Occupy Corporatism
by Susanne Posel
Edward Snowden, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, has come forth with information about how the US government has been bugging offices of millions of residents in the European Union (EU), emails and phone calls.
In light of this revelation, the EU has threatened to delay accord of agreements during trade-talks.
Sharing information with the US may come to a halt as the EU is considering how Snowden’s leaks are causing damage to secret programs and private deals that were never meant to be revealed to the public.
FoxNews postulated if the EU was spying on Americans as the US is spying on EU citizens; however the article was scrubbed from the internet.
Other countries upset about being under surveillance are:
• Sweden
• The Netherlands
• Poland
• Germany
• France
• United Kingdom
Viviane Reding, commissioner for the European Justice division of the EU said: “We cannot negotiate over a big trans-Atlantic market if there is the slightest doubt that our partners are carrying out spying activities on the offices of our negotiators. The American authorities should eliminate such doubt swiftly.”
Cecilia Malmstrom, commissioner of the home affairs department at the EU, wrote a letter to US officials last week which described “European concerns over implementation of the two agreements, both struck in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and regarded by Washington as important tools in the fight against terrorism.”
Maelstrom explained: “Should we fail to demonstrate the benefits of (the agreements) for our citizens and the fact that they have been implemented in full compliance with the law, their credibility will be seriously affected and in such a case I will be obliged to reconsider (whether) the conditions for their implementation are still met.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken the stance that if the US is going to spy on them, this may be an opportunity to push free trade in the global markets at a recent meeting of the Christian Democratic Union.
Merkel said : “Bugging is not what friends do. The Cold War is over. I’m glad talks between the European Union and the United States are starting in parallel to the free-trade negotiations.”
She went on to say: “The United States are our partners, they are a democratic country. Their laws may be slightly different but a free-trade zone with these partners has been on the agenda for decades,” she said. “We must press ahead with this in a determined way, without sweeping the other issue under the carpet.”
Data mining between governments is facilitated by the Terrorist Finance Program (TFTP) that takes digital information on European citizen’s financial transactions has this data sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
TFTP is a US governmental program that accesses the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) that was created in 2006 by the Bush administration so that a standard could be asserted for financial transactions worldwide.
The SWIFT program was created in secrecy in order to database financial information for the sake of catching al-Qaeda and operatives such as Hambali in 2003 through money laundering deals.
SWIFT is a part of the US Treasury.
Another name for the TFTP is the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP*) which served as the main center of the global war on terrorism .
The classified tracking program caused violations of EU and US privacy laws because surveillance agencies were not obtaining search warrants to gain access to the information.
Recently, Morningstar, an investment – research firm, revealed through their Document Research service (DRS), that more than 2,300 customers had their financial information compromised in 2012 during a security breach.
Names, passwords, addresses and email addresses were syphoned out.
DRS explained that they have “encouraged clients whose credit cards may have been compromised to monitor their credit reports and credit-card accounts.”
ConspiracyAnalyst.org 