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Home Front: Politix
Clinton Used NSA for Economic Espionage
2005-12-19
During the 1990s, President Bill Clinton ordered the National Security Agency to use its super-secret Echelon surveillance program to monitor the personal telephone calls and private email of employees who worked for foreign companies in a bid to boost U.S. trade, NewsMax.com has learned.
Ah, yes, Echelon. I remember it well. The press, however, seems to have forgotten.

In 2000, former Clinton CIA director James Woolsey set off a firestorm of protest in Europe when he told the French newspaper Le Figaro that he was ordered by Clinton in 1993 to transform Echelon into a tool for gathering economic intelligence. "We have a triple and limited objective," the former intelligence chief told the French paper. "To look out for companies which are breaking US or UN sanctions; to trace 'dual' technologies, i.e., for civil and military use, and to track corruption in international business."

As NewsMax reported exclusively on Sunday, Echelon had been used by the Clinton administration to monitor millions of personal phone calls, private emails and even ATM transactions inside the U.S. - all without a court order. The massive invasion of privacy was justified by Echelon's defenders as an indispensable national security tool in the war on terror. But Clinton officials also utilized the program in ways that had nothing to do with national security - such as conducting economic espionage against foreign businesses.

In his comments to Le Figaro, Woolsey defended the program, declaring flatly: "Spying on Europe is justified." "I can tell you that five years ago, several European countries were giving substantial bribes to export business more easily. I hope that's no longer the case."

During hearings in 2000 on the surveillance flap, Woolsey told Congress that in 1993 alone, U.S. firms obtained contracts worth $6.5 billion with the help of timely intelligence information. "We collect intelligence on those efforts to bribe foreign companies and foreign governments into awarding an airport contract to a European firm rather than an American firm," Woolsey said in a 1994 speech, in quotes picked up by the New York Post.

Predictably, European officials were outraged by what they regarded as a massive abuse of the NSA's spying capacity. "[This is] an intolerable attack against individual liberties, competition, and the security of states," complained Martin Bangemann, then-European commissioner for industry. But the complaints went unheeded in Washington.

In 1996, President Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, which, according to the Christian Science Monitor, authorized intelligence gathering on foreign businesses. "The Clinton administration has attached especial importance to economic intelligence, setting up the National Economic Council [NEC] in parallel to the National Security Council," the Monitor reported in 1999. "The NEC routinely seeks information from the NSA and the CIA," the paper continued, citing anonymous officials. "And the NSA, as the biggest and wealthiest communications interception agency in the world, is best placed to trawl electronic communications and use what comes up for US commercial advantage."
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