Squidgygate: Encyclopedia II - Squidgygate - Surveillance of Diana after Squidgygate

Squidgygate - Surveillance of Diana after Squidgygate

On 30 November 1998, APB News Online published the results of a US Freedom of Information Act request.

The news agency's request for documents on Diana, held by America's National Security Agency, had been rejected, but the rejection notice itself revealed that a total of 1,056 pages of documents is held by the NSA, CIA, State department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency DIA.

APB quoted John Pike, an intelligence expert from the Federation of American Scientists, as saying that the NSA was "insatiably curious, and monitors everyone of interest outside the US".

A spokesman for the NSA, which holds 124 pages from "39 NSA-originated and NSA-controlled documents", declined to answer further questions about the documents, as did a spokeswoman for the CIA, which has at least two documents.

When asked why the Defense Intelligence Agency might be holding documents on Diana, Lieutenant-Colonel James MacNeil said he had "no idea why. All of our stuff is on military [matters]. Obviously she wasn't in the military ^[35].

After a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Guardian newspaper in 1999, the NSA told the paper that it was - and is still - holding reports under both secret and top secret classifications, and that: "these documents cannot be declassified because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."

The agency said it also needed to protect its sources.

The NSA said:

"The reports contain only references to Princess Diana acquired incidentally from intelligence gathering. It is neither NSA policy or practice to target British subjects in conducting our foreign intelligence mission. However, other countries could communicate about these subjects; therefore, this agency could acquire intelligence concerning British subjects ^[36]."

This statement makes it sound as though the NSA's dossier on Diana consists of third-party information gathered almost by accident.

The NSA's spokesman may have been deliberately vague by relying on the ambiguity of the phrase "British subjects", which - read one way -- means British "citizens" (as long as a Monarch rules, all Britons are subjects of the reigning King or Queen), and - read another - means "matters of interest to the British state".

Either interpretation is demonstrably false: the NSA monitors both British interests and individuals. NSA surveillance of private phone conversations "between Diana and American friends" had been mounted "at MI6's request ^[37]."

US journalist Gerald Posner was played innocuous extracts from the NSA tapes of Diana's conversations in early 1999.

In February 2000, Wayne Madsen, formerly an NSA operative for 20 years, said that "undisclosed material held in US government files on Princess Diana was collected because of her work with the international campaign to ban landmines."

Diana, and other international figures including Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, were all listened in on by the Echelon monitoring system, a world-wide monitoring network capable of processing millions of messages every hour.

"Anybody who is politically active,' said Madsen, 'will eventually end up on the NSA's radar screen ^[38]."

In December 1998, the French magistrate who investigated Diana's death, Herve Stephan, wrote to the American Secret Services to request the 1,056-page dossier of transcripted calls ^[39].

This request was refused a month or so later.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Surveillance of Diana after Squidgygate", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki