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While it's arguable that Berlusconi was a sensible target...How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghani

While it's arguable that Berlusconi was a sensible target...How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? FWIW, I've just started laying out one aspect of this debate and how intelligence operation blowback can affect the perception of neutrality of NGOs working on the ground. This increasingly seems to lead to a rise in deaths of aid workers and many of the people they work to help. E.g Polio in Pakistan. https://medium.com/@roryireland/latest-wikileaks-documents-irish-citizen-working-for-the-un-was-targeted-by-the-nsa-f345b73b73df#.lki1vv63g https://medium.com/@roryireland/latest-wikileaks-documents-i...

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? I think spycraft is a bit like logging to ELK, or sending metrics to Graphite/InfluxDB - capture all data you can, analyze later.
- jonesb6 11y ago
  Yeah you're right, neither involve actual people.
deleted 11y ago
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argonaut 11y ago
Corruption. Obviously we're both speculating here, but accountability is a serious problem with NGOs, along with corruption/graft/general-wastefulness. So if the US suspected massive (tens of millions of dollars, or more) corruption, that's a plausible reason. I'm not saying it's likely, just that there are possible reasons out there in the world.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  I dunno, the US Government had billions of USD go mysteriously missing during our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan so it seems unlikely that the powers that be are too concerned about corruption for the sake of stamping out corruption.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    Total non sequitur. Just because X does Y in A context does not mean it isn't concerned about Y in B context. Not to mention it's also plausible some of that money went to black budget projects.
- GordonS 11y ago
  Given the US' horrendous abuses of human rights in Guantanamo and abroad, I'd say it's far more likely that they are spying on such people and organisations because they may be negative towards some aspects of US foreign policy. Essentially, they seem to be looking out for 'dissidents' - the same sort of behaviour that US politicians often berate when other countries, such as India or China, do it (also wrongly!).
  - secfirstmd 11y ago
    Well that would certainly coincide with a good reason why the NSA/GCHQ where spying on Amnesty International.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

> How does that justify spying on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Afghanistan? Or from previous revelations, UNICEF - the children's agency? I think spycraft is a bit like logging to ELK, or sending metrics to Graphite/InfluxDB - capture all data you can, analyze later.

jonesb6 11y ago
Yeah you're right, neither involve actual people.

deleted 11y ago

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argonaut 11y ago

Corruption. Obviously we're both speculating here, but accountability is a serious problem with NGOs, along with corruption/graft/general-wastefulness. So if the US suspected massive (tens of millions of dollars, or more) corruption, that's a plausible reason. I'm not saying it's likely, just that there are possible reasons out there in the world.

wavefunction 11y ago
I dunno, the US Government had billions of USD go mysteriously missing during our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan so it seems unlikely that the powers that be are too concerned about corruption for the sake of stamping out corruption.
- argonaut 11y ago
  Total non sequitur. Just because X does Y in A context does not mean it isn't concerned about Y in B context. Not to mention it's also plausible some of that money went to black budget projects.
GordonS 11y ago
Given the US' horrendous abuses of human rights in Guantanamo and abroad, I'd say it's far more likely that they are spying on such people and organisations because they may be negative towards some aspects of US foreign policy. Essentially, they seem to be looking out for 'dissidents' - the same sort of behaviour that US politicians often berate when other countries, such as India or China, do it (also wrongly!).
- secfirstmd 11y ago
  Well that would certainly coincide with a good reason why the NSA/GCHQ where spying on Amnesty International.