Amid Uproar Over NSA, Malaysia Wants to Expand Its Spying Powers

The spying scandal roiling the National Security Agency in the U.S. may turn out to provide great air cover for other countries wanting to expand electronic surveillance.

Take the Malaysian government.

The official in charge of fighting graft in the Southeast Asian nation says that the government may soon use phone tapping and Internet monitoring to help root out corporate and government corruption, a huge problem that costs the country as much as $9 billion a year, as my colleague Liau Y-Sing reported from Kuala Lumpur.

Paul Low, the minister in the Prime Minister's Department of fighting graft, says the government is in early-stage talks and declined to provide specifics about how sweeping any new powers might be or how they'd be used. And it's unclear to what degree the government is already snooping on its citizens. Read more...