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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Cold Fjord on Monday February 17 2014, @01:56AM
Indonesia's former top spy master has accused his own President of exaggerating the problem of phone tapping, saying attempts by intelligence agencies to snoop on national leaders were "normal".
And former spy agency chief Abdullah Mahmud Hendropriyono has also punctured claims by his Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa that Indonesia would never tap the phones of Australian politicians, insisting it was a routine part of "black intelligence".
Mr Hendropriyono, the head of Badan Intelijen Negara (BIN) until 2004, has been thrust into the Australian political debate because of a TV interview he gave in 2004, in which he admitted to bugging Australian politicians.
In an interview with Fairfax Media, the former Indonesian army general has now amplified his 2004 comments, saying of Australia's attempts to listen to the conversations of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the first lady and their confidantes: "For intelligence, it's normal."
He added that Indonesia not only had the capacity to tap the phones of Australians, but that intelligence agencies also had a responsibility to try it, "friend or foe".
Asked if Indonesia could listen to Mr Abbott's phone, he said: "We have the ability to tap and to counter-tap". However, he also suggested that Australian counterintelligence would prevent this happening.
Mr Hendropriyono said human intelligence — what he called "white intelligence" — was standard practice in embassies worldwide, but that phone tapping was "the most reliable" way to confirm information gathered.
"Tapping and counter-tapping is quite common in the intelligence life, because it is one of their primary jobs," he said.
"Intelligence is judged like in sport, two boxers fighting in the ring. They punch and they counter-punch... They attack and they defend themselves, but it is in the ring — the ring of intelligence. If the officials, in this case politicians, interfere in the case, that is wrong. That is very wrong."
Now that it is in the political arena, the politicians have overreacted, he said.
"I hope that both our leaders, SBY as well as Tony Abbott should not be too emotional... Please do not deteriorate [the relationship] because of a very small thing. This is a very technical thing." Yes another US ally screwed by a Snowden leak. Can we assume at this point that we'll be hearing nothing about China, Russia, or Iran? Remember how Snowden claimed that he was an expert about Chinese activities and taught classes on them? I wonder what happened to that material?
(Score: 1) by SockPuppet on Monday February 17 2014, @02:21AM
Nice to see you too!
(Score: 1) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Monday February 17 2014, @02:30AM
Thanks for the effort!
The "Submit Story" link does seem to be broken, so I don't think anyone should blame CF for posting a story here...
For now, could you please try using the forums to submit stories until it gets fixed? The address is http://sylnt.us/call-for-stories [sylnt.us]
Regards
(Score: 1) by dmc on Monday February 17 2014, @05:57AM
I can interestingly verify that I'm unable to moderate this article because I already posted to it :) So that said, instead of upmodding the link from clone141166, I'll repost it here- here is the link to submit and track bugs-
https://dev.dev.soylentnews.org/tracker/index.php?func =detail&aid=72&group_id=6&atid=102/ [dev.soylentnews.org]
from- http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=88&cid=530 [dev.soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by isostatic on Monday February 17 2014, @07:07AM
That thread is locked :(
(Score: 1) by SGT CAPSLOCK on Monday February 17 2014, @07:29AM
It looks like the story submission thing is fixed for some people already, so I guess they went and locked that thread...
For a lot of other people (including me) it's still broken, but there's a ticket for it on the bug tracker:
https://dev.dev.soylentnews.org/tracker/?func=detail&a tid=101&aid=79&group_id=6 [dev.soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by isostatic on Monday February 17 2014, @08:22AM
Same here, I wanted to post an "ask the gloop" question :(