2 April 2000. Thanks to Wayne Madsen.
Following items are germane to debate over NSA economic intelligence gathering:
Excerpts from:
Author: Wayne Madsen
EDWIN MELLEN PRESS, ISBN 0-7734-8002-1, 1999
From Chapter 5 - THE AFRICA-ARKANSAS-INDONESIA CONNECTION
As National Security adviser to Clinton, [Anthony] Lake had a strong degree of authority over the activities of the NSA. The secretive intelligence agency began to shift its primary focus to gathering economic intelligence after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union.
According to a former data processor for the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), an agency considered by a former director of NSA to be "just another branch of NSA," the American SIGINT agency has a keen interest in the internal communications of mining companies, particularly those in Canada. The former CSE employee, who was once based at CSE headquarters and a CSE "outstation" at Masset on British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Island, claims the CSE (and ultimately, the NSA) monitored the internal communications of selected Canadian resource-based companies. The CSE technician said he was not sure what his superiors wanted with the information. However, given the interest of Lake and the National Security Council (NSC) in [Maurice] Tempelsman's diamond business, it can be argued that the Vancouver-based operations of [Robert] Friedland and [Jean-Raymond] Boulle are high on the CSE and NSA "watch lists" for key words of interest.
From Chapter 11 - PAX AMERICANA IN AFRICA
The NSA had an additional ear pointed toward Bougainville. Australia's Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), NSA's Australian subsidiary, installed a SIGINT "outstation" on the tip of Cape York in northern Queensland at Bamaga. Bamaga has been a remote detachment of DSD's Cabarlah station in Queensland since 1988. One of the station's main purposes is to listen to the radio transmissions of the BRA [Bougainville Revolutionary Army]. Many experts familiar with DSD believe that Australia passes on intercepted phone calls to Papua New Guinea. It was also possible that in the new era of economic warfare, some of the SIGINT may have ended up in the hands of RTZ [Rio Tinto Zinc, Inc.] and other mining companies having an interest in Bougainville.