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USA-NSA-SAUDI ARABIA: The NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police

25 July 2014

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"The National Security Agency last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden details the agency’s plans “to provide direct analytic and technical support” to the Saudis on “internal security” matters.

The Saudi Ministry of Interior - referred to in the document as MOI - has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that “Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse,” specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly “poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat” of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI’s use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents."

See the article: The NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police (The Intercept, link)

See document: NSA-SAUDI ARABIA Cooperation (pdf)

And see: Privacy watchdog’s next target: the least-known but biggest aspect of NSA surveillance (Washington Post, link): "An independent privacy watchdog agency announced Wednesday that it will turn its focus to the largest and most complex of U.S. electronic surveillance regimes: signals intelligence collection under Executive Order 12333. That highly technical name masks a constellation of complex surveillance activities carried out for foreign intelligence purposes by the National Security Agency under executive authority. But unlike two other major NSA collection programs that have been in the news lately, EO 12333 surveillance is conducted without court oversight and with comparatively little Congressional review."

See document: SIGINT Decision Tree (.jpg)

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