Wikileaks has shaken the National Security Agency with its latest disclosure. The Julian Assange-founded enterprise said on Tuesday that the NSA had "bugged a private climate change strategy meeting between U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin; singled out the Chief of Staff of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception; singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Johann Human, and targeted his Swiss phone for long term interception; stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu; and intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berluscon, where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to 'pop like a cork.'"
"Today we showed that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's private meetings over how to save the planet from climate change were bugged by a country intent on protecting its largest oil companies," said Assange, according to the Eurasia Review. "We previously published Hillary Clinton's orders that U.S. diplomats were to steal the Secretary General's DNA. The U.S. government has signed agreements with the U.N. that it will not engage in such conduct against the U.N. - let alone its Secretary General. It will be interesting to see the U.N.'s reaction, because if the Secretary General can be targeted without consequence, then everyone from world leader to street sweeper is at risk,"
The claim was supported by The Guardian, which is in possession of a NSA memo that shows that such surveillance was not isolated.
According to the memo, titled "Customers Can Help SID Obtain Targetable Phone Numbers," dated October 2006 and issued to staff in the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), "a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders ... Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked. This success leads S2 [signals intelligence] to wonder if there are NSA liaisons whose supported customers may be willing to share their 'Rolodexes' or phone lists with NSA as potential sources of intelligence. S2 welcomes such information!" reports The Guardian.
Wikileaks has to date released approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables along with about 500,000 secret military files.
