'Insane, Disgusting' and 'Epic Treachery': NSA Spied on Climate Talks

While climate activists from around the world gathered outside the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 called for “System Change, Not Climate Change’ while demanding to be heard by world leaders, the U.S. delegation inside the talks was busy listening to something else: a steady stream of surveillance intelligence on other nations provided by the National Security Agency.

That’s according to new documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published Thursday by reporters at the Huffington Post and the Danish newspaper Information, with help from American journalist Laura Poitras.

As the Information reports:

And HuffPost’s Ryan Grim and Kate Sheppard add:

According to Grim and Sheppard, citing the document, the intel gathered by the NSA was likely “used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and [President] Obama, among others.” 

Even more troubling, according to Information‘s assessment, is that the top secret “document suggests that the NSA’s […] focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes.”