NSA is Spying on MSF

Here’s a story that’s, unfortunately, not a surprise:

KINNE: And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military … with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists…

As a foreign-domiciled American, I have suspected for a long time that I’m in the surveillance net. But it is something else entirely to read the words from the whistleblower herself, naming my organization.

There’s some great points in that article. If you can bear it, take time to read it all. But above all don’t miss these points:

• Privacy International rated the United States as a “society of endemic surveillance”.
• The real culprits are the senators who have utterly failed in their jobs to provide oversight, so much so that really the only conclusion one can draw is that they are complicit in the scheme.
• The link to the original reporting from Democracy Now with the revelations about spying on NGOs.

This is part of the death throes of a failing empire and democracy. Who knew it would ever get so ugly?