By Robert Scheer

February 24, 2020 "Information Clearing House" -  In another astounding revelation about the extent of United States’ global surveillance operations, The Washington Post recently published a piece about a Swiss company, Crypto AG, that was actually owned by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and West Germany’s intelligence agency. Crypto AG provided encryption services to over a hundred governments worldwide for decades. Unbeknownst to those governments, the CIA had access to the encryption tools and could therefore read high-level internal governmental correspondence from countries including France, Egypt, Venezuela and many others.

On this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer speaks with William Binney, a leading intelligence expert who worked at the National Security Agency for 30 years, about this shocking information that is only now being made public, roughly two years after the program ended in 2018. In the exchange, Scheer highlights why the revelation is not only incredibly worrying in terms of the power it allowed the U.S. to wield for decades, but because of its historical implications.

“What it means, as I understand it, is that people high up in the U.S. government, right up through the president, would have known of every assassination attempt, every terrorist attempt, every torture, everything done in any of these other societies — as I say, be it Saudi Arabia, be it Egypt, be it Venezuela, be it Guatemala,” says an outraged Scheer.

“We had knowledge of what they were doing, what they were plotting,” he goes on, “aren’t we complicit in actually learning about what they’re doing — that they’re going to kill somebody or torture them — and not intervening, or deciding to ignore it?”

“I certainly would agree with that, what you’re saying there,” Binney responds. “They hold some responsibility for not taking action to stop events, yeah.”

When Scheer asks Binney to explain what’s at the foundation of the Crypto AG operation, the former NSA agent bluntly gets to the heart of the matter. “It’s a standard operation to try to get other people to buy the crypto systems that you’ve built,” Binney says, “because that means you fundamentally own them.”