Two Overlooked Aspects Of Those Leaks About NSA Spying On French Presidents

from the reasons-to-be-cheerful dept

There's been quite a lot of excitement in the press about the latest leaks that the NSA has been spying on not just one French President, but (at least) three of them. As Mike pointed out, this isn't such a big deal, because it is precisely the kind of thing that you would expect the NSA to do -- as opposed to spying on the entire US public, which isn't. There is, though, an aspect that most people have overlooked: the fact that these NSA leaks don't appear to originate from Snowden's stash.

Of course, Mr Crypto himself, Bruce Schneier, did spot it, and pointed out it could be one of his "other" US intelligence community leakers, listed a couple of months ago, or even a completely new one. As that post shows, there are now a few people around that are leaking secret documents, and that's a pretty significant trend, since you might expect enhanced security measures taken in the wake of Snowden's leaks would have discouraged or caught anyone who attempted to follow suit.

That's not the only thing that's interesting about the French documents. As Fabio Chiusi points out in a blog post (original in Italian), they are the latest in a recent series of very rich leaks that include the Sony archives; the Saudi cables; the TPP transparency chapter; and -- not mentioned by Chiusi -- 17 chapters from TISA.

What all those collections have in common is the fact that they came from WikiLeaks. As Chiusi rightly emphasizes, after a period when WikiLeaks seemed to have lost its ability to release important material -- and thus its relevance -- the organization is beginning to hit its stride again. Coupled with the fact that there are half-a-dozen or so people who are leaking intelligence materials, that development offers hope that things are really beginning to look up on the transparency front.

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Filed Under: ed snowden, leakers, leaks, nsa, other leakers, surveillance
Companies: wikileaks