UK-Based NSA Spy Station Alledgedly Spies on EU for Profit

Pretty explosive allegations but the fact this was published by UK's Sunday Times (in 1998) should make it pretty credible, especially combined with the attached illustration.

The French have claimed that Thomson-CSF, a French electronics company, lost a $1.4 billion (£858m) deal to supply Brazil with a radar system because the Americans intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them to Raytheon, the American firm which makes the Patriot missile; Raytheon subsequently won the contract. Another claim is that Airbus Industrie lost a contract worth £1 billion to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas because information was intercepted by American spying.

People can now maybe start connecting some dots on possible uses of 'incidental spy data'. One such use might be for monetary gain. The ultimate insider info if there ever was one.

Link to full article: cryptome.org...

That name is itself misleading - it is not a British airbase. Opened in the late 1950s on land purchased by the crown, it was taken over directly by the NSA in 1966 and became its Field Station F83.

It is of course owned by the RAF, officially.

Overall it is an RAF/GCHQ spy station that shares data with US and other Echelon counterparts as per the UKUSA agreement, hence the NSA staff and lliason officer stationed there.

It's all rather stupid, the agencies starting out "officially" not monitoring their own national citizens, but just giving each other the data anyway.

reply to post by PINGi14


This is just one of many obvious consequences to governments having unfettered surveillance capabilities. In this case it is industrial espionage to help the spying country's big corporations; what if it becomes a case of the government spying on one US company for some other company?. Another is monitoring political dissidents, journalists and whistleblowers. Another is misuse of the resource for personal reasons, e.g. some NSA agent stalking an Ex with government hardware and software. Another is the government encroachment into monitoring to help media corporations enforce their copy right laws. Another would be a Watergate-style surveillance of one's political enemies; this could be extended to a J. Edgar Hoover-esqe blackmailing of elected officials.