

The German Operation Eikonal as Part of NSA's Rampart-A Program - omnibrain
http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-german-operation-eikonal-as-part-of.html

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junto

      The BND noticed at some point that the 
      NSA searched for information about the
      European defence contractor EADS (now 
      Airbus Group), the Eurocopter and French
      government agencies.
    

Welcome to the NSA's secondary purpose. Corporate espionage for hire. The
military industrial complex hard at work.

Also, if I was running a huge US hedge fund, that information would be really
valuable. Just saying.

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nysv
You'd think an intelligence service would know that NSA isn't a friend and not
repeat history. They did almost exactly the same thing in 1990.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Concerns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Concerns)

~~~
ivanca
This is a all new level of corruption, here are the interesting bits:

\- In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA,
acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing
Saudi officials to secure the contract.[58] As a result, the American
aerospace company McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) won the multi-billion
dollar contract instead of Airbus.[59]

\- The American defense contractor Raytheon won a US$1.3 billion contract with
the Government of Brazil to monitor the Amazon rainforest after the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting as a whistleblower, reported that
Raytheon's French competitor Thomson-Alcatel had been paying bribes to get the
contract.[60]

\- In order to boost America's position in trade negotiations with the then
Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in 1995 the CIA eavesdropped on the
conversations between Japanese bureaucrats and executives of car manufacturers
Toyota and Nissan.[61]

~~~
tormeh
While revealing corruption is nice, I think it's safe to say that everyone
serious about winning a big government contract in Saudi Arabia or Brazil is
not going to be clean. So the American companies probably bribed too, but got
away with it since no one whistleblew on them.

