn’t want to investigate these events and actually “covers up tracks”, conceals and destroys the evidence. This makes it even more clear that someone of the “Maidan coalition” was behind the snipers, not Yanukovich.
Since the whole world saw and knew that America provides the main support for the “Maidan coalition”, the United States did the only thing it could — tried to almost fully exclude all mentions of this phone talk from the global media.
From this moment on American intelligence agencies, including the United States Cyber Command created several years ago, as well as a number of private companies working in NSA programs, became especially active in investigating Russian cyber spying. The conclusions of a report of one of such companies was leaked to the media in spring 2014. The report claimed that Russia hackers are especially well qualified and very masterfully “cover up tracks”. It claimed that Russians, unlike the Chinese, direct their attacks not against the military, industrial and economic secrets of USA, but the centers where political and economic decisions are made.
On June 23, 2014 the popular Polish weekly periodical “Wprost” started publishing the transcripts of “restaurant talks” of Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, the former head of Ministry of Finance Jacek Rostowski and the former Minister of Transport, Construction and Maritime Economy Slawomir Nowak. “Wprost” reported that the audio files of the talks were sent to them by an “anonymous friend”.
Here is a notable fragment of the first publication by “Wprost”:
“Sikorski: You know, the Polish-American alliance is worthless. On the contrary, it is even harmful. Because it creates a false sense of security for Poland.
Rostowski: Why?
Sikorski: This is total bullshit. Because we will have a conflict with Germany and Russia and we will be convinced that everything is great because we are blowing Americans like suckers. Total suckers.”
On July 3 Sikorksi gave a “repentant” interview in which he admired the Polish-American relations and talked about the importance of these relations for Warsaw. He also called the United States vanquishers of communism in Europe. This, however, didn’t help. And Sikorski was soon “pushed away” from the most important positions of the head of the Foreign Affairs Ministry to a position of little significance, the Speaker (“Marshal”) of the Sejm (Parliament).
In October Sikorski tried to “redeem” himself in the eyes of the Americans by stating to the media that Putin at some point offered Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to “divide Ukraine”. Tusk decidedly refuted this claim. The political perspectives of Sikorski, who used to be, in essence, the former main “connector” between Warsaw and Washington, have absolutely collapsed.
Some Polish experts tied the appearance of “Sikorski’s audio recordings” to the political struggle in the Polish elites. However, most Western analysts saw this as a “clear Russian spy operation”.
To be concluded.
Source (for copy): https://eu.eot.su/?p=4193
This is the translation of the fifth article (first published in “Essence of Time” newspaper issue 104 on November 19, 2014) by Yury Byaly of a series on the conceptual weaponry by which the United States indirectly reshape the world and coerce governments of other countries to make decisions harmful to these countries, but beneficial to the U.S. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
