Glenn Greenwald talks about NSA documents with Middle East media

In the next few days, we will be told how much joined at the hip the NSA has been with dictators of the Middle East.  

From Al Akhbar:
....Glenn Greenwald: NSA documents on Middle East to be disclosed.
Numerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, according to the journalist leading the reporting on the explosive NSA leaks.

In his first exclusive interview with Arab media, Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who first broke the NSA story in 2013 and has since won a Pulitzer prize for his fearless and consistent reporting on the revelations, told Al-Akhbar there are many more documents to come out from the region.



Greenwald is one of a select few in possession of all the documents and, while working closely with whistleblower Edward Snowden, continues to play a pivotal role in exposing the intrusive level of surveillance by the NSA and its partners across the globe.

The latest damning NSA revelations appear in his new book, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State,” where Greenwald released new documents highlighting the scope of surveillance conducted by the NSA on foes and allies alike, including evidence of what the NSA designated as ‘approved SIGNIT partners’ such as Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

Now taking the time to speak from his home in Brazil, Greenwald gives his take on the agency’s role, the effect the leaks have had on changing attitudes and relations with the US, and what more can be expected from the documents in the future.

Al-Akhbar – Tells us about the NSA documents on the Middle East…

Glenn Greenwald – We did a pretty big story that unsurprisingly didn’t get as much attention as it deserved in the American media back in September [2013] in the Guardian on how the NSA turns over massive amounts of communications to the Israelis without bothering to minimize it, and there was a Memorandum of Understanding between the Israeli surveillance agency and the NSA that we published, detailing how close the relationship was, and also part of that story there were also documents saying that although the US gives huge amounts of aid to the Israelis the Israelis are actually one of the most aggressive eavesdroppers on the US government and America generally, and that they try to make the relationship completely one-sided on behalf of Israel, so there is that that we published.

AA – Why wasn’t it made a big deal in the US?

GG – Because anything that reflects poorly on Israel is systematically ignored by most of America’s media….It got some attention, it just didn’t get nearly the amount of attention it deserved – I think the NYT public editor, if I’m not mistaken, even criticized the NYT for not reporting and following up on it................

............AA – Have you noticed from the documents the types of partnerships between the NSA and regional security agencies (in the Middle East)?

GG – The one thing I try not to do is talk in interviews or elsewhere about reporting we haven’t done yet, because it has to go through the reporting process for me to responsibly describe the documents, but yes, one of the things we want to work on are documents that detail NSA cooperation with some of the worst tyrants in the Gulf region, both to augment their own domestic surveillance capabilities and also for the NSA to share with those regimes information they get about those countries. This is definitely a big story that remains to be told that we want to work on now…. All I can say is there is a lot more reporting to do on that region of the world.

..........AA – Have you seen evidence of this?

GG – There is already some reporting we’ve done about that – there’s reporting we’ve done where the NSA has targeted what they call ‘radicalizers’ – people who establish radical views, but who are not, says the document, actual terrorists or even associated with terrorist organisations, and some of the documents we’ve uncovered talk about monitoring their online activities to see if there are any sex-chats or visiting pornographic sites and using that as a means to destroy their reputation and discredit them. So that’s targeting people who the government believes have radical ideas and using the surveillance as a means to ruin their lives, which is what the surveillance scandals of the 1960s and 70s were about. There are other documents we’ve reported on where they collect the data on people who visit the Wikileaks website, or ways in which they try and harm the reputations of activists on behalf of Anonymous, but one of the big stories that’s left to be told, which is the one we’re working on most now, is reporting on who it is specifically that the NSA has targeted with the most evasive type of surveillance on US soil, and who these people are, and what are the reasons for it, and that is the story of targeting of dissidents, and activists, and advocates as retaliation for their political views......