Glenn Greenwald on NSA Bugging Tech Hardware, Economic Espionage & Spying on U.N. excerpts, from DemNow: "Nearly a year after he first met Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to unveil new secrets about the National Security Agency and the surveillance state. His new book, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State," is being published today. It includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents, including new details on how the NSA routinely intercepts routers, servers and other computer hardware devices being exported from the United States. According to leaked documents published in the book, the NSA then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. This gives the NSA access to entire networks and all their users. The book includes one previously secret NSA file that shows a photo of an agent opening a box marked CISCO. Below it reads a caption: "Intercepted packages are opened carefully." Another memo observes that some signals intelligence tradecraft is "very hands-on (literally!)." ... The second story which I think was probably even more responsible for the worldwide explosion was the PRISM program, because this program revealed that Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Skype and Microsoft were directly cooperating with the NSA in all sorts of extensive ways to ensure easy NSA access to the communications that take place through those companies. And the reason that was so significant is because, unlike the NSA story of 2005 that involved AT&T and Sprint and Verizon, U.S. domestic telephone companies, these Internet companies are the primary means that the entire First World, for lack of a better term, uses to communicate, and even lots of people in developing countries who are now looking to these companies as the primary means. So you’re not just talking about one country; you’re talking about hundreds of millions, probably billions of people around the world who use these companies. ... but I think what became apparent to people is that literally the mission of the NSA—and this is them in their own words—is to eliminate privacy globally. And that’s not hyperbole. Literally, their institutional mandate is to collect and store and, when they want, analyze and monitor all forms of electronic communication that take place between human beings around the planet. And once people understood that this extraordinary system of suspicionless surveillance, which was truly unprecedented in scope, had been created completely in the dark—I mean, no one knew about any of this, even though it had been done by allegedly democratic governments—it became more than a surveillance story. It became a story about government secrecy and accountability and the role of journalism, and certainly privacy and surveillance in the digital age. AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called No Place to Hide. In it, you reveal previously—previously secret NSA files. Why don’t you go through some of those? ... And then, one of the biggest stories that’s new in the book is this program that really is quite remarkable, which is, all over the world, people buy routers and switches and servers, which are the devices that let corporations or municipalities or villages provide Internet service to large numbers of people at once, hundreds or even thousands. And there are American companies that are leaders in these products, such as Cisco. And what the NSA will do, whenever it decides that it wants to, is, once somebody orders a product from Cisco, Cisco then ships it to that person; the NSA physically intercepts the package, takes it from FedEx or from the U.S. mail service, brings it back to NSA headquarters, opens up the package, and plants a backdoor device on one of these devices, reseals it with a factory seal and then sends it on to the unwitting user, who then provides Internet service to large numbers of people, all of which is instantly redirected into the repositories of the NSA. ... I mean, one of the remarkable parts about this story, this specific story, is that for many years the U.S. government has been warning the world not to buy routers, switches and servers from Chinese companies, on the grounds that the Chinese government is invading these products and putting backdoor surveillance devices onto them, and saying, "You cannot trust Chinese products." And in fact, the largest Chinese technology company, Huawei, recently announced it was leaving the U.S. market, because they had been so demonized by the U.S. government that they couldn’t sell their products anymore. And so, to find out that the U.S. government is doing exactly that which they’ve been accusing the Chinese doing— ... video and full transcript prior to break after the break: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/13/the_stuff_i_saw_really_began excerpt: AMY GOODMAN: That’s Edward Snowden. A federal judge or the president of the United States—and this, of course, is what the Obama administration at first completely denied. GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And the Obama administration—and I say this really advisably—was knowingly lying to the public when they denied the truth of what he had said. And, you know, this was in the very first week, and that was explosive claim, and the NSA had no idea what evidence we had, so they could—they thought they could lie with impunity. And then we ultimately published documents, and I publish on purpose a lot more in the book, that demonstrate exactly what analysts are capable of doing. And what they’re capable of doing is exactly what Edward Snowden said, which is—the phrase that describes what the NSA is attempting to do and is close to doing is their own phrase, which is "collect it all." They want to collect and store the entire Internet, literally every email, every chat, every Google search, every website that you click on.