[From today's Guardian, link below]:
Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.
A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton's name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.
It called for detailed biometric information `on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders' as well as intelligence on Ban's `management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat'. A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.
Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and `biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives'.
The secret `national human intelligence collection directive' was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.
The operation targetted at the UN appears to have involved all of Washington's main intelligence agencies. The CIA's clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI were included in the `reporting and collection needs' cable alongside the state department under the heading `collection requirements and tasking'.
The leak of the directive is likely to spark questions about the legality of the operation and about whether state department diplomats are expected to spy. The level of technical and personal detail demanded about the UN top team's communication systems could be seen as laying the groundwork for surveillance or hacking operations. It requested `current technical specifications, physical layout and planned upgrades to telecommunications infrastructure and information systems, networks and technologies used by top officials and their support staff', as well as details on private networks used for official comunication, `to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys and virtual private network versions used'.
The UN has previously asserted that bugging the secretary general is illegal, citing the 1946 UN convention on priveleges and immunities which states: `The premises of the United Nations shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action'.''
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-spying-un
This is the best of the stories I found so far on Wikileaks latest release. The Wikileaks web page is unreachable. So it is being blocked. We'll see if this cyberwar works.
If you read down through the article you will notice a particular pattern that involves the Middle East and Africa. In a word, Israel. Think about the UN and Israel and consider all the various events that have involved the UN and its agencies that don't follow US-Israeli orders. (The other link is oil and energy multi-nationals. The mention of WHO is interesting because of the corporate link to big Pharma and the giant agriCorps.)
``Missions in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt were asked to gather biometric information `on key Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders and representatives, to include the young guard inside Gaza, the West Bank', as well as evidence of collusion between the PA security forces and terror groups.
Taken together, the directives provide a vivid snapshot of America's perception of foreign threats which are often dazzlingly interconnected. Paraguayan drug traffickers were suspected of supporting Hezbollah and al-Qaida, while Latin American cocaine barons were linked to criminal networks in the desert states of west Africa, who were in turn linked to Islamist terrorists in the Middle East and Asia.
High on the list of requests in an April 2009 directive covering the Saharan west African countries, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal, was information about the activities of fighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Information was wanted on `indications that international terrorist groups are seeking to take advantage of political, ethnic, tribal or religious conflict'.''