Spy agencies threaten Latin America’s sovereignty - Assange
US: The founder of the whistle blower website WikiLeaks says
the US spy agencies pose a threat to the sovereignty of Latin American
nations as the countries depend on US-based telecommunication
technologies.
Julian Assange said speaking via videoconference at Uruguay’s
University of the Republic that Latin America’s reliance on hardware and
traffic handling by Washington was a source of vulnerability to
monitoring by US spy agencies including the CIA, the National Security
Agency (NSA) and the FBI, Russia Today reported on Friday.
“The penetration of the internet in all facets of society,
substituting traditional mail and telephone and even physical
interaction between individuals has placed in the hands of the US
information provided by telecoms for the majority of humanity,” Assange
said. The WikiLeaks founder referred to the rising popularity of social
networking and products offered by companies such as Google, saying that
Latin American countries unknowingly upload profiles of their citizens
in computer systems within enormous servers in the US state of
California.
The profiles are controlled by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others.
“These are directly or indirectly controlled by mechanisms, both
legal or otherwise, via intelligence services of the United States and
peripheral organizations.”
The remarks come a few days after the Associated Press said the US
Justice Department had secretly gained access to two months of telephone
records of its reporters and editors.
Assange added that the US government had “not demonstrated scruples
in following its own laws in intercepting these [phone] lines to spy
even on its own citizens.”
He further said that there “did not exist” laws in the United States
to prevent it from “spying on citizens of foreign countries.”
The records obtained by the Justice Department comprised outgoing
calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters,
for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, and Hartford,
Connecticut, and for AP’s main number in the House of Representatives
press gallery.
-PRESS TV |