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NSA contractor Edward Snowden of programs that collect huge quantities of data on US allies and adversaries, and American citizens.
The NSA’s surveillance of the Washington-based IMF and World Bank has not previously been disclosed. Details of such spy programs are usually highly classified.
In response to Reuters’ inquiries, a senior Obama administration official said: “The United States is not conducting electronic surveillance targeting the headquarters of the World Bank or IMF in Washington.”
The right decision
The Obama administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not address whether the NSA had eavesdropped on the two entities in the past.
The first official said Obama had ordered a halt to such practices within the last few weeks, about the same time he instructed the NSA to curtail eavesdropping on the United Nations headquarters in New York.
The IMF and the World Bank both declined to comment.
Representatives of the NSA and the Office of Director of National Intelligence had no immediate comment.
Loch K. Johnson, a former congressional oversight aide who is now a professor of international relations at the University of Georgia, said Obama made the right decision by curbing eavesdropping on international organisations and friendly foreign leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“I think it’s a good idea to cut back on surveillance” of economic-related targets, Johnson said. “The enemy is terrorism and we should focus on that. We have to focus almost all of our resources on Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” he said.
Weighing the risks
Paul Pillar, a former senior analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, said that US policy makers have to weigh the value of collecting intelligence on an organisation like the IMF against the risk it will become public.
“In this instance the gain from that information is likely to be minimal,” Pillar said.
“Sound analysis on international economic issues of concern to US policymakers is apt to draw more from other sources of information, both secret and public, and from tapping relevant expertise both outside and inside government, than from eavesdropping on conversations at the IMF,” he added.
It is no secret that US spy agencies historically have collected and analysed information related to economic affairs, in public briefings to Congress, top intelligence officials have discussed assessments of economic issues.
But a former senior US intelligence official said that the Obama Administration had put greater emphasis and resources than predecessors into collecting and assessing economic information.
In February 2009, shortly after Obama entered the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency began producing a new “Economic Intelligence Brief” for him to review along with the regular President’s Daily Brief on international security and threats.
Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director, said at the time the change was aimed at understanding the implications of the global economic crisis, and that the agency was considering hiring more economic analysts.
The former US intelligence official noted that insider detail on economic policy developments, for example, financial crises affecting the economies of European countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, and the stability of the Euro, is the type of critical information US policymakers welcome.
The desire by US policymakers for such information could help explain why NSA collected information on foreign leaders such as Merkel. Her mobile phone number was listed in a NSA targeting document, which German media outlets apparently obtained from Snowden’s cache. US officials have now indicated that much NSA eavesdropping on Merkel and other allied leaders, is likely to be curtailed if not halted.
