Journalist alleges Ed Snowden claims CIA spies on charity organisations

Journalist alleges Ed Snowden claims CIA spies on charity organisations

Two of the journalists who helped the whistleblower Edward Snowden leak thousands of secret American documents are due to fly into New York later tonight - their first attempt to enter the USA since the story broke. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are hoping to to accept a prestigious journalism award for national security reporting. Mr Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained at London's Heathrow last August and had his electronic equipment taken, before being released after a press outcry.

MARK COLVIN: Two of the journalists who helped the whistleblower Edward Snowden leak thousands of secret American documents are due to fly into New York later tonight - their first attempt to enter the USA since the story broke.

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are hoping to accept a prestigious journalism award for national security reporting.

Mr Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained at London's Heathrow last August and had his electronic equipment taken before being released after a press outcry.

Meanwhile Edward Snowden himself appeared via video link before the European Council this week and said the American National Security Agency - the NSA - spied on major human rights organisations.

Luke Harding of the Guardian reported that story and he's the author of a new book, 'The Snowden Files'.

I asked him about the allegations of spying on organisations like Amnesty.

LUKE HARDING: We don't have the details, but what we do know about the NSA and human rights organisation is that, according to Edward Snowden, Skyped him from Moscow, the NSA is spying on human rights organisations: big ones, small ones, American ones.

He didn't actually name names, but he was asked specifically by a group of Council of Europe members whether the US was essentially eavesdropping on this highly sensitive communications of human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and he gave an emphatic answer: yes, absolutely they are, including within the borders of the United States.

MARK COLVIN: And Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch was actually in Australia during the last two weeks. He would have been spied on here then?

LUKE HARDING: One doesn't know, I mean we haven't seen the documents. It's highly possible. What we do know is that the NSA has a voracious appetite for all sorts of information and that it's kind of objective, it's kind of global objective, if you like, is to collect of the signals all of the time, in the words of General Alexander, the head of the NSA who's just retired.

In other words, they want everything. They want everybody's metadata; they want telephony records; they want the lot, and of course human rights organisations which work in some tricky parts of the world and have some quite interesting partners are a fairly obvious target.

But having said that, the way we've been covering this story, we journalists, Edward Snowden's media partners: the Guardian, New York Times, Spiegel and others, is that we've tried to get all the documents. In other words, we've only reported really what we've been able to prove and verify and which we think is in the public interest.

But, clearly, spying on human rights organisations is a matter of public interest.

MARK COLVIN: Well he also talked about a program called XKeyscore, which the NSA and its partners, which include Australia's intelligence agencies use to trawl through metadata. Could you explain a bit about that?

LUKE HARDING: It's a complex program. It's also an extremely powerful program. What was quite interesting about this is that this is something we wrote about, the Guardian, back in July of last year in a long story written by Glenn Greenwald, who then of course was working for us - now, isn't anymore.

But, in essence, it's a very powerful device which allows analysts, including Snowden, who said that he'd done this himself, to pick a selector if you like, which means a sort of keyword, and to search accordingly through vast quantities of emails, web chats, metadata - which means the who you're sending the email to, their address, your address and so on. And, I don't know if you remember, but at one point last year, Edward Snowden said that he, sitting at his desk, could actually search the private communications of everybody, including the president of the United States if he had a private email address for him.

Now the NSA have poo-pooed this and said this is not true. But it's clearly, according to Snowden on Tuesday, XKeyscore is the tool which allows essentially the NSA to surveil everybody on the planet.

MARK COLVIN: And, there's a been a lot of argument recently, particularly with police and intelligence agencies, arguing that they should have more access to metadata. Now, others are fighting back and saying that metadata can give those agencies a window into pretty much your whole life.

Who's right about that?

LUKE HARDING: I'm afraid the critics are right. Metadata is incredibly revealing. We're talking about what you search online; we're talking about who you contact; we're talking about people who, in the privacy of their own homes, will reveal their sexual orientation perhaps, their political affiliation, their religious views, who they're in contact with, using metadata - the record of your electronic transactions.

You can construct a rich electronic narrative of an individual's life: their predilections, their secrets, their joys, their sorrows. It's all there and, really, the spies are being disingenuous when they say, "Oh, it's not content; it doesn't count."

They can know practically everything about you.

MARK COLVIN: When Edward Snowden was talking to the Council of Europe, by what means was he talking and was it controversial that he was talking?

LUKE HARDING: The Council of Europe invited him and he spoke. The European Parliament, which is a slightly different body wanted to do this, but had chickened out in the end. I think that what's quite interesting is that we've seen a lot of online chats from Snowden in the past few weeks.

He's spoken to a couple of technology conferences in the United States. He spoke to an Amnesty International conference recently, and now he's talked directly to Europe, to this important human rights body, and I think that it's a sort of strategy change by Snowden who really for the first six months when he was stuck in Moscow, was pretty reclusive. He didn't meet anybody apart from his family. He met one reporter, Barton Gellman from the Washington Post in December.

But, since the beginning of this year, I think we've seen him try and make his case more and I think the strategic goal is actually to change the political climate in the United States so that, at some point, the White House - maybe not this White House - maybe a future White House will be in a position to give him clemency.

MARK COLVIN: Journalist, Luke Harding. His book is called 'The Snowden Files'.