Epic Fail Ethics Glenn Greenwald NSA Security The Media

Misreported NSA Witch Hunt Threatens American Business. Again.

The Washington Post reported in early October that the U.S. cloud computing industry has already lost between 21 to 35 billion dollars because of security leaks.

The Associated Press reported this week that the latest leak, which was grossly misreported by Le Monde and Glenn Greenwald, has put a free-trade agreement worth $138 billion at risk.

Revelations of the extent of U.S. spying on its European allies is also threatening to undermine one of President Barack Obama’s top trans-Atlantic goals: a sweeping free-trade agreement that would add an estimated $138 billion (100 billion euros) a year to each economy’s gross domestic product.

Top EU officials say the trust needed for the negotiations has been shattered.

The Associated Press reports that EU officials are considering suspending a “Safe Harbor” agreement that allows American companies to process commercial and personal data inside America for European customers.

If the current Safe Harbor agreement is terminated, the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo would immediately take a hit to their pocket book.

And this is all for naught. The revelation that the NSA was spying on French and Spanish citizens with abandon was a fabrication. French and Spanish intelligence agencies were collecting data on foreign targets and then sharing it with the NSA.

The French newspaper Le Monde has admitted that they got it wrong. Or rather they were duped.

(rough translation via Google)

According to our information, collected from a senior official of the intelligence community in France, the direction of the French foreign service, the DGSE, has, in fact, established in from late 2011 and early 2012, a Memorandum of data exchange with the United States.

France has a strategic position for transportation of electronic data. The submarine cables by which most data from transit Africa and Afghanistan landed at Marseilles and Penmarc in Britain . These strategic areas are within the reach of the French DGSE, which intercepts and stores much of what flows between France and abroad.