Thobile Jiwulane
The United States, together with its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence community, are carrying out large-scale activities to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states, including its allies using modern information technologies.
While some of these countries, hence their meek response, see it as beneficial at the same time, it was viewed as a sinister move likely to expose the allies or any other country for that matter to danger. They believe that some opportunistic sinister and uninvited forces could join the fray to put their security at risk, while the US activities themselves may not be innocent friendly move.
For several years, the US administration has been supplying its allies, primarily in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Great Britain, Canada and New Zealand), with information and communication equipment that poses a danger to them due to the high probability of the presence of software and hardware backdoors and malware for unauthorized access to information.
Against this background, cryptography experts Matthew Green and Bruce Schneier stated that the introduction of such “backdoors” for intelligence agencies under the pretext of combating crime “is tantamount to imposing a ban on security”. In their opinion, this significantly reduces the security of information systems and makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks by fraudsters and foreign intelligence agencies.
At the same time, American cybersecurity commentator Byron Tau points out that the US government has prepared a legislative framework that allows special services to monitor foreign citizens, including the military-political leadership of Washington’s allies. Thus, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (P18A) only officially allows the Pentagon, as well as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA, to monitor more than 250 thousand targets.
The author notes that the actual number of objects to be monitored may be many times higher. In addition, the law obliges American technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple to secretly transfer user data at the request of the White House.
The commentator believes that these circumstances determine the superiority of the White House over its opponents and partners in the field of digital technologies and allow the Americans to monitor any person, even if he is a citizen of a state allied with the United States.
At the same time, analysts of the American television channel CNN, Natasha Bertrand and Kylie Atwood note that the recent leak of a significant number of secret Pentagon documents has revealed a large-scale campaign by the White House to spy on US allies.
According to their report, Washington is spying on Seoul, Tel Aviv and Kiev, which are military and political partners of the Americans. At the same time, diplomatic missions of the countries that were subjected to spying expressed concern about this fact, but emphasized that they value the information received from the United States.
Experts believe that in this way the White House was given a signal that the consequences for interstate relations in the event of continued illegal activity will be minimal. This circumstance will only contribute to the scaling up of Washington’s spying activities, including against its allies.
This meek response by the US allies appears to be an acceptance that Washington could do as it pleases and that the affected countries would pretend as if nothing is happening so as to protect the alliance.
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