Documents Show Undersea Cable Firms Provide Surveillance Access to US Secret State

Documents published last week by the Australian web site Crikey revealed that the US government "compelled Telstra and Hong Kong-based PCCW to give it access to their undersea cables for spying on communications traffic entering and leaving the US."

The significance of the disclosure is obvious; today, more than 99 percent of the world's internet and telephone traffic is now carried by undersea fiber optic cables. An interactive submarine cable map published by the Global Bandwidth Research Service is illustrative in this regard.

Since the late 1960s as part of its ECHELON spy project, the United States has been tapping undersea cables to extract communications and signals intelligence. In fact, projects such as Operation Ivy Bells, a joint Navy-NSA secret intelligence program directed against the former Soviet Union was designed to do just that.

Prefiguring the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping scandal which broke in 2005, the Associated Press reported that a $3.2 billion Navy Seawolf class submarine, a 453-foot behemoth called the USS Jimmy Carter, "has a special capability: it is able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them."

A year later, AT&T; whistleblower Mark Klein told Wired Magazine that NSA was tapping directly into the world's internet backbone, and was doing so from domestic listening posts the telecommunications' giant jointly built with the agency at corporate switching stations.

Whatever submarine operations NSA still carry out with the US Navy and "Five Eyes" surveillance partners (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US), access to information flowing through undersea cables mean that the US government is well-positioned to scoop-up virtually all global communications.

Since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began spilling the beans last month, it should be clear that the American government's capabilities in amassing unprecedented volumes of information from cable traffic, also potentially hands the US and their corporate collaborators a treasure trove of sensitive economic secrets from competitors.

Economic Espionage

Reporting by Australian journalists confirm information published July 6 by The Washington Post. There we learned that overseas submarine cable companies doing business in the United States must maintain "an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances," a cadre of personnel whose job is to ensure that "when US government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely."

Inked just weeks after the 9/11 provocation, the 23-page Telstra document specifies that access to undersea cable traffic by the FBI and "any US governmental authorities entitled to effect Electronic Surveillance," is an explicit condition for doing business in the United States.

Similar agreements were signed between 1999 and 2011 with telecommunication companies, satellite firms, submarine cable operators and the US government and were published earlier this month by the Public Intelligence web site.

It has long been known that the Australian secret state agency, the Defence Security Directorate (DSD), is a key participant in US global surveillance projects. Classified NSA maps provided by Snowden and subsequently published by Brazil's O Globo newspaper, revealed the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence sites worldwide. DSD currently operates four military installations involved in a top secret NSA program called X-Keyscore.

Snowden described X-Keyscore and other programs to Der Spiegel as "the intelligence community's first 'full-take' Internet buffer that doesn't care about content type . . . 'Full take' means it doesn't miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit's capacity."

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, along with the "US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs," three other DSD facilities, "the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra," were identified as X-Keyscore "contributors." The paper also reported that "a new state-of-the-art data storage facility at HMAS Harman to support the Australian signals directorate and other Australian intelligence agencies" is currently under construction.

The Herald described the project as "an intelligence collection program" that "processes all signals before they are shunted off to various 'production lines' that deal with specific issues and the exploitation of different data types for analysis--variously code-named Nucleon (voice), Pinwale (video), Mainway (call records) and Marina (internet records). US intelligence expert William Arkin describes X-Keyscore as a 'national Intelligence collection mission system'."

Two of the Australian bases illustrated on the X-Keyscore map sit adjacent to major undersea cable sites transiting the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Cozy arrangements with Telstra and other firms however, hardly represent mere passive acceptance of terms and conditions laid out by the US government. On the contrary, these, and dozens of other agreements which have come to light, are emblematic of decades-long US corporate-state "public-private partnerships."

As Bloomberg reported last month, "thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with US national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence."

It's a two-way street, Bloomberg noted. Firms providing "US intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications" use it "to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries." In return, "companies are given quick warnings about threats that could affect their bottom line." Such sensitive data can also be used to undermine the position of their foreign competitors.

We now know, based on documents provided by Snowden, that the "infiltration" of computer networks by US secret state agencies are useful not only for filching military secrets and mass spying but also for economic and industrial espionage.

That point was driven home more than a decade ago in a paper prepared by journalist Duncan Campbell for the European Parliament.

"By the end of the 1990s," Campbell wrote, "the US administration claimed that intelligence activity against foreign companies had gained the US nearly $150 billion in exports."

"Although US intelligence officials and spokespeople have admitted using Comint [communications intelligence] against European companies . . . documents show that the CIA has been directly involved in obtaining competitor intelligence for business purposes."

At the time the Telstra pact was signed, the Australian telecommunications and internet giant was "50.1% owned" by the Australian government. Reach Global Services, is described in the document as "a joint venture indirectly owned 50% by Telstra" and "50% owned" by Hong Kong's Pacific Century CyberWorks Limited (PCCW).

With controlling interest in more than 40 undersea fiber optic cables, and with landing rights in global markets that include Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, North America and Europe, the joint venture was then the largest commercial telecommunications carrier in Asia with some 82,000 kilometers of undersea cables. Reach also operates international satellite systems that cover two-third's of the planet's surface.

Such assets would be prime targets of "Five Eyes" spy agencies under terms of the UKUSA Communications Intelligence Agreement.

Telstra and PCCW restructured their partnership in 2011, with the Australian firm now controlling the lion's share of an undersea cable network that stretches "more than 364,000 kilometres and connects more than 240 markets worldwide," the South Morning China Post reported. Inevitably, the restructuring will afford the US government an even greater opportunity for spying.

Network security agreements hammered out among undersea cable firms and the US government have profound implications for global commerce. Their geopolitical significance hasn't been lost on America's closet "allies."

The Guardian revealed last month that the US is "spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington." In addition to the EU mission, target lists include "the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey."

That list has since been supplemented by further disclosures.

Snowden told the South China Morning Post that NSA hacked into the "computers at the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which owns one of the most extensive fibre optic submarine cable networks in the region."

Recently, the firm signed major deals with the Chinese mainland's "top mobile phone companies" and "owns more than 46,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cables."

According to the paper, Pacnet "cables connect its regional data centres across the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, the mainland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It also has offices in the US."

The South Morning China Post also disclosed that Tsinghua University, "China's premier seat of learning" has sustained extensive attacks on the school's "network backbones."

Available documents based on Snowden disclosures and other sources seem to suggest that President Obama's militaristic "pivot to Asia" is also an aggressive campaign to steal commercial and trade secrets from US imperialism's Asian rivals.

Whether or not these revelations will effect negotiations over the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a NAFTA-style "free trade" agreement between the US and ten Pacific Rim nations, including Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru and Singapore--all prime US-UK targets of PRISM, TEMPORA and X-Keyscore--remains to be seen.

'Legal' License to Spy

If we have learned anything since Snowden's revelations began surfacing last month, it is that the US secret state relies on a body of "secret laws" overseen by a Star Chamber-like FISA court described in the polite language The New York Times as a "parallel Supreme Court," to do its dirty work.

Along with leaked NSA documents, published agreements between telecommunications firms, internet service providers and the US government should demolish the fiction that blanket surveillance is "legal," "limited in scope" or chiefly concerned with fighting "crime" and "terrorism."

Proclaiming that "US communications systems are essential to the ability of the US government to fulfill its responsibilities to the public to preserve the national security of the United States, to enforce the laws, and to maintain the safety of the public," the Telstra summary posted by Crikey should dispel any illusions on that score.

On the contrary, the agreement reveals the existence of a vast surveillance web linking private companies to the government's relentless drive, as The Washington Post explained, to "collect it all."

● All customer billing data to be stored for two years;
● Ability to provide to agencies any stored telecommunications or internet communications and comply with preservation requests;
● Ability to provide any stored metadata, billing data or subscriber information about US customers;
● They are not to comply with any foreign privacy laws that might lead to mandatory destruction of stored data;
● Plans and infrastructure to demonstrate other states cannot spy on US customers;
● They are not to comply with information requests from other countries without DoJ permission;
● A requirement to:

. . . designate points of contact within the United States with the authority and responsibility for accepting and overseeing the carrying out of Lawful US Process to conduct Electronic Surveillance of or relating to Domestic Communications carried by or through Domestic Communications Infrastructure; or relating to customers or subscribers of Domestic Communications Companies. The points of contact shall be assigned to Domestic Communications Companies security office(s) in the United States, shall be available twenty-four (24) hours per day, seven (7) days per week and shall be responsible for accepting service and maintaining the security of Classified Information and any Lawful US Process for Electronic Surveillance . . . The Points of contact shall be resident US citizens who are eligible for US security clearances.

In other words, an "internal corporate cell of American citizens," charged with providing confidential customer data to the secret state, as The Washington Post first reported.

Additional demands include:

● A requirement to keep such surveillance confidential, and to use US citizens "who meet high standards of trustworthiness for maintaining the confidentiality of Sensitive Information" to handle requests;
● A right for the FBI and the DoJ to conduct inspection visits of the companies' infrastructure and offices; and
● An annual compliance report, to be protected from Freedom of Information requests.

This is not a one-off as the other 27 Agreements published by Public Intelligence readily attest.

For example, the 31-page 2011 Agreement between the US government and Level 3 Communications, which operates in North America, Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific, which acquired Global Crossing from from the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia (the focus of The Washington Post's July 6 report), was expanded beyond the FBI and Department of Justice to include the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, NSA's "parent" agency.

As with the 2001 Telstra agreement, "Access" to Level 3's systems by governmental entities is defined as "the ability to physically or logically undertake any of the following actions: (a) read, divert, or otherwise obtain non-public information or technology from or about software, hardware, a system or a network; (b) add, edit or alter information or technology stored on or by software, hardware, a system or a network; and (c) alter the physical or logical state of software, hardware, a system or a network (e.g., turning it on or off, changing configuration, removing or adding components or connections)."

NSA, the principle US spy agency charged with obtaining, storing and analyzing COMINT/SIGINT "products, i.e., user data, has been handed virtually unlimited access to information flowing through Level 3 fiber optic cables as it enters the US.

This includes what is described as "Domestic Communications," content, not simply the metadata, of any phone call or email that transit Level 3 systems: "'Domestic Communications' means: (a) Wire Communications or Electronic Communications (whether stored or not) from one US location to another US location; and (b) the US portion of a Wire Communication or Electronic Communication (whether stored or not) that originates or terminates in the United States."

So much for President Obama's mendacious claim that "nobody is listening to your phone calls"!

Access to the entirety of customer records and communications is clearly spelled out in the section entitled "Electronic Surveillance."

Note: the "USC." provisions refer to (18) the Stored Communications Act which compels disclosure to the government of stored wire, electronic and transactional data; a provision that greatly weakened the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. 50 USC outlines the role of War and National Defense in the United States Code and includes "foreign intelligence," "electronic surveillance authorization without court order," "internal security," including the "control of subversive activities" and the "exercise of emergency powers and authorities" by the Executive Branch.

'Electronic Surveillance,' for the purposes of this Agreement, includes: (a) the interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications as defined in 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510(1), (2), (4) and (12), respectively, and electronic surveillance as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 1801(f); (b) Access to stored wire or electronic communications, as referred to in 18 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq.; (c) acquisition of dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information through pen register or trap and trace devices or other devices or features capable of acquiring such information pursuant to law as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 3121 et seq. and 50 U.S.C. § 1841 et seq.; (d) acquisition of location-related information concerning a service subscriber or facility; (e) preservation of any of the above information pursuant to 18 U.S.C.§ 2703(f); and (f) Access to, or acquisition, interception, or preservation of, wire, oral, or electronic communications or information as described in (a) through (e) above and comparable state laws.

Level 3 is further enjoined from disclosing what is described as "Sensitive Information," that is, "information that is not Classified Information regarding: (a) the persons or facilities that are the subjects of Lawful US Process; (b) the identity of the Government Authority or Government Authorities serving such Lawful US Process; (c) the location or identity of the line, circuit, transmission path, or other facilities or equipment used to conduct Electronic Surveillance; (d) the means of carrying out Electronic Surveillance."

In other words, we do the spying; you hand over it over and keep your mouths shut.

The electronic driftnet thrown over global communications is expedited by direct access to Level 3's equipment by the US government.

'Principal Equipment' means the primary electronic components of a submarine cable system, to include the hardware used at the NOC(s) [Network Operations Center], landing station(s) and the cable itself, such as servers, repeaters, submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE), system supervisory equipment (SSE), power feed equipment (PFE), tilt and shape equalizer units (TEQ/SEQ), optical distribution frames (ODF), and synchronous optical network (SONET), synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH), wave division multiplexing (WDM), dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM), coarse wave division multiplexing (CWDM) or optical carrier network (OCx) equipment, as applicable.

Who oversees the set-up? On paper it appears that Level 3 control their operations. However, the Agreement specifies that the firm must utilize "primary US NOCs for any Domestic Communications Infrastructure" and it "shall be maintained and remain within the United States and US territories, to be operated by Level 3, exclusively using Screened Personnel."

Who signs off on "screened personnel"? Why the US government of course, which raises the suspicion that corporate employees are little more than spook assets.

But here's where it gets interesting. "Level 3 may nonetheless use the United Kingdom NOC for routine day-to-day management of any of the Cable Systems as such management is in existence as of the Effective Date."

Why might that be the case, pray tell?

Could it be that fiber optic cables transiting the UK are already lovingly scrutinized by NSA's kissin' cousins across the pond? GCHQ, as The Guardian disclosed, is merrily ingesting "vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them" with the American agency.

Therefore, since UK undersea cable traffic is already under close "management" via the British agency's TEMPORA program, described as having the "'biggest internet access' of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance," it makes sense that Level 3 is allowed to "use the United Kingdom NOC" as a hub for its "Domestic Communications Infrastructure"!

In conclusion, these publicly available documents provide additional confirmation of how major corporations are empowering the US surveillance octopus.

By entering into devil's pacts with the world's "sole superpower," giant telcos and internet firms view the destruction of privacy rights as just another item on the balance sheet, a necessary cost of doing business in America.

And business is very good.

ECHELON Today: The Evolution of an NSA Black Program

People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While the public is rightly angered by the illegal, unconstitutional nature of NSA programs which seize and store data for retrospective harvesting by intelligence and law enforcement officials, including the content of phone calls, emails, geolocational information, bank records, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, even medical records--in secret, and with little in the way of effective oversight--the historical context of how, and why, this vast spying apparatus came to be is often given short shrift.

Revelations about NSA spying didn't begin June 5, 2013 however, the day when The Guardian published a top secret FISA Court Order to Verizon, ordering the firm turn over the telephone records on millions of its customers "on an ongoing daily basis."

Before PRISM there was ECHELON: the top secret surveillance program whose all-encompassing "dictionaries" (high-speed computers powered by complex algorithms) ingest and sort key words and text scooped-up by a global network of satellites, from undersea cables and land-based microwave towers.

Past as Prologue

Confronted by a dizzying array of code-named programs, the casual observer will assume the spymasters running these intrusive operations are all-knowing mandarins with their fingers on the pulse of global events.

Yet, if disastrous US policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing capitalist economic meltdown tell us anything, it is that the American superpower, in President Nixon's immortal words, really is "a pitiful, helpless giant."

In fact, the same programs used to surveil the population at large have also been turned inward by the National Security State against itself and targets military and political elites who long thought themselves immune from such close attention.

Coupled with Snowden's disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported here and here), revealed that the agency--far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his "secret and confidential" black files--has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.

While Tice's allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American policy--elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations--despite being deep-sixed by US media, they confirm previous reporting about the agency.

When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA's ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for New Statesman revealed that a whistleblower, Margaret Newsham, a software designer employed by Lockheed at the giant agency listening post at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England, stepped forward and told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session, that NSA was using its formidable intercept capabilities "to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals."

Campbell's reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager's groundbreaking book, Secret Power, the first detailed account of NSA's global surveillance system. A summary of Hager's findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared in CovertAction Quarterly.

As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that "NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes," said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Ironically enough, congressional efforts to mitigate abuses by the intelligence agencies exposed by the Church and Pike Committees in the 1970s, resulted in the 1978 creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. However, as The New York Times reported July 7, that court "in more than a dozen classified rulings . . . has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans," a "parallel Supreme Court" whose rulings are beyond legal challenge.

In an 88-page report on ECHELON published in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Newsham said that when she worked on the development of SILKWORTH at the secret US base, described as "a system for processing information relayed from signals intelligence satellites," she told Campbell and other reporters, including CBS News' 60 Minutes, that "she witnessed and overheard" one of Thurman's intercepted phone calls.

Like Thomas Drake, the senior NSA official prosecuted by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act, for information he provided The Baltimore Sun over widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the agency's failed Trailblazer program, Newsham had testified before Congress and filed a lawsuit against Lockheed over charges of sexual harassment, "corruption and mis-spending on other US government 'black' projects."

A year earlier, in a 1999 on the record interview with the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, Newsham spoke to journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, telling them of her "constant fear" that "certain elements" within the US secret state would "try to silence her"; a point not lost on Edward Snowden today.

"As a result," the newspaper reported, "she sleeps with a loaded pistol under her mattress, and her best friend is Mr. Gunther--a 120-pound German shepherd that was trained to be a guard and attack dog by a good friend in the Nevada State Police."

"To me," the whistleblower said, "there are only two issues at stake here: right or wrong. And the longer I worked on the clandestine surveillance projects, the more I could see that they were not only illegal, but also unconstitutional."

"Even then," between 1974 and 1984 when she worked on ECHELON, it "was very big and sophisticated."

"As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating," Newsham averred. "Since our satellites could in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be today."

When queried about "which part of the system is named Echelon," Newsham told the reporters: "The computer network itself. The software programs are known as SILKWORTH and SIRE, and one of the most important surveillance satellites is named VORTEX. It intercepts things like phone conversations."

Despite evidence presented in her congressional testimony about these illegal operations, "no substantive investigation took place, and no report was made to Congress," Campbell later wrote.

"Since then," the British journalist averred, "investigators have subpoenaed other witnesses and asked them to provide the complete plans and manuals of the ECHELON system and related projects. The plans and blueprints are said to show that targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start." (emphasis added)

This would explain why members of Congress, the federal Judiciary and the Executive Branch itself, as Tice alleges, tread lightly when it comes to crossing NSA. However, as information continues to emerge about these privacy-killing programs it should also be clear that the agency's prime targets are not "terrorists," judges or politicians, but the American people themselves.

In fact, as Snowden stated in a powerful message published by WikiLeaks: "In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised--and it should be."

How did we get here? Is there a direct line from Cold War-era programs which targeted the Soviet Union and their allies, and which now, in the age of capitalist globalization, the epoch of planet-wide theft and plunder, now targets the entire world's population?

ECHELON's Roots: The UKUSA Agreement

Lost in the historical mists surrounding the origins of the Cold War, the close collaboration amongst Britain and the United States as they waged war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, by war's end had morphed into a permanent intelligence-military alliance which predated the founding of NATO. With the defeat of the Axis powers, a new global division of labor was in the offing led by the undisputed superpower which emerged from the conflagration, the United States.

Self-appointed administrator over Europe's old colonial holdings across Africa, Asia and the Middle East (the US already viewed Latin America as its private export dumping ground and source for raw materials), the US used its unparalleled position to benefit the giant multinational American firms grown larger and more profitable than ever as a result of wartime economic mobilization managed by the state.

By 1946, the permanent war economy which later came to be known as the Military-Industrial Complex, a semi-command economy directed by corporate executives, based on military, but also on emerging high-tech industries bolstered by taxpayer-based government investments, was already firmly entrenched and formed the political-economic base on which the so-called "American Century" was constructed.

While resource extraction and export market domination remained the primary goal of successive US administrations (best summarized by the slogan, "the business of government is business"), advances in technology in general and telecommunications in particular, meant that the system's overlords required an intelligence apparatus that was always "on" as it "captured" the flood of electronic signals coursing across the planet.

The secret British and US agencies responsible for cracking German, Japanese and Russian codes during the war found themselves in a quandary. Should they declare victory and go home or train their sights on the new (old) adversary--their former ally, the Soviet Union--but also on home grown and indigenous communist and socialist movements more generally?

In opting for the latter, the UK-US wartime partnership evolved into a broad agreement to share signals and communications intelligence (SIGINT and COMINT), a set-up which persists today.

In 1946, Britain and the United States signed the United Kingdom-United States of America Agreement (UKUSA), a multilateral treaty to share signals intelligence amongst the two nations and Britain's Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Known as the "Five Eyes" agreement, the treaty was such a closely-guarded secret that Australia's Prime Minister was kept in the dark until 1973!

In 2010, the British National Archives released previously classified Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) files that provide an important historical overview of the agreement. Also in 2010, the National Security Agency followed suit and published formerly classified files from their archives. Accompanying NSA's release was a 1955 amended version of the treaty.

It's secretive nature is clearly spelled out: "It will be contrary to this Agreement to reveal its existence to any third party unless otherwise agreed by the two parties."

In 2005, 2009 and 2013, The National Security Archive published a series of previously classified documents obtained from NSA under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed agency thinking on a range of subjects, from global surveillance to cyberwar.

What we have learned from these sources and reporting by Duncan Campbell and Nicky Hager, are that the five agencies feeding the surveillance behemoth, America's NSA, Britain's GCHQ, Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), are subdivided into first and second tier partners, with the US, as befitting a hyperpower, forming the "1st party" and the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand forming "2nd party" partners.

Under terms of UKUSA, intelligence "products" are defined as "01. Collection of traffic. 02. Acquisition of communications documents and equipment. 03. Traffic analysis. 04. Cryptanalysis. 05. Decryption and translation. 06. Acquisition of information regarding communications organizations, procedures, practices and equipment."

"Such exchange," NSA informed us, "will be unrestricted on all work undertaken except when specifically excluded from the agreement at the request of either party and with the agreement of the other."

"It is the intention of each party," we're told, "to limit such exceptions to the absolute minimum and to exercise no restrictions other than those reported and mutually agreed upon."

This certainly leaves wide latitude for mischief as we learned with the Snowden disclosures.

Amid serious charges that "Five Eyes" were illegally seizing industrial and trade secrets from "3rd party" European partners such as France and Germany, detailed in the European Parliament's 2001 ECHELON report, it should be clear by now that since its launch in 1968 when satellite communications became a practical reality, ECHELON has evolved into a global surveillance complex under US control.

The Global Surveillance System Today

The echoes of those earlier secret programs reverberate in today's headlines.

Last month, The Guardian reported that the "collection of traffic" cited in UKUSA has been expanded to GCHQ's "ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months."

Then on July 6, The Washington Post disclosed that NSA has tapped directly into those fiber optic cables, as AT&T; whistleblower Mark Klein described to Wired Magazine in 2006, and now scoops-up petabyte scale communications flowing through the US internet backbone. The agency was able to accomplish this due to the existence of "an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances."

"Among their jobs documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially."

Following up on July 10, the Post published a new PRISM slide from the 41-slide deck provided to the paper by Edward Snowden.

The slide revealed that "two types of collection" now occur. One is the PRISM program that collects information from technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. The second source is "a separate category labeled 'Upstream,' described as accessing 'communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past'."

Recently, Der Spiegel, reported that NSA averred the agency "does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do." This is an outright falsehood exposed by former Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE) officer Mike Frost.

In a 1997 CovertAction Quarterly exposé, Frost recounted how "CSE operated alone or joined with NSA or GCHQ to: intercept communications in other countries from the confines of Canadian embassies around the world with the knowledge of the ambassador; aid politicians, political parties, or factions in an allied country to gain partisan advantage; spy on its allies; spy on its own citizens; and perform 'favors' that helped its allies evade domestic laws against spying."

"Throughout it all," Frost insisted, "I was trained and controlled by US intelligence which told us what to do and how to do it."

Everyone else, Der Spiegel reports, is fair game. "For all other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not apply. 'We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners,' the NSA boasts in an internal presentation."

It should also be clear that targeting isn't strictly limited to the governments and economic institutions of "3rd party foreign partners," but extends to the private communications of their citizens. Der Spiegel, citing documents supplied by Snowden, reported that the agency "gathered metadata from some 15 million telephone conversations and 10 million Internet datasets." The newsmagazine noted that "the Americans are collecting from up to half a billion communications a month in Germany," describing the surveillance as "a complete structural acquisition of data."

Despite hypocritical protests by European governments, on the contrary, Snowden disclosed that those "3rd party" partners are joined at the hip with their "Five Eyes" cousins.

In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Snowden was asked if "German authorities or German politicians [are] involved in the NSA surveillance system?"

"Yes, of course. We're in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker's girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country--and they hand them over to us. They don't ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they're violating global privacy."

Disclosing new information on how UKUSA functions today, Snowden told the German newsmagazine: "In some cases, the so-called Five Eye Partners go beyond what NSA itself does. For instance, the UK's General [sic] Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has a system called TEMPORA."

"TEMPORA," the whistleblower averred, "is the signals intelligence community's first 'full-take' Internet buffer that doesn't care about content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act. It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit."

"Right now," Snowden said, "the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that's being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that's not metadata. 'Full-take' means it doesn't miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit's capacity. If you send a single ICMP packet and it routes through the UK, we get it. If you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter's medical records get processed at a London call center . . . well, you get the idea."

We do; and thanks to Edward Snowden we now know that everyone is a target.

Greek Journalist Acquitted for Blowing Tax Fraud Whistle. Widespread Corruption Linked to Private HSBC Accounts

Earlier this month, Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was acquitted by an Athens court of charges that he breached data privacy laws with the publication of a list of tax cheats and money launderers.

Vaxevanis, who publishes the investigative news magazine Hot Doc, faced two years in prison and a €30,000 ($38,000) fine over that publication's outing of 2,000 Greeks who hold secret banks accounts at HSBC's private banking arm in Switzerland.

Known as the "Lagarde List," data on high-profile offenders had been transferred to Greek authorities by Christine Lagarde, the former French Finance Minister and current head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where it languished for two years.

While the Greek people are forced into abject poverty under an "austerity" regime designed to enrich their corporate masters, a criminal class of political overseers backed by brutal police and rampaging neo-Nazis, billions of euros were shielded as successive "left" and "right" governments failed to act.

Insider Leaks

The Vaxevanis arrest was unique in one respect: unlike official probes into drug money laundering, tax fraud and terrorist financing by major banks, explosive allegations of widespread financial corruption was kick-started by a journalist's investigative digging despite government complicity and cover-up.

And as with other major disclosures which have come to light in the last decade--from the Iraq-Niger uranium fraud, the Downing Street Memo or spying on UN officials by Western intelligence services--Hot Doc's revelations began with insider leaks from a whistleblower.

The source of Madame Lagarde's List was Hervé Falciani, a computer services specialist with HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) N.A., who supervised data migration on individual accounts.

Increasingly troubled by the bank's dubious practices, for two years beginning in 2006, he mirrored account information onto his laptop.

In 2008, an international arrest warrant was issued by Swiss authorities; however, they committed a serious error. Falciani, a dual French-Italian citizen whom neither country would extradite, was picked up in Nice. When French prosecutors, acting on behalf of Swiss police, searched his home and seized his laptop, they discovered files on 130,000 alleged tax evaders.

Rather then arresting Falciani, they opened an investigation into the alleged tax evaders. When French authorities let it slip to the media that had files on some 3,000 Swiss HSBC account holders and that they would prosecute, they recuperated some €1.2 billion ($1.5bn) in unpaid taxes from profligate citizens.

In the interim, a diplomatic row ensued; Switzerland accused France of using stolen data and the French countered, threatening to have Switzerland added to the OECD Tax Haven Black List. Over Swiss objections, then Finance Minister Lagarde shared the data with tax officials in cooperating countries.

Arrested in Barcelona on July 1, Swiss authorities are demanding Falciani's extradition to Switzerland where he faces charges of data theft and violation of bank secrecy laws.

If convicted, Falciani faces a three-year prison term and a fine that could top €200,000 ($253,000).

Revelations contained in those leaked files touched off major probes across Europe. In Italy, Italian Treasury officials recovered some €570 million ($730m) from HSBC account holders.

In Spain, the high-profile investigation into the finances of the banking clan led by Emilio Botín, the wealthy Chairman of the Santander banking dynasty caused a sensation.

And why wouldn't it? Like Greece, Spain's working class is confronted by demands from international lenders to impose draconian austerity measures, including some €37 billion ($46.9bn) in budget cuts in the face of a severe recession and record-high unemployment.

Last spring, El País reported that "Botín, his daughter Ana Patricia Botín (the head of Santander's British banking unit), his brother Jaime and five of his brother's children were among the names of 659 Spanish residents who hold secret Swiss accounts at HSBC Private Bank, with a combined value of some six billion euros."

Confronted by public outrage and threats of criminal prosecution by Spanish authorities over allegations of tax fraud, the Botín clan caved-in and ponied-up €200 million ($253m).

In a report last summer on Switzerland's extradition request, El País reported, "now that Falciani is being held in a Spanish jail, the High Court is faced with a legal problem, according to judicial sources."

Why might that be the case?

"The information coming from Falciani's database has already been used to prosecute Spaniards and no one in Spain has presented a complaint against the former HSBC computer analyst for 'stealing' private bank records."

The most serious hurdle which Swiss authorities must overcome are that allegations against Falciani are not considered criminal offenses in Spain.

"In fact," El País noted, "the Law for the Prevention of Money Laundering states that banks have the obligation to report any illicit activities. This might not apply to Falciani because he was only an employee, but the results from the hundreds of investigations opened in Spain because of his list prove that he complied with the law."

The same cannot be said for HSBC, Santander or other financial giants considered "too big to fail, or jail."

After his July arrest, The Daily Telegraph reported Falciani as saying that "he took the customer details in order to expose tax evasion among HSBC's customers," considering it his "civic duty."

"If you discover that...offshore structures have no other aim than to avoid taxation and that the sole legitimacy of these structures is that purpose," he asked, "what would you do?"

Why you expose the bastards, of course!

This wouldn't be the first time the hammer of "justice" came crashing down on a financial insider who exposed gross financial chicanery, while state officials allowed perpetrators to walk.

Moves against Falciani by the Swiss government are reminiscent of the U.S. Justice Department's 2008 prosecution of UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld.

A former UBS banker in Switzerland, Birkenfeld blew the lid off a massive scheme by the bank to illegally hide 19,000 U.S. client accounts squirreled away in dodgy offshore tax havens for purposes of money laundering and tax fraud.

The IRS has calculated that the total cost in lost revenue stolen from the American people by wealthy elites may be in excess of $100 billion annually.

This however, pales in comparison to the so-called "tax gap"--the gap between taxes owed and collected. Former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti told PBS Frontline nearly a decade ago that the "biggest single source" of the problem are abusive offshore tax shelters which account for an estimated $250 to $300 billion in uncollected revenues; the equivalent of a 15 percent surtax on everyone else.

A U.S. Senate panel at the time, recalling their recent investigation of HSBC, accused UBS and Liechtenstein's LGT Group of marketing tax fraud strategies to rich Americans. In 2009, UBS agreed to pay $780 million in fines and the Treasury Department recovered some $20 billion in unpaid taxes. However, not a single UBS official was criminally prosecuted, or even charged, the result of a sweetheart "deferred prosecution agreement" negotiated with the Justice Department.

Such deals result in little more than a slap on the wrist for well-connected offenders and are considered to be a small cost of doing business.

Readers will recall that the 2010 deferred prosecution agreement cobbled together between the Justice Department and Wachovia Bank led to a microscopic $160 million fine despite strong evidence that the bank, now owned by Wells Fargo, as Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed, had laundered upwards of $378 billion for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.

As for Birkenfeld? Despite his testimony and cooperation with the federal government in exposing massive fraud by UBS, he was tried and sentenced to 40 months in prison. He pled guilty in 2008 for helping Florida real estate billionaire Igor Olenicoff stash more than $350 million offshore according to Olenicoff's Forbes profile.

However, federal prosecutors lied to the judge when they claimed during his sentencing hearing that he had not exposed Olenicoff's fraud; in fact, he had, on multiple occasions, beginning with his 2007 testimony before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Set to be released this month, Birkenfeld, whom the New York Daily News said deserved "a statue on Wall Street," was eventually paid a $104 million award by the IRS in September for acting as a corporate whistleblower.

Another Day, Another Filthy HSBC Scandal

When news of the Falciani leak went public, Alexandre Zeller, the chief executive of HSBC's Swiss subsidiary said at the time, "We deeply regret this situation and unreservedly apologize to our clients for this threat to their privacy."

Press reports failed to mention whether HSBC apologized to European taxpayers for the role they played in continent-wide tax fraud.

As Antifascist Calling has previously reported (here, here and here), the multinational banking giant stands accused by U.S. Senate investigators of smoothing the way for terrorist financiers and money laundering drug cartels.

Vaxevanis's revelations over the bank's secret Swiss accounts comes at a time when HSBC is "actively engaged" in settlement talks with federal prosecutors. Fines for serious breaches of U.S. banking laws could now reach upwards of $1.5 billion (£940m), The Guardian reported.

According to The New York Times, "prosecutors are considering criminal charges related to money laundering, according to several law enforcement officials with knowledge of the matter. It would be the first such case stemming from the broad investigation."

Despite these facts, and despite claims by current CEO Stuart Gulliver that HSBC's criminal practices were "regrettable" and that the bank "failed to spot and deal with unacceptable behavior," British tax authorities "obtained details of every British client of HSBC in Jersey after a whistleblower secretly provided a detailed list of names, addresses and account balances earlier this week," The Daily Telegraph disclosed.

Among those receiving the red carpet treatment at HSBC's Jersey branch were drug dealer Daniel Bayes, currently on the lam in Venezuela, "Michael Lee, who was convicted of possessing more than 300 weapons at his house in Devon; three bankers facing major fraud allegations and a man once dubbed London's 'number two computer crook'."

According to the Telegraph, the list "identifies 4,388 people holding £699 million in offshore current accounts and they are also likely to have billions of pounds more in investment schemes. Several celebrities and other well-known figures are understood to be identified in the client data."

Unsurprisingly, HSBC's Jersey client list is "heavily dominated by senior figures in the City. Dozens of bankers are understood to have deposited six-figure sums offshore with some institutions said to have 'clusters' of employees taking advantage of the accounts."

"One investment manager has more than £6 million in his account," the Telegraph noted, "while the average amount held is £337,000. Under Britain's non-domicile rules, those with foreign roots only have to pay tax on money entering Britain--provided it is earned abroad. However, more seriously for HSBC, dozens of people with no obvious legal source of substantial income are holding large sums in Jersey."

In other words, like their North American banking affiliate, HBUS, accused of laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels, HSBC Jersey may be a conduit for European drug syndicates seeking a safe harbor for illicit wealth.

Richard Murphy, a prominent British tax accountant and campaigner against offshore tax havens like Jersey told The Daily Mail the leaked HSBC accounts could be the "tip of the iceberg."

Murphy added: "This bank was clearly out of control. It confirms what we've begun to realise, that this is a bank that was, during the period that the Reverend Lord Stephen Green was in charge, the world's biggest money-launderer."

It now appears from these latest revelations this continues to be the case.

Contradicting claims made in sworn testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last summer that the bank would "apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong," they were singing another tune last week when the Telegraph story broke.

A bank spokesperson averred: "HSBC has a duty of confidentiality and cannot comment on clients even to confirm or deny they are clients. We have good relationships with our regulators and co-operate with investigations when required to do so."

Translation: "if you catch us in the act we'll 'fess up, otherwise mum's the word chumps!"

More recently, The Daily Mail reported that "hundreds of tax dodgers" on the Lagarde List "will escape prosecution and will be allowed to keep their identities hidden."

Despite the fact that some "6,000 British names linked to HSBC bank accounts in Geneva were handed to the tax authorities in 2010 by Mrs Lagarde," HM Revenue and Custom's officials "have decided to offer them immunity in exchange for payment of a penalty and their tax bills."

While "critics have accused tax officials of offering immunity deals to almost everyone on the HSBC list, whether they owe a few pounds or billions," HMRC handed tax fraudsters a cozy arrangement which protected their anonymity and simultaneously shielded serious offenders from prosecution, the Mail disclosed.

Trifling details such as these shouldn't surprise anyone. As the Tax Justice Network pointed out, British tax officials "had sold off 650 of their offices to a company called Mapeley Steps Ltd., a company owned in Bermuda, and leased them back for 20 years."

Mapeley is now owned by the U.S. private equity firm, Fortress, "headquartered in the tax haven of Guernsey. Now private equity firms make a lot of money for their owners--and note carefully that does not mean they make a lot of money for their foolish investors."

It turns out the "company has now revealed a £103m loss and the directors admit that there are material uncertainties as to the group as a going concern."

Ironically enough, guess who might own Mapeley if it goes under? You guessed right if you said: "Britain's tax offices will become the property of its bankers."

Talk about "state capture"!

But it gets worse. As Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a former financial crimes specialist with London's Metropolitan Police observed on his web site Friday, Britain's Financial Service Authority (FSA) are utterly clueless when it comes to cracking down on illegal drug money laundering by British banks.

"The importance of this question is that it goes right to the heart of the whole responsibility of the FSA for regulating one major element of the UK financial market," Bosworth-Davies wrote, "the element of money laundering. Yet the answers appear to be frankly unsatisfactory, complacent, almost evasive, although the first answer from Lord Turner, boss of the UK's financial regulatory agency, was right on the money when he said: 'I would have to say that I do not know the answer to that...'"

Commenting on hearings in the House of Commons by its Home Affairs Committee into the illegal proceeds of the narcotics trade washed through British banks, the former Met detective wrote that "FSA lost the plot a long time ago."

"As a result, the industry they sit above generally despises them, and ignores them most of the time. How else can you interpret the level of financial criminality that goes repeatedly unpunished, the level of organised criminality which is endemic within the British banking sector, and the criminogenic culture which permeates the sector."

In the face of pervasive corruption and official negligence which crosses the line into outright complicity, Bosworth-Davies wonders: "Can we expect prosecutions now to be brought against HSBC as a result of the Jersey revelations today, which are clearly so blatant and so scandalous as to be nothing more than a direct challenge to the authority of the law. Might be ok if we had a prosecuting authority willing to take responsibility to bring a case, but I wouldn't hold your breath!"

"Austerity" Regimes: Fronts for Global Crime

The problem of money laundering, tax fraud and the illegal offshoring of wealth isn't solely an issue for Britain, Greece or for that matter, the United States: it is a global phenomenon. One which clearly demonstrates, as economic analyst Michel Chossudovsky, the director of the Center for Research on Globalization has long observed, represents the "criminalization of the state," that is, the end stage of a capitalist system in terminal crisis.

On the one hand, the managed drug trade overseen by wealthy banking elites, and exploited as a tool by Western intelligence services, and on the other, moves to impose "fiscal austerity" on a planetary scale would seem to be unrelated phenomenon. On the contrary, they represent two sides of the same coin, the upward transfer of wealth by well-connected insiders seeking geopolitical advantage for those in on the game.

Indeed, the same crooked bankers now demanding that supposedly "irresponsible" governments get their "fiscal houses in order" are the very miscreants who thrive on the chaos arising from laundered drug money and financial speculation.

Although Hot Doc's publication of secret HSBC accounts embarrassed the Greek government and their European paymasters, moves to reduce Greek workers to abject poverty continue apace.

With the Greek government knuckling under to "austerity" measures demanded by the European Central Bank (ECB), European Union (EU) and the IMF, a new €31.5bn ($39.9bn) "bailout"--designed to indemnify hyena bankers, not struggling Greeks, from losses--will impose ever-harsher conditions on the working class.

Lining the pockets of institutional lenders who drove the crisis in the first place, let's call the raft of complex cross-currency "swaps," dodgy derivatives and "rescue packages" what they are: a filthy grift which Greeks are forced to pay with their lives.

The "Troika's" latest demands include the imposition of a six-day work week, the continued sell-off of public assets to vampire investors at fire sale prices and the virtual destruction of the social safety net.

Quite naturally, such measures are viewed as a splendid means to bailout financial speculators in Berlin, Wall St. and the City of London responsible for looting the Greek economy. And if millions of people are consigned to the scrap heap? Well, tough luck suckers!

Reuters reported that the Greek government "presented a new austerity package to parliament on Monday as a week of strikes and protests kicked off over proposals that lawmakers must approve if the country is to secure more aid and stave off bankruptcy."

Key features lusted after by the Euro bosses include a "package of measures making it easier to hire and fire workers and a series of cost cuts and tax hikes that should amount to 13.5 billion euros ($17 billion) by 2016."

Greece's powerful unions launched a 48-hour general strike against the government. Tens of thousands of Greek workers took to the streets, opposing a regime that engineered the virtual collapse of living standards. Since the eruption of the so-called European "debt crisis" three years ago, disposable income has fallen by a staggering 35 percent for the average Greek worker.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in September, "The social situation of the majority of Greeks is already catastrophic. While pensions and wages have fallen by up to 60 percent, mass consumption taxes have been hiked up and millions of jobs cut. In the first three months of this year wages fell by 11.5 percent compared to the previous year."

"The official unemployment rate," reporter Christoph Dreier averred, "stands at 24.4 percent and at 55 percent among young people. Nearly sixty percent of the unemployed receive no state support at all. According to the unions, the real level of unemployment is much higher."

Last week, the World Socialist Web Site reported that austerity measures imposed by the Greek government will include massive "cuts to the health care system. Already decided are savings in health care totaling €2 billion. Part of this sum is to be achieved by laying off 10 percent of doctors and other staff in public hospitals."

Cuts in the budget have already seriously impacted the delivery of vital health care services to Greek citizens.

According to Dreier, doctors and pharmacists "are owed €230 million by the country's biggest health insurance company, EOPYY. As a result," as in cash-strapped Third World countries, "patients must pay in advance at pharmacies and also for some doctors' services and submit the bills later to their health insurer. Such upfront payments are often impossible for the old, the poor and the chronically ill, meaning they have to do without medicines and treatment."

"A growing number of children," the leftist critics noted, "are contracting infectious diseases such as diphtheria and meningitis because their parents cannot afford the necessary vaccines. New HIV infections also increased by over 50 percent in 2011 alone."

In the context of endemic corruption and massive fraud among wealthy elites, it is no surprise that Lagarde's list was passed to Greek officials--and ignored--more than two years ago.

According to multiple press reports, the list was buried by successive governments. Among those charged with the cover-up were officials from the right-wing New Democracy party led by current Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and former Prime Minister George Papandreou's fake "socialist" PASOK organization.

"In the two years since it had been handed to Greek authorities by the IMF's chief Christine Lagarde," The Guardian reported, "the infamous tally of suspected tax evaders had caught the popular imagination ... the failure of successive governments to act on the list and crack down on tax evaders had raised suspicions that corrupt vested interests ran to the top of society."

Greece, Vaxevanis wrote in The Guardian, is an "exclusive club of powerful people" which "engages in illegal practices, then pushes through necessary laws to legalise these practices, granting itself an amnesty, and in the end, there are no media to uncover what really happened."

"The 'Lagarde' case in Greece is merely an extreme expression of this situation," Vaxevanis averred.

"In 2010, Lagarde handed to the then minister of finance, George Papaconstantinou, a list of Greeks who held bank accounts abroad. Some of this was 'black money'--money that may not have been taxed or needed to be laundered."

"In a convoluted train of events," Vaxevanis noted, "Papaconstantinou admitted to losing the original data, but was able to pass another copy to his successor Evangelos Venizelos, who eventually admitted to having held it but has failed to produce it so far. The list has still never been properly investigated."

"It is quite clear the political system did everything not to publish this list" he said.

"If you look at the names, or the offshore companies linked to certain individuals, you see that these are all friends of those in power," he told the Guardian during a recess in his recent trial.

"We live in a country where, on the one hand, tax evasion is rampant and, on the other, people are eating out of rubbish trucks because of salary cuts, because they can't make ends meet."

"They can no longer play hide and seek," Vaxevanis told The Daily Telegraph, "and they cannot demand the little old lady in a village to make more painful sacrifices and have her pension cut when a small group of oligarchs continues to grow wealthy."

In a Reuters interview the journalist said that "the main problem in Greece is the people who govern it. It is a closed group, an elite, one part of which is composed of people from all the parties and the second connected directly or indirectly to business people."

Sound familiar? It should. And if you think "austerity" is a game that only the Europeans are playing, better think again!

With talk of a "grand bargain" in Washington over an alleged "fiscal cliff," Hope and Change™ grifter Barack Obama, feckless Democrats and their Republican brethren are planning to implement a program that will slash the federal budget deficit through massive cuts in education, health care and social spending while leaving the Pentagon's bloated budget virtually untouched.

With "comprehensive tax reform" in the offing, the sole beneficiaries will be giant corporations and the rich who will continue to launder trillions of dollars in "non-taxable" wealth offshore.