Environmental Groups “Shocked” by Reports of NSA Spying of U.N. Climate Talks

In one of the latest revelations based on the leaks of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ “preparations and goals,” saying, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” We speak to Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth.
Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re still joined by Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth USA. Erich, I wanted to ask you about the recent reports that the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ preparations and goals, saying, quote, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” Your response?

ERICH PICA: Shocking, but not surprised, as we hear more and more about what the National Security Agency has been doing. You know, the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen was supposed to be this convening of the world leaders to take us into the future of climate negotiations and carbon pollution reductions. And, you know, the United States, throughout those negotiations, had a smug reality to their negotiating stance and was—can be blamed for the collapse of those talks. And kind of hearing through the Snowden documents that NSA was spying on the countries and the negotiators kind of explains many things about why those talks collapsed, because it seems that the United States wasn’t really interested in negotiating just like other countries should be. They were just interested in listening to what was going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of those talks. I remember very well in Copenhagen when Friends of the Earth was kicked out.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, no, we were—we were kicked out for protesting within the U.N. confines. And so, those talks, you know, those 2009 talks, were really about how does the world come together to solve this great issue, which is how to reduce our carbon pollution and save the planet and our society from global warming. And, you know, a lot of countries from around the world, and heads of state, more importantly, came to Copenhagen to try to hammer out an agreement that would have taken us into the future over the next 20 years. And unfortunately, the United States led the—you know, several countries, including Canada, who we were just talking about, in basically destroying the goodwill that these talks had created, to the point where we’ve been now in these negotiations over the last four years, which have really gone nowhere.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you expect from the coming talks? We’ve just come out of Warsaw. Then they’re moving on to Lima, and the binding discussion is supposed to take place in Paris, France, in 2015.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, in Paris. Yeah, well, it’s not a good sign when you’re trying to build trust with other negotiators, other countries, and it comes out that, you know, the United States was spying on those negotiations. There’s already been a level of mistrust and distrust between the United States and countries around the world, particularly those developing countries. And so, you know, where we’re going in Paris, who knows? The United States has not been forthcoming with their negotiating stances. They have not been—we have not been aggressive in reducing our climate change emissions and putting out an offer that the rest of the world can accept. And we haven’t been terribly generous with funding to help these less-developed, these poorer countries in adjusting to both adapting and mitigating the climate impacts that are already happening to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Erich Pica—

ERICH PICA: And so the United States has very little trust in these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, president of Friends of the Earth USA, as we turn right now to Michigan.

ERICH PICA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

Monday, February 3, 2014

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New from Snowden: The NSA was spying on U.N. climate talks Leaked documents reveal that the U.S. government monitored communications to gain an advantage in negotiations

The National Security Agency was spying on foreign governments’ communications before and during the 2009 United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, a new document released by whistle-blower Edward Snowden reveals.

The Huffington Post, partnering with Danish newspaper Information, has the exclusive:

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners [the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship] will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document reads. The NSA’s plan, Information adds, was to get the scoop on those private discussions in order to brief U.S. officials and give them an advantage in negotiations of CO2 reductions, which had the potential to harm U.S. (and other nations’) economic interests:

The general theme of the document is a set of risk assessments on various effects of climate change that the entire intelligence community was working on. However, the document suggests that the NSA’s actual focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes. It describes the U.S. as being under pressure because of its role as the historically largest carbon emitter. A pressure to which the NSA spies were already responding:

“SIGINT (Signals Intelligence, ed.) has already alerted policymakers to anticipate specific foreign pressure on the United States and has provided insights into planned actions on this issue by key nations and leaders.”
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A National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the document, but said in an email that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

The ultimate outcome of the Copenhagen talks is mostly seen as a disappointment: an agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees C, but one that was non-binding and that allowed each nation to develop its own plans for doing so. While a number of factors undoubtedly contributed to this, these new revelations signal a bad turn for future efforts to reach an international accord on fighting climate change. As HuffPo puts it, in a bit of an understatement, “The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.”

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com

Thursday, Jan 30, 2014 03:38 PM +0100

Find this story at 30 January 2014

Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Snowden Docs: U.S. Spied On Negotiators At 2009 Climate Summit

 

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“Second Party partners” refers to the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship. “While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event,” the document says.

The Huffington Post published the documents Wednesday night in coordination with the Danish daily newspaper Information, which worked with American journalist Laura Poitras.

The December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen was the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brings together 195 countries to negotiate measures to address rising greenhouse gas emissions and their impact. The Copenhagen summit was the first big climate meeting after the election of President Barack Obama, and was widely expected to yield a significant breakthrough. Other major developed nations were already part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emissions limits, while the United States — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases when the protocol went into effect in 2004 — had famously declined to join. The two-week meeting was supposed to produce a successor agreement that would include the U.S., as well as China, India and other countries with rapidly increasing emissions.

The document indicates that the NSA planned to gather information as the leaders and negotiating teams of other countries held private discussions throughout the Copenhagen meeting. “[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document states. The information likely would be used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama, among others, according to the document.

The document does not detail how the agency planned to continue gathering information during the summit, other than noting that it would be capturing signals intelligence such as calls and emails. Previous disclosures have indicated that the NSA has the ability to monitor the mobile phones of heads of state. Other documents that Snowden has released indicate that the U.K.’s intelligence service tapped into delegates’ email and telephone communications at the 2009 G-20 meetings in London. Other previous Snowden disclosures documented the surveillance of the G-8 and G-20 summits in Canada in 2010, and the U.N. climate change conference in Bali in 2007.

The document also refers to some intelligence gathered ahead of the meeting, including a report that “detailed China’s efforts to coordinate its position with India and ensure that the two leaders of the developing world are working towards the same outcome.” It refers to another report that “provided advance details of the Danish proposal and their efforts to launch a ‘rescue plan’ to save COP-15.”

The Danish proposal was a draft agreement that the country’s negotiators had drawn up in the months ahead of the summit in consultation with a small number key of countries. The text was leaked to The Guardian early in the conference, causing some disarray as countries that were not consulted balked that it promoted the interests of developed nations and undermined principles laid out in previous climate negotiations. As Information reports, Danish officials wanted to keep U.S. negotiators from seeing the text in the weeks ahead of the conference, worried that it may dim their ambitions in the negotiations for proposed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

The Danes did share the text with the U.S. and other key nations ahead of the meeting. But the NSA document noting this as “advance details” indicates that the U.S. may have already intercepted it. The paragraph referring to the Danish text is marked “SI” in the Snowden document — which most likely means “signals intelligence,” indicating that it came from electronic information intercepted by the NSA, rather than being provided to the U.S. negotiators.

That could be why U.S. negotiators took the positions they did going into the conference, a Danish official told Information. “They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document,” the official said. “They made no constructive statements. Obviously, if they had known about our plans since the fall of 2009, it was in their interest to simply wait for our draft proposal to be brought to the table at the summit.”

Members of the Danish delegation indicated in interviews with Information that they thought the American and Chinese negotiators seemed “peculiarly well-informed” about discussions that had taken place behind closed doors. “Particularly the Americans,” said one official. “I was often completely taken aback by what they knew.”

Despite high hopes for an agreement at Copenhagen, the negotiations started slowly and there were few signs of progress. Obama and heads of state from more than 100 nations arrived late in the second week in hopes of achieving a breakthrough, but the final day wore on without an outcome. There were few promising signals until late Friday night, when Obama made a surprise announcement that he — along with leaders from China, India, Brazil and South Africa — had come up with the “Copenhagen Accord.”

The three-page document set a goal of keeping the average rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius, but allowed countries to write their own plans for cutting emissions — leaving out any legally binding targets or even a path to a formal treaty. Obama called the accord “an unprecedented breakthrough” in a press conference, then took off for home on Air Force One. But other countries balked, pointing out that the accord was merely a political agreement, drafted outside the U.N. process and of uncertain influence for future negotiations.

The climate summits since then have advanced at a glacial pace; a legally binding treaty isn’t currently expected until 2015. And the U.S. Congress, despite assurances made in Copenhagen, never passed new laws cutting planet-warming emissions. (The Environmental Protection Agency is, however, moving forward with regulations on emissions from power plants, but a new law to addressing the issue had been widely considered as preferable.)

The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.

“It can’t help in the sense that if people think you’re trying to get an unfair advantage or manipulate the process, they’re not going to have much trust in you,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a seasoned veteran of the U.N. climate negotiations. Meyer said he worried that the disclosure might cause the parties to “start becoming more cautious, more secretive, and less forthcoming” in the negotiations. “That’s not a good dynamic in a process where you’re trying to encourage collaboration, compromise, and working together, as opposed to trying to get a comparative advantage,” he said.

Obama has defended the NSA’s work as important in fighting terrorism at home and abroad. But the latest Snowden document indicates that the agency plays a broader role in protecting U.S. interests internationally.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment directly on the Snowden document in an email to The Huffington Post, but did say that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.” She noted that Obama’s Jan. 17 speech on the NSA “laid out a series of concrete and substantial reforms the Administration will adopt or seek to codify with Congress” regarding surveillance.

“In particular, he issued a new Presidential Directive that lays out new principles that govern how we conduct signals intelligence collection, and strengthen how we provide executive branch oversight of our signals intelligence activities,” Hayden said. “It will ensure that we take into account our security requirements, but also our alliances; our trade and investment relationships, including the concerns of our companies; and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties. And we will review decisions about intelligence priorities and sensitive targets on an annual basis, so that our actions are regularly scrutinized by the President’s senior national security team.”

Posted: 01/29/2014 9:17 pm EST Updated: 01/30/2014 12:59 pm EST

Find this story at 29 January 2014

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Justice minister to seek more control over intelligence agency

In light of the sensational revelations from double-agent Morten Storm, the justice minister wants PET to report to parliament about the use of civilian agents
Following the uproar created by the numerous revelations from former PET secret-agent Morten Storm, the justice minister, Morten Bødskov (Socialdemokraterne), is now calling for parliament to have more control over the domestic intelligence agency.

In an interview with Berlingske newspaper, Bødskov said that he is seeking increased powers for parliament’s Kontroludvalg, a committee established in 1964 to oversee PET.

The move comes in response to the many questions that have arisen about PET’s actions following Storm’s decision to contribute to a series of articles in Jyllands-Posten newspaper that chronicled his time as a PET double-agent [9]. Storm says he assisted PET in tracking al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki for the American intelligence agency, the CIA, which clearly had the intention of assassinating him. Storm also claims to have arranged a Western wife for al-Awlaki [10], who was sent to Yemen with tracking equipment placed in her luggage by PET without her knowledge. He also alleges that PET attempted to buy his silence [11] by offering him 25,000 tax-free kroner a month for the next five years if he promised to keep quiet about his role in the hunt for al-Awlaki.

After Storm’s claims made an international splash, numerous politicians and human rights organisations demanded investigations into PET [12].

Among those wanting answers was Enhedslisten’s Pernille Skipper, whose party had called Bødskov in for an “open meeting” scheduled for today.

“This case is so complex that anyone can see that we need some answers,” Skipper told Politiken newspaper last month. “There are two central elements we need to have answers to. One is whether PET has helped the CIA with a plan to kill somebody rather than have him put in front of a court. The other is now whether PET has also used an innocent person as live bait. That’s not just a violation of rules, it is completely morally reprehensible.”

Bødskov’s move would give Kontroludvalget insight into PET’s use of civilians as agents – something that elected officials have not historically had.

“It is important for the government to have some peace of mind around these questions in parliament,” Bødskov told Berlingske. “Therefore, as something completely new, we will see to it that parliament’s Kontroludvalg receives notifications on PET’s use of civilians as agents.”

…

November 22, 2012 – 05:55
Justin Cremer [8]

Find this story at 22 November 2012

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