www.thesouthafrican.com
18 - 24 June 2013
Issue 519
UK SPIED ON SA AT G20 LONDON SUMMITS
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures include revelations that GCHQ spied on visiting delegations at economic summit on the instructions of HM Government by STAFF REPORTER
AS the G8 summit got underway in Northern Ireland yesterday, it was revealed that Britain’s intelligence agencies carried out an intensive spying operation on foreign politicians, especially those from South Africa, Russia and Turkey, who attended the two G20 meetings in London in 2009. According to reports by The Guardian, details of the surveillance are said to be contained in documents uncovered by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, responsible for a string of disclosures about American intelligence operations. The documents reveal that Britain’s signal spying body, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), spied on communications of visiting delegations on the instruction of the British government. GCHQ was said to have enabled a team of 45 analysts to be provided with live round-the-clock summaries of who was phoning whom during the proceedings. The leaked documents, classified ‘top secret’, show that G20 delegates had their computers monitored and phone calls intercepted by GCHQ, and were even persuaded to use specially prepared Internet cafes where an email interception programme and key logging software was used to provide the M16 and GCHQ with “sustained intelligence options against them” even after the April
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HONOURING THE PAST, CELEBRATING THE FUTURE: South Africans from all over London gathered on Saturday at the Orange Bull bar in Rotherhithe, London, to commemorate Youth Day. The event organised by South African Youth Development featured a braai, SA drinks and entertainment, with Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist Asanda Jezile a special guest.what is important is that his family must release him.
and September summits were over. One of the documents describes a sustained campaign to penetrate South African computers, and successfully gain access to the country’s foreign ministry network. They “investigated phone lines used by the High Commission in London” and “retrieved documents including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8 meetings”. As a ‘friendly ally’ and member of the G20 group, South Africa has observer status at G8 meetings. It is alleged that in December 2005, the GCHQ convened a meeting on a project to intensify spying on the South
African foreign ministry. It is clear that GCHQ was aiming to find out everything it could about the negotiating position of the government of then President Thabo Mbeki, “an independently minded swing vote on issues of global economics and finance.” The “computer networks exploitation” team, responsible for hacking into foreign computer networks, had acquired passwords from a standing operation whose task it was to wheedle them out of target governments and agencies. One line of approach was to dig up the old phone numbers and continued on page 2
INSIDE:
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