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NSA Intercepted French Telephone Calls "On a Massive Scale"
rtoz writes "The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting French telephone calls 'on a massive scale,' according to a report published in Le Monde. According to Le Monde, the NSA recorded millions of telephone calls placed by French citizens over a 30-day period last year, including some placed by people with no connections to terrorist organizations. France called in the U.S. ambassador to protest the alleged large-scale spying on French citizens by NSA."
It's their job to a) not blanket-grab millions of phone users of data in a random bug hunt but to apply "intelligence" and b) not to get caught doing so. They are spies. This is just terribly amateur. If you don't see that, then you're really missing the biggest thing - that's the problem more than ANYTHING else. So fucking amateur that it makes you look like a bunch of incompetents.
However, on a similar note, if you found out that the French authorities had a complete copy of your phone records which got publicly leaked (WikiLeaks-style, say), would you not be pissed? It could easily destroy your career, your life, your relationships, etc. (think: This might include the phone numbers of sex chat lines, and you might be a politician / teacher - nothing ILLEGAL in doing that, but would you want that being public knowledge after illegal collection of that data by a foreign entity not being held subject to the laws of YOUR country?).
Now think that that might include, say, phone calls made by the US ambassador to France while he was in the US. Now we're into REALLY serious shit that you can't even get in a court of law in the country.
What's more shocking is NOT that this data exists, or has been abused for purposes far beyond their remit, nor that they are that incompetent that it gets found out so easily (but that's pretty damning), but that - in order to "protect" the US, they have now incurred the wrath of quite a number of other countries allied to them and - should it come out into the public media that certain things were captured "accidentally" into that data - could well be the trigger to an international incident (read: War).
What if you found that a US ally like, say, the UK had complete records of every US citizen that the US did not give them (because a law prevents the US from doing so, and they thought it was just a blind hunt without purpose, and couldn't see why the UK would need that so they blocked it) but they stole in other ways and then managed to publish/leak to a newspaper in the UK?
And what if that info contained things like the phone records of major political figures? Or the phone calls made from Guantanamo Bay? Or what numbers were dialled in the Washington DC area when the UK queried why it join in fighting in the Middle East (or whatever?). It's not WHAT specifically was collected - it was why it was collected and what COULD be inside that that could easily trigger an international incident. And it has. And will continue to do so while things like this come out.
Fact is, there's being a spy - and that means NOT GETTING CAUGHT - and there's just going on a blind hunt through data "because you can" against the laws of a country you are allied to (who would have given you what you wanted if you'd asked).
Just how much co-operation do you think you will see next time you're trying to track a terrorist cell through France? It's counter-productive, and BAD SPYING. TERRIBLE SPYING. CRAP SPYING. And it's pissing off your allies.
Oh yeah, "just in case"
Yes, just in case for both sides. Doesn't mean the plans are expected to be used but you can be certain that the US military has at some point developed plans for attacking and defending against every country in the world. Just in case.
Thanks for making up some stats so we can all know the truth.