Report: US spied on Nigerian security agencies also
New York Times reported on Saturday that the United States has been spying on the Nigeria's security agencies, especially the State Security Service, and probably the Presidency.
The newspaper report indicates that Edward Snowden cited Nigeria's SSS one of the security agencies across the globe that the N.S.A. had been listening in on.
Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, has gain international fame when he began to spew out documents about the internal operations of US spy agency.
According to him, briefs on the information gleaned from intercepting of telephone conversations and hacking of computers of the SSS, other security agencies in Nigeria and other countries are delivered to the office of the US President, Barrack Obama every morning.
The newspaper reports, 'By many accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence nuggets delivered to the White House early each morning in the President's Daily Brief - a measure of success for American spies. (One document boasts that listening in on Nigerian State Security had provided items for the briefing 'nearly two dozen' times.) In every international crisis, American policy makers look to the N.S.A. for inside information.
'That creates intense pressure not to miss anything. When that is combined with an ample budget and near-invisibility to the public, the result is aggressive surveillance of the kind that has sometimes gotten the agency in trouble with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a United States federal court that polices its programs for breaches of Americans' privacy.'
The release of documents that proved that the NSA had been eavesdropping on the communications of world leaders, including US allies, had caused diplomatic rows, with Germany and some other countries protesting.
Snowden also noted that the NSA had obtained thousands of classified documents, containing secrets of governments around the world, pointing to a possibility that it might have obtained secret documents of the Federal Government of Nigeria, or tapped President Goodluck Jonathan's phone conversations.
Snowden, who is on a temporary political asylum in Russia, disclosed classified details of several top-secret United States, Israeli, and British government mass surveillance programmes to the press.
He started releasing the NSA's documents in June and the documents he has released so far show that the US has been spying most countries in the world.
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.