The US spy agency targeted Japanese politicians, its top central banker and major firms for years, WikiLeakssaid on Friday, in the latest revelations about Washington's snooping on allies.
The intercepts exposing US National Security Agency activities follow other documents released by the whistleblower group that revealed spying on allies including Germany and France, straining relations.
Japan is one of Washington's key allies in the Asia-Pacific region and they regularly consult on defence, economic and trade issues.
The leaks comes as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe moves to expand the role of Japan's military, a move applauded by Washington but deeply unpopular at home.
The claims of spying on trade officials could prove particularly sensitive after high-profile talks kicked off this week in Hawaii aimed at hammering out a vast free-trade bloc encompassing 40 percent of the world's economy.
The United States, Japan, and 10 other Pacific Rim countries are looking to finalise the most ambitious trade deal in decades.
But Washington and Tokyo — the biggest economies in the negotiations — have sparred over auto sector access and Tokyo's concerns about including agricultural products in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
"The reports demonstrate the depth of US surveillance of the Japanese government, indicating that intelligence was gathered and processed from numerous Japanese government ministries and offices," WikiLeaks said. (...)
The French president, François Hollande, has called an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council for Wednesday morning after claims that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.
The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.
The recorded conversations, which were handled by the summary services unit at the NSA, were said to reveal few state secrets but show clear evidence of the extent of American spying on countries considered allies. WikiLeaks documents suggest that other US spy targets included French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the United States.
“The documents contain the ‘selectors’ from the target list, detailing the cell phone numbers of numerous officials in the Elysée up to and including the direct cell phone of the president,” a report of the taps published in the French media revealed.
According to the documents released by Wikileaks, Sarkozy is said to have considered restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without US involvement. They also purport to show that Hollande feared a Greek euro zone exit as far back back as 2012.
The documents are said to include summaries of conversations between French government officials on the global financial crisis, the future of the European Union, the relationship between Hollande’s administration and Merkel’s government, French efforts to determine the make-up of the executive staff of the United Nations, and a dispute between the French and US governments over the latter spying on France.
The revelations come as France gives its domestic intelligence and surveillance services controversial greater powers to combat jihadist networks, with more permissions to bug phones and licences to carry out mass surveillance on the internet.
In an article co-authored by Julian Assange, the French newspaper Libération pointed out that in matters of spying, there are no friends: “Spying abroad is the ultimate ‘grey zone’ in surveillance – it is also, in France, the real blind spot of the planned law on surveillance, expected to be adopted this Wednesday.”
Mediapart said: “For almost 10 years, the United States has listened into French presidents … it was all classed top secret or ‘special intelligence’.
“In the five documents that we are publishing, four were marked with a G, kept for the most ‘highly sensitive material’, others were labelled ‘NF’, stipulating that they must not be communicated to foreign countries in any circumstances. Most were marked ‘unconventional’, meaning they had been got through hacking.”
The documents published by Mediapart suggest that the Americans were tapping into François Hollande’s conversations from the moment he was elected in 2012.
Ned Price, spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said on Tuesday in remarks that were grounded in the present and future tense: “We are not targeting and will not target the communications of President Hollande … we work closely with France on all matters of international concern, and the French are indispensable partners.”
On the historical allegations, Price said: “We are not going to comment on specific intelligence allegations. As a general matter we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike.” (...)
WikiLeaks has struck again, releasing the text of a secret court order that cannot be published in Australia.
The anti-secrecy group has this morning published a Victorian Supreme Court suppression order that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange describes as “unprecedented” in scope.
The suppression order is itself suppressed. No Australian media organisation can legally publish the document or its contents.
In a statement provided to Fairfax Media, Assange said it was “completely egregious to block the public's right to know and suppress the media in any instance, and especially in cases of international corruption involving politicians and subsidiaries of a public organisation”.
“Despite the legal implications WikiLeaks publishes this suppression order, as it will others, to uphold our values of freedom of information and transparency of government - the Australian people have a right to know, we work to ensure this right for them, even when their government tries to obstruct it."
WikiLeaks suggests there has not been a comparable “blanket suppression order” since 1995 when the Australian government sought to suppress publication by Fairfax Media of details of a joint US-Australian espionage operation to bug a new Chinese embassy in Canberra.
Assange argues that the suppression order, together with the Australian government's recent introduction of legislation to criminalise reporting on certain types of intelligence operations, is part of “an increasing trend in Australia of suppressing press freedoms for the sake of politics".
"The Australian government is not just gagging the press, it is blindfolding the Australian public," Assange said. (...)
In defence of Julian Assange Julian Assange's publisher writes about his experience of working with the much-criticised WikiLeaks founder
A great deal has been written recently about the frustrations of publishing a book with Julian Assange, mainly in a widely discussed, marathon article for the London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan. (...)
On 5 January 2011, at 8.30 p.m., I was messing about at home when the phone buzzed on the sofa. It was a text from Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate. ‘Are you about?’ it said. ‘I have a somewhat left-field idea. It’s potentially very exciting. But I need to discuss urgently.’ Canongate had bought, for £600,000, a memoir by the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The book had also been bought for a high sum by Sonny Mehta at Knopf in New York and Jamie had sold foreign rights to a slew of big houses. He said he expected it to be published in forty languages. Assange didn’t want to write the book himself but didn’t want the book’s ghostwriter to be anybody who already knew a lot about him. I told Jamie that I’d seen Assange at the Frontline Club the year before, when the first WikiLeaks stories emerged, and that he was really interesting but odd, maybe even a bit autistic. Jamie agreed, but said it was an amazing story. ‘He wants a kind of manifesto, a book that will reflect this great big generational shift.’ He’d been to see Assange in Norfolk and was going again the next day. He said he and the agent Caroline Michel had suggested me for the job and that Assange wanted to meet me. I knew they’d been talking to other writers, and I was at first sceptical. It’s not unusual for published writers to get requests to write things anonymously. How much did Alex Haley protect Malcolm X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t half of Facebook? Isn’t the World Wide Web a new ether, in which we are all haunted by ghostwriters? (...)
(...) But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established procedures determining what was right further up the organizational chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord. Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision. (...)
The US government is believed to be preparing to put a Navy Seal on the witness stand to testify that secret files published by WikiLeaks were discovered in Osama bin Laden's compound.
Colonel Denise Lind ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of being behind the largest leak of state secrets in America's history, has been denied the chance to make a whistleblower defence in his upcoming court martial in which he faces possible life in military custody with no chance of parole.
The judge presiding over Manning's prosecution by the US government for allegedly transmitting confidential material to WikiLeaks ruled in a pre-trial hearing that Manning will largely be barred from presenting evidence about his motives in leaking the documents and videos. In an earlier hearing, Manning's lead defence lawyer, David Coombs, had argued that his motive was key to proving that he had no intention to harm US interests or to pass information to the enemy.
The judge, Colonel Denise Lind, ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial, and must be held back until Manning either entered a plea or was found guilty, at which point it could be used in mitigation to lessen the sentence. The ruling is a blow to the defence as it will make it harder for the soldier's legal team to argue he was acting as a whistleblower and not as someone who knowingly damaged US interests at a time of war.
"This is another effort to attack the whistleblower defence," said Nathan Fuller, a spokesman for the Bradley Manning support network, after the hearing.
The judge also blocked the defence from presenting evidence designed to show that WikiLeaks caused little or no damage to US national security. Coombs has devoted considerable time and energy trying to extract from US government agencies their official assessments of the impact of WikiLeaks around the world, only to find that he is now prevented from using any of the information he has obtained.
