Japan Made Secret Deals With the NSA That Expanded Global Surveillance
Top-secret documents reveal the complex relationship the NSA has maintained with Japan over a period of more than six decades.
It began as routinely as any other passenger flight. At gate 15 of New York City’s JFK Airport, more than 200 men, women, and children stood in line as they waited to board a Boeing 747. They were on their way to Seoul, South Korea’s capital city. But none would ever make it to their destination. About 14 hours after its departure, the plane was cruising at around 35,000 feet not far from the north of Japan when it was shot out of the sky.
The downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 occurred on September 1, 1983, in what was one of the Cold War’s most shocking incidents. The plane had veered off course and for a short time entered Soviet airspace. At Dolinsk-Sokol military base, Soviet commanders dispatched two fighter jets and issued an order to “destroy the intruder.” The plane was hit once by an air-to-air missile and plummeted into the sea, killing all passengers and crew. President Ronald Reagan declared it a “crime against humanity,” marking the dawn of a volatile new chapter in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Soon, tensions would escalate to a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis, which 20 years earlier had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Sisters of a passenger on Korean Airlines Flight 007 weep as a South Korean government spokesman announced that it was “almost certain” the jetliner had been shot down en route to Seoul on Sept. 2, 1983.
Photo: Kim Chon-Kil/AP
As the international confrontation between the two adversaries played out publicly, behind closed doors another problem — which has never before been revealed — was developing. The U.S. and one of its closest allies, Japan, were embroiled in a dispute involving secret surveillance. Soviet officials were flat-out denying they had any role in shooting down the jet. At a spy base on Japanese territory, however, communications had been intercepted proving the Soviet military was the perpetrator. The U.S. wanted to obtain copies of the tapes but had to first receive approval from the head of a shadowy Japanese surveillance organization known as the “G2 Annex.”
After some bureaucratic wrangling, the Japanese eventually signed off on the release and the highly sensitive recordings were sent to Washington. From there, the tapes were forwarded to New York City, where U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick brought them to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. On September 6 — just five days after the Korean Airlines jet was shot down — Kirkpatrick attended a meeting at the U.N. Security Council where she blasted the Soviet Union for telling “lies, half lies and excuses” about its involvement in the downing of the plane. She then proceeded to play the copy of the intercepted conversations, stating that the evidence was being presented in “cooperation with the government of Japan.”
The case Kirkpatrick put forward against the Soviets was irrefutable and damning. But Japan’s spying capabilities had now been exposed — and the country’s officials were not pleased about it. The G2 Annex received new orders limiting its cooperation with the U.S., which affected the NSA’s relationship with its Japanese counterparts for the better part of a decade, at least until the Cold War ended in the early 1990s.
The details about the Korean Airlines case are revealed in classified National Security Agency documents, obtained by The Intercept from the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents, published Monday in collaboration with Japanese news broadcaster NHK, reveal the complicated relationship the NSA has maintained with Japan over a period of more than six decades. Japan has allowed NSA to maintain at least three bases on its territory and contributed more than half a billion dollars to help finance the NSA’s facilities and operations. In return, NSA has kitted out Japanese spies with powerful surveillance tools and shared intelligence with them. However, there is a duplicitous dimension to the partnership. While the NSA has maintained friendly ties with its Japanese counterparts and benefited from their financial generosity, at the same time it has secretly spied on Japanese officials and institutions.
The NSA declined to comment for this story.
Photo: Hiromichi Matsuda/Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/Getty Images
On August 14, 1945, Japan announced its unconditional surrender just days after U.S. Air Force planes dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 people. The war was over, but as part of the peace agreement, Japan agreed to U.S. military occupation. American forces — led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur — drafted a new Japanese constitution and reformed the country’s parliamentary system. In April 1952, Japan’s sovereignty was restored, but the U.S. continued to maintain a major presence in the country — and that is where the NSA’s story begins.
According to the agency’s documents, its relationship with Japan dates back to the 1950s. NSA’s presence in the country was for many years managed out of a “cover office” in the Minato area of downtown Tokyo, within a U.S. military compound called the Hardy Barracks. From there, NSA maintained close relations with a Japanese surveillance agency that it refers to as Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT.
At first, the NSA appears to have kept a low profile in Japan, concealing details about its presence and operating undercover. But as its relationship with the country developed, that changed. By 2007, the agency had determined that “cover operations are no longer required” and it relocated its main office in Japan to a space within the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. “NSA’s partnership with Japan continues to grow in importance,” the agency noted in a classified October 2007 report, adding that it planned to take the country “to the next level as an intelligence partner with the U.S.”
Beyond Tokyo, NSA has a presence today at several other facilities in Japan. The most important of these is located at a large U.S. airbase in Misawa, about 400 miles north of Tokyo. At what it calls its “Misawa Security Operations Center,” the agency carries out a mission under the code name LADYLOVE. Using about a dozen powerful antennas contained within large golf ball-like white domes, it vacuums up communications — including phone calls, faxes, and internet data — that are transmitted across satellites in the Asia-Pacific region.
Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, reviews his notes while testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 1, 2007.
Photo: Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP
As of March 2009, Misawa was being used to monitor “over 8,000 signals on 16 targeted satellites,” one NSA document noted. At the same time, the agency was working on beefing up the spy hub’s systems, so that it could meet a challenge set by then-Director Keith Alexander to “collect it all” — meaning, to sweep up as many communications as possible. Misawa’s NSA employees responded to Alexander’s call by developing technology to automatically scan and process more satellite signals. “There are multitude of possibilities,” one Misawa-based NSA engineer reported, predicting that the base would soon be “one step closer to ‘collecting it all.’”
Strategically, Japan is one of the NSA’s most valuable partners. Because of its close proximity to major U.S. rivals like China and Russia, it has been used as a launching pad to spy on those countries. But NSA’s operations in Japan are not limited to monitoring the communications of nearby adversaries. At Misawa, the NSA deployed programs called APPARITION and GHOSTHUNTER, which pinpoint the locations of people accessing the internet across the Middle East and North Africa. NSA documents detailing GHOSTHUNTER’s deployment at the NSA’s British base Menwith Hill state the program was used to facilitate lethal strikes, enabling “a significant number of capture-kill operations” against alleged terrorists. One November 2008 document noted that Misawa had proved particularly useful in tracking down terror suspects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was also being used in an effort to identify targets in Indonesia.
Over the past decade, the NSA’s tactics have evolved dramatically — and it has rolled out new and more controversial methods. By 2010, with the internet surging in popularity, the agency was continuing to focus on long-established spying tactics like eavesdropping on phone calls, but it was increasingly adopting more aggressive methods, such as hacking into its targets’ computers.
At Misawa, the NSA began integrating hacking operations into its repertoire of capabilities. One such method it deployed at the base is called a “Quantum Insert” attack, which involves monitoring the internet browsing habits of people targeted for surveillance, before covertly redirecting them to a malicious website or server that infects their computers with an “implant.” The implant then collects data from the infected computer and returns it to the NSA for analysis. “If we can get the target to visit us in some sort of web browser, we can probably own them,” an NSA employee claims in one document describing the hacking techniques. “The only limitation is the ‘how.’”
Photo: Hitoshi Maeshiro/EPA/Redux
The Yokota Air Base, another U.S. military facility, sits at the foothills of Okutama mountains near the city of Fussa. The base is about a 90-minute drive west from central Tokyo and houses more than 3,400 personnel. According to the U.S. Air Force, Yokota’s function is to “enhance the U.S. deterrent posture and, if necessary, provide fighter and military airlift support for offensive air operations.” But it also serves another, more secret, purpose.
NSA documents reveal that Yokota is home to what the agency calls its Engineering Support Facility, which supplies equipment used for surveillance operations across the world. In 2004, the agency opened a major new 32,000 square foot building at the site – about half the size of a football field – for the repair and manufacture of surveillance antennas it said would be used in places like Afghanistan, Korea, Thailand, the Balkans, Iraq, Central and South America, and Cyprus. The construction cost $6.6 million, which was paid almost entirely by the government of Japan, a July 2004 NSA report stated. Within the facility, Japan would finance the staff as well, the report noted, including seven designers, machinists, and other specialists, who were collectively receiving salaries worth $375,000.
About 1,200 miles southwest of Yokota is the NSA’s most remote Japanese spying station, located on the island of Okinawa at a large U.S. Marine Corps base called Camp Hansen. It, too, has greatly benefited from a massive injection of Japanese money. In the early 2000s, NSA constructed a state-of-the-art surveillance facility on the island, paid for in full by Japan at a cost of some $500 million, according to the agency’s documents. The site was carved out of a “dense, hilly area” called Landing Zone Ostrich that the Marines had previously used for jungle training. The facility, built to include an “antenna field” for its spying missions, was designed to be low profile, blending in with the landscape. It replaced a previous spy hub NSA had maintained on Okinawa that the island’s Japanese residents had complained was unsightly. The role of the remote eavesdropping station is to collect high-frequency communications signals as part of a mission called STAKECLAIM. The NSA does not appear to have a large number of employees stationed on the island; instead, it remotely operates the Okinawa facility from a “24-hour collection operations center” in Hawaii.
Hiroshi Miyashita, a former Japanese government data protection official, told The Intercept that Japan’s funding of U.S. intelligence activities is withheld from public disclosure under a state secrecy law, which he criticized. “It’s our money — Japanese taxpayers’ money,” he said. “We should know how much was spent for intelligence activities in Japan.” Miyashita, now an associate professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, said it was his understanding that NSA operates in the country outside Japan’s legal jurisdiction due to an agreement that grants U.S. military facilities in Japan extraterritoriality. “There is no oversight mechanism,” Miyashita said. “There is limited knowledge of activities within the bases.”
Members of the U.S. Marine Corps test fire M110 rifles at Camp Hansen in Okinawa Prefecture on Jan. 12, 2011.
Photo: Kyodo/AP
As recently as 2013, the NSA claimed to maintain “robust” working relations with its Japanese counterparts. The agency has two surveillance partners in Japan: the Directorate for SIGINT, and the Japanese National Police Agency. Japan has collaborated closely with the NSA on monitoring the communications of neighboring countries, and it also appears to rely heavily on U.S.-provided intelligence about North Korean missile launches. As of February 2013, the NSA was increasingly collaborating with its Japanese counterparts on cybersecurity issues. And in September 2012, Japan began sharing information with the NSA that could be used to identify particular kinds of malicious software being used by hackers. This was the first time the country had shared this kind of data and the NSA viewed it as highly valuable, potentially leading to the prevention or detection of hacking attacks on “critical U.S. corporate information systems.”
“Japanese citizens know almost nothing about Japanese government surveillance. It is extremely secret.”
In return, the NSA has provided Japanese spies with training, and it has also furnished them with some of its most powerful spying tools. An April 2013 document revealed that the NSA had provided the Japanese Directorate for SIGINT with an installation of XKEYSCORE, a mass surveillance system the NSA describes as its “widest reaching” for sweeping up data from computer networks, monitoring “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.”
Igeta Daisuke, a Japanese lawyer who specializes in civil liberties cases, said that the XKEYSCORE revelation was “very important” for the country. The Japanese government’s use of the system could violate Japan’s Constitution, which protects privacy rights, Daisuke told The Intercept. He added that Japan has a limited legal framework covering surveillance issues, largely because the scope of the government’s spying has never before been disclosed, debated, or ruled upon by judges. “Japanese citizens know almost nothing about Japanese government surveillance,” said Daisuke. “It is extremely secret.”
The Japanese government’s defense ministry, which oversees the country’s surveillance capabilitites, declined to comment.
Photo: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images
The NSA works with a diverse range of counterparts in countries across the world — from the United Kingdom and Sweden to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. But the agency’s partnership with Japan is one of its most complex and seems tainted by a degree of distrust, highlighted by the dramatic aftermath of the Korean Airlines incident in 1983.
In a November 2008 document, one of NSA’s then most senior officials in Japan offered an insight into the relationship. He described the Japanese as “very accomplished” at conducting signals intelligence but lamented that they were excessively secretive. The country’s spies were “still caught in a Cold War way of doing business,” the official wrote. “They treat SIGINT as a special-access program — the most sensitive program they have. The result is that they are rather stove-piped, somewhat like NSA was 10-or-more years ago.”
The NSA participates in a group called the SIGINT Seniors Pacific, which has included surveillance agencies from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, India, New Zealand, Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore. The group keeps tabs on security issues in the Asia-Pacific region — issues of great interest to Japan, given its geographic location. Yet the country refused to join the meetings. “Japan was the only nation who was actually offered membership but turned it down,” wrote one NSA employee in a March 2007 document. “At the time, Japan expressed concerns that unintended disclosure of its participation would be too high a risk and had other reasons as well.”
Some of the difficulties have directly impacted the NSA’s operations. According to the agency’s documents, for many years Japan participated in a surveillance program called CROSSHAIR, which involved sharing intelligence gathered from high-frequency signals. However, in 2009, the country abruptly ceased its participation in the program.
Four years later, the issue was still causing NSA concern. Ahead of a February 2013 meeting the agency had scheduled with the deputy director of Japan’s Directorate for SIGINT, it prepared a briefing document that outlined the CROSSHAIR problem and warned of a “potential landmine” associated with the discussions. “In the past, the partner has mistakenly perceived that NSA was trying to force [the Directorate for SIGINT] to use U.S. technical solutions in place of their own,” the memo stated. “When this occurred, the partner reacted in a strong, negative manner.”
But while NSA employees may walk on eggshells with Japan during face-to-face meetings, they have taken a different approach on a covert level. An NSA document from May 2006 indicated that a division of the agency — called Western Europe and Strategic Partnerships — was spying on Japan in an effort to gather intelligence about its foreign policy and trade activities. Moreover, as of July 2010, the NSA had obtained domestic court orders enabling it to conduct surveillance on U.S. territory of Japanese officials and the Bank of Japan, which has offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
The NSA’s covert eavesdropping operations give it an insight into the Japanese government’s private negotiations and dealmaking. As was the case in late May 2007, during a secret meeting at the luxury Hotel Captain Cook in downtown Anchorage, Alaska.
Delegates from more than 70 countries listen to proceedings during the International Whaling Commission meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, on May 29, 2007.
Photo: Michael Conti/AFP/Getty Images
The 59th annual gathering of the International Whaling Commission was being held in the hotel — and Japan was lobbying to end a moratorium preventing countries from hunting whales for commercial purposes. U.S. officials supported maintaining the moratorium and called in the NSA to help spy on Japan’s representatives ahead of a crucial vote. The agency worked with its New Zealand counterparts to conduct the surveillance. “New Zealand had the target access, and collected and provided insightful SIGINT that laid out the lobbying efforts of the Japanese and the response of countries whose votes were so coveted,” noted an NSA document from July 2007, which outlined the operation.
One morning into the four-day gathering, at 7 a.m., an NSA employee arrived in a taxi at the agency’s Alaska Mission Operations Center, a 20-minute drive from the hotel. She collected printed copies of the intelligence that had been gathered from the Japanese communications. She then returned to the hotel with the information stored in a locked bag, and brought it to a private conference room in the hotel. There, the material was shared with two U.S. delegates from the Department of Commerce, two officials from the State Department, two representatives from New Zealand, and one from Australia. The officials read the material in silence, pointing and nodding while they studied it.
The 77-member commission voted at the meeting to allow aboriginal whaling for indigenous people in the U.S., Russia, and Greenland. Japan put forward a proposal that it should be permitted to hunt minke whales for similar reasons, claiming that doing so has been part of its culture for thousands of years. But it failed in its efforts; at the end of proceedings in Anchorage, the moratorium stood and Japan was not granted any special exemptions.
Japan’s representatives were furious and threatened to quit the commission altogether. “This hypocrisy leads us to seriously question the nature by which Japan will continue participating in this forum,” complained Joji Morishita, Japan’s deputy whaling commissioner. As far as NSA was concerned, however, it was a job well done. Whatever intelligence the agency had gathered during the meetings — the specifics of which are not revealed in the document — it had apparently helped sway the vote and scupper Japan’s plans. “Was the outcome worth the effort? The Australian, New Zealand, and American delegates would all say ‘yes,’” noted one agency employee who was involved in the covert mission. “I believe the whales would concur.”
———
Documents published with this article:
- What are the Japanese like as SIGINTers
- NSA opens new engineering support facility in Japan
- The story behind the move
- The KAL 007 shootdown
- Japan provided with XKEYSCORE
- NSA special SIGINT delivery
- U.S. and Japan now exchanging collection from reconnaissance missions
- Shift to software demodulation in Misawa expands collection, saves money
- NSA liaison in Tokyo opens new office
- Crosshair: foreign partners filling HFDF gaps for the U.S.
- NSA policy and trade surveillance of Japan
- Japan official NSA visit, cyber briefing
- Japan official NSA visit, HF briefing
Top photo: US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta delivers a speech after arriving at the Yokota airforce base in Tokyo on October 24, 2011.
In fact, the people who first tried to break this were harassed almost to death, and are still in total poverty and hiding.
looks like someone was a few years ahead of you Ryan.
Plenty else no one is paying attention to.
It dismays me to read yet another story about the nasty underhand duplicitous activities of the USA, treating its so-called partners and friends no differently to its enemies.
I know the USA is not alone in this behaviour, having a number of allies which aid and abet its surveillance activities, but it is the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of its attitude that sickens me most. It expects other people and nations to behave in a certain way, and to ‘trust’ the USA, but doesn’t reciprocate – only pretends to do so. Then when the nasty truth is revealed, it reacts badly and tries to tarnish and hurt the revealer.
It’s rather like that courtroom film with Jack Nicholson where he (?) is told ‘you can’t handle the truth’. The American government can’t handle the truth about its own terrible activities. It still lives in the Wild West mentality of shoot first, answer later, attacking anything and anyone that it doesn’t understand or doesn’t like.
Hardly the behaviour of a civilised or mature country. and it wonders why so many people react badly to its aggressive and malicious behaviour. It really can’t handle the truth of what type of country it has become.
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On 26 April, the Reporters Without Borders in Paris announced, the findings on the freedom of freedom in Japan. According to this, the ranking of Japan in 2017 is 72th in 180 countries. Although it was the same as last year, the deterioration due after the 3.11(2011) barely stopped. When I examined, the ranking in the past decade is as follows. this is the result of “self-regulation”.
However, on April 24th and 27th, NHK released part of the Snooden file in a special program, Although this is due to partnership with “The Intercept”, surprisingly we can see the NHK’s logo on this website in currently.
Actually, the broadcast on this day was that only four hours after Mr. Snowden published the content. the real intention of NHK is unknown.
However, Japan’s rank down may be intercept for a bit by this.
2008?-29??2009?-17??2010?-11??2011?-22??2012?-22??2013?-53??2014?-59??2015?-61??2016?-72??2017?-72??
?
I think Snowden reveled it already. He also insisted on tips to protect yourself. Read his story and you’ll know about everything behind this post. For some tips go here: https://www.purevpn.com/blog/stop-your-phone-from-spying/
It’s becoming all too clear that everywhere, a parallel secret governance, profoundly anti-democratic and without accountability, has replaced self rule by the people. The revelations have become so damning, that there is a countereaction occurring by the globalists, which seeks to censor, sanction and incarcerate the conduits of information to the public.
I’m not sure I really understand how this story impacts U.S. readers, except that it seems to champion how U.S. surveillance installations, paid for by the Japanese gov’t, ultimately thwarted whale hunting.
That’s a good thing, right?
The bigger meat seems to be that Japanese citizens really have no legal protections against intelligence conducted by their gov’t or the U.S.
I would have liked to have read a lot more on that angle.
Having lived in the Western Pacific for a decade, I’m very familiar with NHK, obviously, and I appreciate The Intercept trying to build journalistic bridges, but what really is the point of this story?
I’m not trying to be snarky, I just don’t see how all these threads connect.
It begins with a downed Korean airliner during the Reagan presidency and ends with whales.
We’ve been fool for long US president visit’s japan after WW2 just an year back, I hope this is an fake.
“Japan announced its unconditional surrender just days after U.S. Air Force planes dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 people. The war was over, ”
Japan had surrendered before. The insinuation that the nuclear bomb was needed to end the war (and thus “saved lives”) is wrong, the war could have ended months before. The wrong claim of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs as peacemaking device is a fabrication to cover up a war crime of the US. But in the US, and in many other Western countries, history is being bent and even taught in school like this.
On reuters.com: “Spy agencies from ‘Five eyes’ gather in New Zealand: PM, sources”
“Activities by Russia’s government and counter-proliferation of nuclear arms in North Korea would likely be discussed, alongside more mundane topics like managing diversity in the workplace and how to prevent whistleblowers, according to Massey University security and defense analyst Rhys Ball, who formerly worked for New Zealand’s intelligence service.”
I reckon James Clapper lied again, eh? You just can’t trust the federal gubmint to respect the US Constitution or tell the truth to the American people. Time to clean house on those folks.
Reaching back into the far recesses of my mind I recall a British academic (Johnson?) wrote a book “Shootdown” on this subject, sourced from all the public information available at the time.
It appeared from his meticulous research that the KCIA had fronted an attempt by USA to have the plane veer off course over Sakhalin into Russia to see how quickly the diversion was detected and responded to by Russian radar. The plane was shot down in early course.
President Reagan called it a crime against humanity. He was referring to the shooting down and not the use of 400 passengers on a commercial jet for American strategic objectives.
There isn’t a good explanation for how a commercial airliner managed to ‘stray off course’ in such a manner and cross into restricted airspace. The Soviets were concerned about the use of airliners to gather intelligence, and local commanders ordered the plane be shot down as they could not get instructions from Moscow on how to handle the breach.
The story about the KCIA is, as far as I know, unproven.
A small error in your article:
> Igeta Daisuke, a Japanese lawyer who specializes
> in civil liberties cases, said that the XKEYSCORE
> revelation was “very important” for the country.
> The Japanese government’s use of the system
> could violate Japan’s Constitution, which protects
> privacy rights, Daisuke told The Intercept.
After you first give Igeta Daisuke’s name, you then twice call him just plain “Daisuke”, as if Daisuke was his family name. But that’s not right. His family name is Igeta — Daisuke is his given name and is a common given name in Japan. The Japanese custom is to put the family name first, although sometimes a Japanese person addressing Western audiences will follow the Western order and put the family name last. If you look up Igeta Daisuke, the civil liberties advocate, you can see that he sometimes uses the Western order of names and sometimes the Japanese order, as follows:
A blog post he wrote for the Center for Constitutional Rights says “Igeta Daisuke is a partner attorney at Asahi Law Offices in Tokyo”:
https://ccrjustice.org/home/blog/2015/12/18/guest-blog-challenging-japans-extensive-surveillance-muslims
However, his English LinkedIn page identifies him the other way, as “Daisuke Igeta”:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daisuke-igeta-bb1aa1115
The usual way of clarifying which name is the family name, in international contexts where the word order is ambiguous, is to put the family name in all caps. That’s what he does on his law firm’s web page, where he is identified as “IGETA, Daisuke”:
http://www.alo.jp/eng/member/partners/igeta.html
So that last link makes it unambiguous: Igeta is his family name, and Daisuke is his given name. In my experience Daisuke is always a given name, not a family name, and looking up Igeta suggests that it is a family name and not a given name.
Please fix the article so that after you give his name initially, later references to him identify him as “Igeta”, not “Daisuke”.
And when you’re referring to people from countries which don’t share our customs about naming (China, Japan, Hungary, etc.), try checking first to see what the country’s customs are about naming and which of the person’s names are which. Usually looking up a few people from the same country, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, is enough to figure out what the right custom is. At least you should be careful when mentioning people from China and Japan, where lots of people will notice if you get the names wrong.
However well-written and researched, this is at bottom a recycling of the more boring of the Snowden files. These are becoming increasingly out of date, and hence of largely historical interest. In fact, going back to the shooting down of the Korean airliner in 1983 really is just modern history (that is before many of The Intercept’s readers were born). We would like to know more about what is happening today, and see material that is directly relevant to the dangerous administration now in the White House.
Verrry interestinggg!
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-usa-senate-idUSKBN17Q1LR
too bad the japanese are too stupid and corrupt to get rid of the invading american pieces of shit – at any rate americans remain by far the worst scumbags on the plaent.
That’s some pretty tough talk from someone who is just made someone’s watchlist.
Good job, Free-dumb
A corrupted young mind, at the age of thirteen
Nigga never had a father and his mom was a fiend
She put the pipe down, but for every year she was sober
Her son’s heart simultaneously grew colder
He started hanging out, selling bags in the projects
Checking the young chicks, looking for hit-and-run prospects
He was fascinated by material objects
But he understood money never bought respect
He built a reputation ’cause he could hustle and steal
But got locked once and didn’t hesitate to squeal
So criminals he chilled with didn’t think he was real
“In the early 2000s, NSA constructed a state-of-the-art surveillance facility on the island, paid for in full by Japan at a cost of some $500 million”- guess that’s why it’s illegal for American soldiers to read/access The Intercept. Good job by the Japanese military/government to take that the way they did/do.
“Japanese citizens know almost nothing about Japanese government surveillance. It is extremely secret.” Terrible that it’s taken a decade plus just to reveal the small amount of information that is reported on in this article. Thumbs up Intercept.
The Snowden Archive is getting a bit stale and predictably boring. The Wikilicks one is fresh and more relevant. Please don’t waste any more time unless you have good news to disseminate. Read and re-read your articles several times, and if you still feel excited about the news then only proceed to publish it. Even our glorious Pompeous ignores your articles but gets mad at Assange, which goes to show how diligently Omidyar has worked to finally make all your offerings benign.
What’s India and Thailand doing in this club? India has more Muslim blokes than we have good, ordinary folks. They always lean on the Russians who once prevented us from nuking them during one of their Paki wars. Thailand is a Muslim Radical Jihadist country with very loose morality for child sex, and consequently they are under the influence of the Chinese folks. I think we should kick those two out if we want to keep anything secret from the Russians and the Chinese. Small wonder then that we get hacked all the time.
Thailand is primarily Buddhist. Like 95%. There is a Muslim population of less than 5%, mostly Malay and located (surprise!) down the Malay peninsula close to Malaysia. They’re hardly radical jihadis. The country is ruled under a king, and you’re in big trouble if you insult him in any way. Thailand, if you’re old enough to remember, was an anti-communist ally during the Vietnam kerfuffle. The sex trade developed during that period in response to demand from our boys in uniform.
Surprise!
Is this article, (and the NHK Japanese version) the first time US and Japanese public learn of this?
No, anyone with two working brain cells knew the NSA was operating in Japan.
Who is now perpetrating, not only violence and military force by bombing illegitimate targets such as Doctors Without Borders with impunity and make facts to operate in the repugnant dark shadows of callousness and mendacity in secrecy while cloaked in the regular instrument of democracy or in the values of the land of the free clothing?
Why the US attacks humanity and hides its atrocious truth in secrecy with impunity?
The US mainstream kosher owned media and free presstitute along with the deep/shadow state pauppets in the US governance chant and trumpet the abolishment of privacy in order to “collect it all to know it all” at the expense of national security, just like they have excused and justified the murders of john f Kennedy and his son, blaming it on lone mk-ultra operatives, as the twin towers were blamed on a terrorist attack facade in order for all investigations to go into a halt and just as the US was complicit in hiding the truth that the rothschild jewsrael deliberately bombed the liberty ship full of young non-Jewish soldiers with impunity and in tyrannical secrecy.
Any US treaties based with or without occupation (as in Japan where US military has perpetrated forced occupation) are never contributing nor beneficial to the security of a foreign nation state , but rather it ensures the perpetuation of subverting any nation with signal intelligence gathering communications, that only ensures and benefits the capabilities to subvert and stalk a nation/population, culture and any person, thus, ensuring the impunity and security of the deep/shadow state whose modus of operandi is to ensure hyper-uber tyrannical secrecy.
This article is on time because the pauppet Anne and USA are so eager to subvert the Japanese constitution to further advance (in that region of the world) the covert eavesdropping operations of the deep/shadow state.
No nation NOR group of nation states in the world have the sole unisovereign right to abolish privacy traceable to stalking (spy) by eavesdropping in secrecy where there is no accountability and as standards of ethics and integrity are preferred to be abolish when it comes to “collect it all to know/search/browse it all modus operandi” in order to control and subvert ( while cloaked in sheep’s clothing) by covert tyranny.
All that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden [independenupright journalists and whistleblowers like Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, especially the founder of EBay, William Binney, Russel Tice, Thomas Drake and the brilliant female lawyer of Edward snowden even the female journalist who heloed Edward snowden be alive today along with the Russian state] revealed and exposed, has become the point by point refutation and even the central –onus of evidence – that contravenes the animus of the US constitutional values with impunity and repugnant secrecy
– Alejandro Grace Ararat
quite right.
Absolutely. Sarah Harrison is certainly an admirable figure.
http://www.vogue.com/article/sarah-harrison-edward-snowden-wikileaks-nsa
While I am happy to see this information become public I am at the same time angered by its suppression for years by the editors of the Intercept.
Under the protection of its own definition of “journalism” and acting well within the confines of the deeply and thoroughly discredited established institution of “journalism” the Intercept has suppressed vital public documents and public information. As we see today, there is this story and another generously releasing our documents and the information we have every right to know after keeping them secret (just like the NSA did) for years.
The gods of “journalism” having issued their diktat that says – only as of today – that the documents are “newsworthy” and can be published last year and the years before there was no public interest quality to these documents. Before today they were – threats to the safety of people working for Booze Allen – criminals engaged in criminal activity which it is clearly only right for “journalists” to protect. Until today there was no “journalistic” justification for the publication of these documents – until today the practice of institutional journalism forbade their publication on grounds only “journalists” understand – we the readers should show our gratitude to an organization working entirely for the benefit of its oligarch tax cheating owner. Please don’t give me the tired and ignorant line about “editorial independence” no one believes that oligarchs hand over $250 million dollars and not expect it to be put to work in their interests.
Obviously internal NSA newsletters are so sensitive they need to be kept secret. Clearly, spy deals with Japan should be kept from the public for years, otherwise your just acting like Bashar al-Assange the evil dumper and non-journalist (according to the self defining gods of journalism).
I want to vomit – this website is not acting in the best interests of the community where I live and apparently has some agenda which is actually opposed to the interests of the broader community which it excludes from participation and capriciously graces with documents it considers its private property (and by extension the private property of Pierre Omidyar [whether he controls them or not]) from on high.
Community? Who cares? Its all about the individual and private property.
The pillars of Neoliberal ideology hold up the Intercept – we decide everything – the community or society in the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher – “Doesn’t exist” and the other Thatcher Neoliberal maxim: TINA – there is no alternative – to the “journalism” and process as decided and defined by those with the power to do so.
The process of publication of the Snowden archive has served to discredit and disgrace a singular brave act and subvert the effectiveness of their publication.
The Intercept will continue to do as it pleases, just as the other Neoliberal institutional news outlets such as the WaPo do. What’s the difference really? The NYT kept the Pentagon Papers unpublished for over a year and did not publish them until McNamara himself gave his approval – who is giving approval now?
Wonder why the Intercept is not getting any leaks of substance? Wonder why WikiLeaks and others get so many? Trust might have something to do with it.
Japan is a vassal state that we treat like garbage. News at 11.
The Japanese government deserves to be treated as garbage.
It affects ordinary Japanese people the most. As usual.
Offloading risk, everywhere, often. It’s called good business.
The NSA saves the whales!
In 2286, an enormous cylindrical probe moves through space, sending out an indecipherable signal and disabling the power of ships it passes. As it takes up orbit around Earth, its signal disables the global power grid and generates planetary storms, creating catastrophic, sun-blocking cloud cover. Starfleet Command sends out a planetary distress call and warns starships not to approach Earth.
Our future is now safe for The Voyage Home.
I witnessed a DoD ip attempting to hack into a client system years back into “some sort of browser to own them.” Well, they were spotted and didnt own anything.
What are we up to?
WHY?
Spying on every country, then sharing intel, just seems stupid.
what are they, stupid? NOPE.
. Is the cat out of the bag?
If it isn’t it will have been shortly after this informed article.
We arent getting a bang for our buck.
It is extremely expensive and what do we get for it, peace of mind that wallstreet can keep robbing Americans, standard of living going to hell, education costs thru the roof, roads and bridges dilapidated, public services being trashed out by wealthy thieves with their wallstreet connections, poisoned water, polluted air, disappearing farmland, pesticide ridden food supply…. this is what we are spending billions to protect? WTH?
“What we have here is a failure to com mu ni cate”
a very large network of paranoid government echelon club of dumb&dumbers getting re-elected to keep a job because they have a sick phobia for ordinary living who then manufacture these foreign policy fraudulent relationships to keep getting paid by the populations they feed on.
scotty, beam me up.
It’s amazing how the real issues you highlight are just ignored, while business as usual must be carried on…. for what?
for business as usual – it’s the down escalator
which feeds the GROWTH MONSTER, the one that ate new york city
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to eventually learn, Mr. Gallagher, four of the five eyes have also been intentionally poked – by a trusted finger. Great story!
The NSA said it doesn’t do this:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-despite-claiming-it-doesnt-engage-economic-espionage-engaged-economic-espionage.shtml
Oh, they lied? And if they lied about that, what else are they lying about?
“The NSA does not collect all the communications of American citizens, nor does it store them in a massive database in Utah.” ???
Yes, I read that too. They also said “collect it all to know it all”” and I would not be surprise many of the high cherry echelons in the military and public office are pedophilers that need and must be caught and their wickedness expose to their six hundred and sixty six kosher and non-kosher winds.
Well, not ‘wittingly’. ;o)
and WINDOWS 10 will not log everything you do, create and update a persistent and ongoing profile, and send that and real time data to the NSA.
darn! i lied?
It appears you and TechDirt don’t actually know what economic espionage is. Here’s a hint on what it isn’t: Providing intel on government trade delegation meetings.
hold the phone
are you sayin that Providing intel on government trade delegation meetings is NOT economic espionage?
1. GATHERING intel is certainly espionage.
2. gathering intel about TRADE meetings is certainly ECONOMIC
3. GATHERING + TRADE would mean econ esp..
morover, this sort of spying would be industry specific and even COMPANY SPECIFIC / relevant.
When the NSA makes a secret deal to share information, that’s a good sign it is planning to spy on you. For example, they may provide access to XKEYSCORE, but that is because they are curious to see what queries will be submitted by their new intelligence target, I mean partner. This type of international cooperation is a key to building a better, more compliant, world.
A fine morning laugh, Duce, followed by the sobering realization your suggested scenario fits the empire’s behavior patterns – to a tee. It was that needed-daily-reminder this empire of greed – dismissing all its treachery as, “just good business,” are truly the pirates. Greatly appreciated!
1. An interesting question is who is surveillance directed at.
99.9% of the population are just ordinary innocent people. To put these 99.9% of the population under constant surveillance is a complete loss of time and money. In fact it makes every ordinary citizen a suspect and potential criminal of the worst kind.
2.The complete foreign politics of the US and western countries in general is based on dividing the world in 2, the good ones (we) and the bad ones, that we are the good ones is a very questionable. However every man and woman will tell: we do nothing wrong, same thing for neigbours, all inhabitants of a city.
So if no ordinary people do something wrong and at the same time we are not exactly the good ones what is going on. That riddle can be easily solved in the way that ordinary people are indeed the good ones but the government is not.
3. Why are whistleblowers outlawed and hunted down without mercy?
Because they destruct the nice picture that we are the good ones. Our western governments as well as others put enormous energy in keeping up the appearance of being the good ones.
4.Nearly everyone is not capable of making a correct assessment of risk and danger. That makes it easy for a governments to deploy laws and actions that they say are necessary to enhance security. But those measures are not enhancing security they are aimed to reduce the feeling of unsafeness and insecurity, a feeling that is based on incorrect risk and danger assessment, so the government actions are in fact worthless.
5.Persistence and accumulation.
All actions taken immediately after an incident will never go away, they have an immense level of persistence and every new incident results in accumulating more safety measures.
a very large collection of criminal minds who murder to steal power resources and land from others – even in their own country. Why just the other day the israeli tanks rolled up into the Golan Heights.
it’s life on the pig farm
Timothy Snyder’s little book On Tyranny makes some of these same points eloquently.
It is obvious to me that I do not share Snyder’s political views, to put it mildly, but the book is truly good. It has also been promoted far and wide, on websites that really do not share his views.
I was unaware of that book, might be an idea to read it.
Politics can be analysed without reflecting a political view at least within limits.
Useful tools are searching for creeping normality effect, psychology effects in general.
Japan as an unconditionally docile loser of the war, has shown the UsA that you can win a regional nuclear war. This might tempt Trump and his generals to try to do the same with NK. It might also tempt Kim to nuke preemptively his neighbours and US bases. This is the opposite of the nuclear deterrent doctrine. The winner might be the one who strikes first !
If the Japanese program of “research” was a transparent cover for whale hunting, then Australia’s paramilitary objection to it was surely an equally transparent cover for expanding precedent for its control over a third of Antarctica and the surrounding mineral resources in its claimed EEZ. As oil slicks and strip mines begin to circle the warming continent, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will merit a fair chunk of the credit. But the nature of national involvement is the more interesting part. (We have to have oil spills somewhere … why not out there instead of off Virginia Beach…) Allegedly SSCS is entirely independent, yet fans of Whale Wars might remember that when someone couldn’t show up, a fresh recruit from the New Zealand Navy came forward to volunteer for the spot almost immediately. And now … we see the NSA in the fun. But the distinction is that NZ and UK recognize the Australian territorial claims, while I thought the US nominally did not. So this might hint that Five Eyes policy is more relevant to what the NSA does than US policy…
As shown in this article, there is one key reason why the United States is in a permanent state of war:
http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2017/03/americas-permanent-state-of-war.html
Money speaks loudest in Washington.
nice
I think it’s even worse.
The status of the dollar as global reserve currency, and the agreement of OPEC to price petroleum in dollars in exchange for the US providing security to their regimes, are both the reason we can afford the military spending and the reason we need the military spending — to prop up the system.
We would lose 25% purchasing power overnight if it were not for the status of the dollar as global reserve.
We cannot sustain such a blow.
When Melenchon mentioned this fact — and so casually, as if it were common knowledge — I knew he would not become president of France. We are this fragile, now. We cannot sustain dissent from this system. We will demonize anyone who threatens it. If there is no way to maintain our position “nicely,” then we will kill on a grand scale.
The next financial collapse? If we can still avoid global war, we are LUCKY.
Japan pays the US/NSA generously in land, infrastructure and cash.
In return, NSA spies on the Japanese government and Japanese citizens (and Japanese companies?) for political and economic advantages [over Japan].
Shocking, but not surprising, knowing how the united states of full spectrum dominance operates.
Further on, NSA has information sharing agreement with Israel. Does that mean, Israel also can take political and economic advantages over Japan, using the data from surveillance?
does facebook have a china connection?
does not aipac call the shots in the US?
question is, can the citizens of the US spy on the NSA….?