Venezuelan Government Asks U.S. Citizens to Weigh in on NSA Spying

Edited by Ivan Martínez
2015-12-17 13:44:42

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Caracas, December 17 (RHC-teleSUR) -- In a video posted on YouTube, “Americans from all walks of life” speak out against the U.S. spying on Venezuela revealed by teleSUR.

“Anyway they can go and steal and spy and cheat and rob people out their natural resources, that’s what they do,” says a man featured in a new video commissioned by the Foreign Ministry of Venezuela. “That’s the nature of the United States of America.”

The video comes after teleSUR, in an exclusive partnership with The Intercept, revealed that intelligence agents -- working for the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, but posing as diplomats -- used powerful surveillance equipment stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas to infiltrate the computer network of Venezuela’s most important company, the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela.

The revelation was made possible thanks to a top-secret document provided by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. That document showed that an NSA agent working in the U.S. coordinated their actions with agents stationed in Caracas, obtaining passwords for hundreds of PDVSA employees and private phone numbers and email addresses for top officials including former president and current Ambassador to the United Nations Rafael Ramirez. The document stated that the information gathered from the infiltration would prove very helpful in cracking the company’s network wide open.

The video from Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry, unsurprisingly, features U.S. citizens critical of their government’s espionage. “Once the Venezuelan state gets control of its own natural resources, this poses a threat to U.S.-based companies such as Exxon,” says one man. “So it’s partly about profit.”

At the time, that NSA and CIA agents were hacking into PDVSA’s servers in late 2010 and early 2011, according to the Snowden document, the Venezuelan state was embroiled in a legal conflict with oil giant ExxonMobil over the 2007 nationalization of its investment in a Venezuelan oil project.

 



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