Just like all of us, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has its friends, and its real friends.
It should no longer be surprising that the NSA shares information with similar agencies in many other countries.
A new NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden via journalist Glenn Greenwald and published Wednesday in the Spanish newspaper El Mundoshows exactly which countries are in close cooperation with the US secret service and which countries simply cooperate with it on a not-so-close level.
This information, as indicated by El Mundo and the Guardian, includes telephone metadata of the citizens of these countries.
Since the Second World War, the secret services have been cooperating under the framework of the Five Eyes alliance of five countries. The countries that make up the alliance are the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Many of the secret Snowden documents that have already been leaked indicate the cooperation of the NSA with other countries that make up this alliance. Thus, according to the new document leaked to the Tier A group, the nations that are in “full cooperation” with the NSA.
Tier B,which is labeled “Focused Cooperation,” is a bit more complicated. The countries mentioned in the document include Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.
The document is undated, so it is unclear whether it is recent. It is worth noting, however, that Israel is not on the list, although it is already widely known that the NSA works with the Israeli secret service (ISNU).
