Cole was asked about the issue during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, whose session was devoted to the uproar over the program surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), a scandal revealed last summer by former NSA technical adviser Edward Snowden.
When Republican Rep. Darrell Issa asked if House phones were included in the collection data (i.e. the numbers they called, the duration of the calls and their date) Cole replied: "No specifics, yes, we probably do."
Isa asked him if Obama's phone calls are being monitored, but the deputy minister refused to answer, promising to do it some other time. However, the Republican MP insisted on his question, noting that the US president was talking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose cell phone was being monitored.
On January 17, Obama promised to reform the surveillance system, announcing that it would change the way to store the millions of phone data collected.
However, Bob Goodleit, co-chair of the committee to which Cole testified, warned that "outsourcing the data to private companies could raise greater privacy concerns."
For his part, James Sensembren, of the authors of the anti-terror law passed after 11's September 2001 attacks, said he was shocked because FISA's 215 law was used to justify the huge collection company of metadata.
And Schröder
US intelligence services spurned former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the predecessor of Angela Merkel, at least from 2002, German public television NDR revealed tonight.
The name of Schröder, who was a Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, is included in the list of persons and institutions attended by the NSA at least since the start of 2002 when his second term began. Then the Social Democrat Chancellor opposed his country's involvement in an intervention in Iraq.
The NSA is at the heart of a 2013 summer scandal when its former partner, Edward Schoonen, revealed the range of spying activities and the fact that he was watching foreign leaders such as Chancellor Merkel. These revelations provoked a stir in Germany and a crisis in the country's relations with the US.
The NDR investigation, conducted in collaboration with the newspaper Zidoyce Zeitung, shows that Merkel was not the target of surveillance before taking office. The code "388" in the "list of targets" concerned its predecessor in this position.
"At that time it would not have crossed my mind, but today it does not surprise me," Schroeder said when asked by the channel and the newspaper about this issue.
"According to my information, it seems that Chancellor Schroeder and, of course, others were being watched," Hans-Christian Strebele, a Green MP and security expert whose party was part of Schroeder 's government, said on television.
In a recent interview on German television, US President Barack Obama assured that the surveillance of Merkel has stopped and will not happen "as long as he is president", but warned that, in general, the NSA will continue its activities abroad.
And the 2009 International Climate Conference
New revelations of US intelligence seeker Edward Schoonen for US intelligence interceptions before and during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, 2009, have been felt to the detriment of foreign delegations.
According to the documents brought to light by Huffington Post and Danish Information, the National Security Service (NSA) was following telephone conversations and emails of foreign officials in connection with the Copenhagen conference, which ended with a weak, non-binding agreement to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius and no binding targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“Analysts here at the NSA, as well as our Second Party partners [Britain, Canada, Australia, Ν. Ζηλανδία], θα συνεχίσουν να παρέχουν στους υπεύθυνους χάραξης πολιτικής μοναδικές, έγκαιρες και πολύτιμες πληροφορίες για τις προετοιμασίες και τους στόχους βασικών χωρών ενόψει της διάσκεψης, όπως και τις διαπραγματεύσεις στους κόλπους κρατών σχετικά με τις πολιτικές για την κλιματική change and their negotiating strategies," a document posted on an internal NSA website on the first day of the conference reads, among other things.
The documents, part of which is labeled "Top Secret", show that the United States was attempting to collect information that would strengthen the US position at the conference. According to Information, it is almost certain that they were in the hands of the Danish draft agreement, which was adjusted for months ahead of the conference. The text essentially proposed to abandon the framework of the Kyoto Protocol, which provided for binding and specific emission reductions from the rich countries.
The authors of the text, which was in the interest of the United States, insisted that it should not fall into the hands of US officials, as the US delegation would remain impromptu during the conference, waiting for the Danes to present their proposal. It seems, however, that the NSA had secured the document before the conference even began.
"It's interesting to verify your fears," Ken Von from Care International, who attended the Copenhagen conference, told BBC. "We all believed it was happening, but knowing that it eventually happened is even worse."
Speaking to Information, members of the Danish bargaining group called "curiously well-informed" both the US and the Chinese delegation about what was going on in closed-door talks. "They just watched loose, just as we thought they would do if they knew about our text," an official said.
Asked about the Guardian, the then Energy Minister and head of the British delegation, Ed Miliband, declined to comment, and a spokesman for the US Security Council was content to say that "the United States is collecting foreign information of the same type as those collected by all other countries ".
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
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