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MEPs Vote To Suspend Data Sharing With US
New submitter mrspoonsi writes with this news, excerpted from the BBC: "The European Parliament has voted to suspend the sharing of financial data with the U.S., following allegations that citizens' data was spied on....The European Parliament voted to suspend its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US, in response to the alleged tapping of EU citizens' bank data held by the Belgian company SWIFT. The agreement granted the U.S. authorities access to bank data for terror-related investigations but leaked documents made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden allege that the global bank transfer network was the target of wider U.S. surveillance."
"MEPs vote to suspend US data sharing"
How do they plan to stop it? I am being serious here. It sounds like the NSA has taps on all their data already, whether Europeans give it freely or not.
How long before we hear calls to declare the whole EU as terrorist sympathisers?
As more of this comes out, I hope others join the EU and we start looking at a embargo on sharing information with the US until it learns.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Have gnu, will travel.
The TFTP was a pretty one-sided agreement, and it's therefore politically fragile and the first thing that's likely to be pulled when the trust in the USA's respect of EU data breaks down.
The EU members won't share data with us that we want! If only one of our intelligence bureaus had a way to get data from other countries without their consent...
Every child knows that if you abuse a privilege it gets taken away.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
That's THE LEAST that ought to be done.
No, we're surprised that shills keep posting "we already knew this" and thinking they're clever.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Why Europe should honor US intellectual property if the US government is officially ignoring the intellectual property of all EU citizens, including the one of their leaders?
Surprised at how the NSA got so deep into France/EU and was able to take over their domestic telco system for generations.
For that you would need a Vichy "tech" to actively help and collaborate to hide foreign telco tech within France/EU.
The UK, Italy, Germany is understandalbe as client or defeated nations. France and other more tech savvy EU nations should have been able to understand their own internal (global) telco networks. How is the NSA getting all the data out?
Is France and others looping the bulk of its calls via NSA friendly countries to save in domestic telco interconnect fees?
The US message back is http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57608909-83/intelligence-chief-le-mondes-allegations-against-nsa-false/
The French and other EU nations are just talking about weapons of mass destruction too much on the phone? Just a list of US/UK keywords and French people chatting on the phone the wrong way?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I wonder what repercussions this may have regarding EU countries' compliance with FATCA?
From article "The vote is non-binding but illustrates MEPs' growing unease [...]" . So parliament showed right amount of outrage, won some brownie points among electorate and managed to do it without pissing off USA. Good job.
Europe is a lot closer to, and has been more impacted by, terrorist strikes than the US. A reduction in data sharing will impact both sides of the Atlantic.
Of course, MEPs aren't really -accountable- to anyone for their decisions, it's the European sovereign governments who will be left holding the bag if terrorist strikes increase.
Yes. Do you suppose the role of an intelligence organization is to spy on its allies? How much of an ally can they really be if we spy on them like we do our enemies? The role of the NSA is not (or should not be) to spy on everyone. Spying is not a friendly activity. Spying is fundamentally a hostile activity and subjecting our allies to hostile activity will quickly result in a loss of allies.
Would you be friendly with someone who was spying on you?
"There's no way our government would do that."
"There's no way we wouldnt already know if they were doing that."
And from the last several years,
"Obama is going to fix all the abuses of the warmongering Republicans. So whatever evils were there they will be going away."
In the end we have purchased what has befallen us, but not through informed consent. It's simply been done through willful ignorance and denial. It takes minimal awareness to recognize how clueless most Americans are, wholly consumed with the mind-rot like Jersey Shore or Facebook.
So yes, most are/were surprised.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
In theory we did. The US/UK NATO crypto offers for friendly embassy use was junk from the 1950-90's. It kept the Soviets out but let the NSA and GCHQ in. The UK and US press often hinted at plain text from embassy intercepts over many years. How far back do you want to go:
..."practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information ... deliberately violating the airspace of other nations ... intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies ..." ...:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection 1960?
Thanks to Snowden we have the history needed for the dreamy sock puppets. I saw one offer that the US does not really 'use' the info for finance or domestic political needs.
A huge change from its not possible, would never work, would be found out, the data sets are too large, the US brands would never help, the political and legal protections
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The NSA is chartered to do that by a specific nation. The USA.
Why should independent nations not react to the (very real and ilegal) actions ot the NSA against those nations' interests and citizens?
For anyone that is minimaly informed about history and politics, the desire of the NSA (or any other inteligence agency) to have access to EVERYTHING is obvious.
My surprise is limited to the extent to which the NSA as been allowed to gain that information.
The level and volume of information that it is said that the NSA acquires regarding communications inside european countries would'nt be possible without:
- A faily big operational capability (which isn't neither new nor chocking in itself)
- Cooperation from local entities , government and private (which is very unsettling)
- The belief by those that make the decisions, in Europe, allowing access by the NSA to local resources, that that access wouldn't be abused. (which was unbelievable as it is mind-bogllingly STUPID).
Putting it bluntly, these actions by the NSA are illegal in most (if not all) of the european countries.
- It's agents and enablers are breaking laws. Those should be punished legaly when caught (yes, prison).
Also, "good will" with regards to access to some information sources should be re-evaluated.
Those include the aforementioned finantial data and should also include the passenger information now routinely shoveled out by the EU to the US, even regarding flights that don't touch the USAs airspace.
Of course you are going to spy on your allies. They can be much more dangerous than your enemies ever could.
My experience with ISP administration, like my father's experience as a Telefonica engineer, is that you don't have to be a genius to have a very substantial level of technical responsibility - but you do have to be one of the lads.
And that means you're very chummy and utterly loyal to the environment around you. Your god-like powers give you god-like beliefs, especially over your ability to monitor the behaviour of others. After all, you have so much responsibility and so much control, which means you must know best, right?
How old are you? When I got on the internet in 1992 as a 9th grader, the NSA didn't even officially exist, but I knew full well that the NSA was monitoring foreign and domestic network traffic.
The Room 641A story was on the cover of the New York Times 7 years ago.
I don't think saying "we already knew this" is clever. It's a fact. I knew this. And since I did not have any special access to information, I have to assume that everyone else who paid any attention also knew this.
The amount of information obtained in the "french affair" isn't attainable via "tapping cables".
It entails access to switching equipment, call detail records, etc.
This access is via either of two ways:
- Backdoors
- Agents in place that have access to those systems.
It also entails some very fat "pipes" connecting to those systems.
These aren't new issues regarding security (and I don't mean "cyber security").
Maybe the powers that be need to start mandating more security to that part of the infra-structure.
That, and :
- Auditing of software and hardware (and not just rubber-stamping)
- Increased security for physical assets (data-centers, overland cables, etc...)
- And active enforcment of anti-espionage laws
will mitigate the problem.
What won't solve it, and will certeanly lead to more abuse and friction between states, is just shrugging
it of or brushing it under the carpet.
That makes EU a terrorist state.
I don't think saying "we already knew this" is clever. It's a fact. I knew this. And since I did not have any special access to information, I have to assume that everyone else who paid any attention also knew this.
Yes, and? Enough with the "Why are you surprised?"-type posts. I agree that it was obvious to anyone with a brain, so there's no point in acting like everyone is surprised (more angry after having seen evidence maybe, but not surprised).
Ignorance is a choice
I remember seeing a recruiting brochure for the NSA when I was in college in the late 70's. They touted something like, "Come work for the NSA, we are 10 to 15 years ahead of what is considered state-of-the-art".
Yes, take America for example.
America is currently as much of a threat to the rights and freedoms of everyone else in the world as the people they purport to be watching for.
Why would anybody continue to trust the US when they're acting like a bunch of self entitled assholes who think their rights trump ours?
"So we found out that even though we're giving you all that information for free, you're also spying on us and taking it secretly. That seems kind of redundant. It'd save money if we just let you steal the info yourself instead of handing it over."
Of course you are going to spy on your allies.
I suppose that's why the US government spies on its own citizens. A cowardly way of thinking, but definitely not an excuse thugs would be above using.
Ignorance is a choice
"The French and other EU nations are just talking about weapons of mass destruction too much on the phone?"
Yes, they prevented all the terrorist acts Angela Merkel was planning too.
I am sure the Chionese government is very happy that you are OK with them spying on anything in the U.S. they like and violating any American law they please, as long as it is in accordance with their own laws.
If it were the other way around, the U.S. would just kidnap the suspects, along with some random other people, and torture them on some island without any form of due process (or outsource the torture to a friendly dictatorship in the Middle East). Unfortunately, Europeans are too civilised for such an enterprise, so I am afraid the NSA criminals will simply get away with it (and maybe get some medal from their government).
The TFTP is being phased out in favor of FTP. Everyone is tracked financially, not just (presumed) terrorists.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
get caught spying, get expelled from NoValueIstan. this is the same thing.
otherwise known as shit on the neighbors, they won't like you any more.
something three-year-olds catch onto quickly, but governments never do...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
EU NATO command would side with the US. Any "hint" at prosecuting anyone would result in the fall of a gov, early retirement or a perfect scandal until the domestic surveillance networks where safe.
The courts would need the full protection of their respective security forces.
Think Poland ~ 1980 or around East Germany in 1988...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Especially since the correct response, if we already knew this, should be directed at the MEPs and it is "I told you so".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If you look at the French case it's pretty clear that some people who work for the NSA have been in France.
Some of them are probably still here.
These people, especialy if they are French citizens, should be arrested as soon as possible.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yes UK/US magazines and books where hinting at much from public news by the late 1970's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace was ~1982.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The EU knew in 2001 "on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)" via http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
When I got on the internet in 1992 as a 9th grader, the NSA didn't even officially exist,
Even when I got on the Internet in the early 1980's, in college - and probably still.
Doesn't NSA stand for No Such Agency?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The time when EU started to agree with the US and made SWIFT hand over the data willfully was after the London Subway bombings...
Looks like we will need another attack to convince them to continue handing over the data.... ehehehehehehhehe
That's like saying "the army did what they were chartered to do and we are all surprised?" upon encountering mass graves. Or "Collateral Murder" videos.
Maybe Europe could create a super Navy to defend them from foreign evil like the USA.
Europe doesn't have the money (though France's military is larger than most people realize). On the other hand, the US doesn't have the money either, and the coming decade will see massive cuts to all this sort of thing: military, NSA, spying in general, you can cut all of it with less squawking than cutting social programs, so we will.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hell, even Gary Seven had an NSA ID.
North America is NOT a major tourist destination for Europeans. It's a destination where people travel on business because they have to.
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined, and the EU doesn't have a military chain of command worth speaking about.
So this info "sharing" (aka data fealty) agreement is going to end. Perhaps this is for the best even for the US. As a citizen of the world, I think it's a move in the right direction.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
All I can get from this cold-war type move is that Info Sec will be a hot market in the coming days. Intrusion / CounterIntrusion will be the new game by which big organizations (including governments) thrive or suffer.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
and we are all surprised?
Just curious, how much does the NSA pay you for these posts? I'm broke, the holidays are coming out, and I don't mind stepping on my morals to help the US fuck over the world.
Be seeing you...
The point is that you assumed any significant number of people were paying attention. They werent. They were blissfully ignorant, and a damn notable percentage of them still are.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Get yourself educated, the NSA is a little bit older than the 90s.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Well, he did fix the illegal activities of the previous administration.
He's a law professor.
So now all these stuff has been made as legal as possible.
See, you should be happy that you've lost your privacy legally, aren't you happy?
There was a practice on Usenet by some to put many random but suspicious words in signatures, as a joking attempt to clog up the NSA computers. This goes back to the 80s I think.
This is still in Emacs, for example I just got this output by asking:
global ANZUS fundamentalist CipherTAC-2000 assassinate NWO pipeline Ceridian Area 51 Treasury analyzer Marxist Janet Reno embassy CESID
If it was unconstitutional at any point passing a law that says it's ok makes it no less unconstitutional. Any law professor worth a god damn could tell you that. But this particular law professor will sometimes pass a law as a token gesture or otherwise pass an executive order, and pretend that everything is on the up and up now because he knows there's no way in hell to pass a constitutional amendent making what is being done actually legal.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
I mean, it doesn't have any authentication or authorization methods at all. What's wrong with these Europeans? It's not my fault they didn't guard their router configs...
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined
As surprising as it apparently is to a certain kind of American, not everything in international relations has to be resolved with violence.
The US is committing hostile acts against EU member states, and measures like withdrawing cooperation in these programmes are a reasonable and proportionate response. Trade sanctions would be a more serious step up: no-one would win in the short term if that happened, but the US would probably lose a lot more. There would be direct costs, of course, but also probably irreparable damage to the United States' wider international credibility and reduced cooperation from other nations who were already less predisposed to support the US on matters of mutual interest.
From the outside, it seems very strange that so many people in the US are so proud of their vast military-industrial complex and security services. Here in the UK, the most damaging coverage of the US recently had nothing to do with spying or wars, not that those are winning many friends here. The really sad stuff was shots of pathetic posturing from the political leadership of both the main US parties, juxtaposed with footage of federal workers in DC holding banners saying "Please do your jobs so we can get on with ours", and stories of couples whose wedding days were spoiled, and descriptions of children with very serious health problems who weren't getting experimental drugs that were their only hope because the programmes to trial them were suspended. The idea that such a dysfunctional government, run by politicians so completely out of touch with the basic needs of their own people, should be trusted with anything of significance, security-related or otherwise, just seems bizarre at this point.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Would you be friendly with someone who was spying on you?
If she's cute, I might even be more friendly.
Allies are always potential adversaries on any subject. Or do you expect allies to always have the same agendas and always vote and have the same political views on everything?
I don't mind stepping on my morals to help the US fuck over the world.
This is probably fair, as we have a large group of people dedicated to fucking over the US -- we call them politicians, especially US politicians.
most Americans are, wholly consumed with the mind-rot like Jersey Shore or Facebook.
I have yet to see the proof that mindless entertainment has a negative effect on people using their brains. I suspect it's one of those things that simply sounds reasonable and appeals to our ego, but there's absolutely no proof of. Like sex, drugs, and violence in the media causes those things in real life.
I suspect it's actually that most Americans are consumed with trying to get by, or are too discouraged by the news to try to make a difference. Honestly, where do you start being active? CISPA II, climate change, the NSA, the patriot act, the war on drugs, budget cuts, patent reform, education reform, health care reform, scaling back TSA, scaling back the rest of the government, regulating chewing gum additives, decreasing defense spending, pro choice or pro life debate, electoral college reform, campaign finance reform, the debate of the minute about taxes, EPA standards, the carbon tax, gun control (pro or con), term limits, gerrymandering, third party politics, national ID laws, net neutrality, affirmative action, immigration, etc. No matter what your political beliefs, no matter your news source, it's tough to flip on the news and not come to the conclusion that everything is going to hell. That's kind of the goal of the news. After a while, most people get burned out if they ever cared.
I have no proof that THAT is the reason people are clueless beyond that's why I often ignore politics, but it's more plausible to me than Jersey Shore (which, by the way, ended about a year ago) or other entertainment forms you don't personally like ruining America.
Damn, I should have thought of that. I could get PAID for this?
Seriously, I just put up a quick snarky comment when I saw the post. Now "I" am the one surprised at all the hot and bothered response.
No-one is surprised. Some people are, however, apparently surprised that such "chartered" activity may have repercussions when the other parties find out about it.
Let's just take it as given that nobody is surprised.
Doesn't that make suspending data with the US *more* urgent? They are having high-profile leaks of this information! You don't share private information with people who can't keep it private.
No Souls Allowed
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Where this conversation went off track is this: The NSA *is* supposed to be doing all of this just as foreign SIGINT services are supposed to be doing it.
The real surprise, hence the real problem, is that this spying is not being used purely for State related safety. It is being passed to various other entities to be used for common criminal prosecutions. This is just plain invasive and abusive. It gives WAY too much power to the unethical greedy powermongers.
I recall back in 2011 when Bush made the statement that September 11th happened because of lack of data sharing... and I knew then that THIS was going to be the result. The types of data that were not being shared were common criminal type data. I knew the powermongers would try to get at the State related data through this "lack of data sharing" issue. It is a shame that they succeeded because America is now officially the most Ultimate Police State ever created on this planet.
There is no need for lip service concerning freedom and liberty anymore. It is all gone now. Everything I do, including posting this message, I do with the knowledge that it is being stored, filed, sorted, and categorized somewhere and that at some point, it WILL come back to haunt me. THAT IS NOT FREEDOM. Those are chains.
America will likely survive but I doubt that the police apparatus will. It is not a function that belongs in a civilized society.
Dave
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
This particular vote is non-binding, but the same is true about a lot of votes in national parliaments. You are also wrong to say that the Europarliament "[is] very weak and has limited influence"; actually it has equal power with the European Council over all EU legislation, and it has full veto pwer. For instance, MEPs rejected ACTA last year, meaning that the EU is unable to sign the treaty. It also rejected the software patents directive (remember that?) in 2005. Also because of the principle of separation of powers, MEPs are independent of both the Council and the Commission: there is no "payroll vote" as in most national parliaments, and consequently party discipline is much weaker. The situation is similar to that of US Congress; a US President cannot bank on unqualified support from Congress even when both the House and Senate are controlled by his own party. Finally the European Commission is indeed the executive branch of the EU, but it is NOT "directed by national governments": you are probably thinking of the Council, which is indeed made up of representatives of national governments. You can think of it as a kind of unelected Senate. Commissioners are appointed by national governments of each country, but once appointed they are independent of the government that appointed them.
I see talk about trade sanctions and so on as a way for the EU to "punish" the US.
Germany are leading the way in that regard. I work for a UK company with subsidiaries in Germany. We are looking at moving various services in the cloud (management's bright idea), including Office 365 and one of the cloud based authentication services to tie it all together.
At the moment Germany are pretty much vetoing it. Nothing can be US hosted. That rules out Office 365 for email, anything running on AWS or Azure... unless it's hosted in the EU (or for some data, Germany itself) they tell us it's not compliant with their data protection laws.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I dont think that those kinds of things actually rot the brain. I just believe that people priorities and values are so far out of whack that they spend exponentially more time finding out what shoe brand Snookie is wearing instead of reading the bills being proposed in Congress. They spend more time sharing videos of cats falling into toilets than they do finding 3 opposing articles on the practices of the Federal Reserve, and are appauled at the notion that they doi a little research to see which article appears to be grounded in the most fact. They sign petitions supporting causes they've never heard of, they elect politicians based on the single piece of information they have (the party affiliation letter next to the name on the ballot), and they take as fact clever one-liners from hacks that label themselves journalists.
The fact that these mind-rot shows have high ratings isnt a cause-effect argument. It's a symptom of the level of intellectual strength and honesty of far too many Americans.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
How old are you? When I got on the internet in 1992 as a 9th grader, the NSA didn't even officially exist, but I knew full well that the NSA was monitoring foreign and domestic network traffic.
I knew the NSA existed and was headquartered at fort a Meade some time around the late 70's to early 80's. It really wasn't much of a secret by then. They just didn't do things to draw attention to themselves. However the culture of deney everything continued well after this. I still remember how humorous the article in the Baltimore Sun was about the NSA museum when it opened in 1992 (or there about). The journalist mentioned how difficult it was to find out where it was. I thought he was joking about it's location until I went there myself. There were no signs anywhere and I had to turn off of the main road onto an unmarked gravel road beside an abandoned gas station and drive a couple hundred yards to the unmarked building with a hummer armed with SAMS out front. The author of the article said he had to speak to over a dozen people go find someone who would confirm the museum even existed, several of those also denied the existence of the NSA as well.