Slashdot Mirror
EU Parliament: Other Countries Spy, But Less Than the UK, US
itwbennett writes "An E.U. Parliament survey of 5 member states found that 4 of the 5 (U.K., France, Germany and Sweden) engage in bulk collection of data. Only the Netherlands doesn't, but that's not because it doesn't want to. In fact, The Netherlands is currently setting up an agency for that purpose. France, which summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain allegations that the NSA spied on Alcatel-Lucent, ranks fifth in the world in metadata collection. And Sweden? Its National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) is alleged to have been running 'upstreaming' operations (tapping directly into the communications infrastructure as a means to intercept data) for the collection of private data — collecting both the content of messages as well as metadata of communications crossing Swedish borders through fibre-optic cables from the Baltic Sea."
I still don't see the problem. Spying on foreign countries has happened since they were invented, it's entirely legal and expecting it not to happen strikes me as hopelessly naive.
The bastions of civilization are threatening my rights to privacy and it seems to be a systemic problem across many nations and interests.
The question I have is, if 'everyone' (almost) is doing it, when do us sheeple get to say 'no' and have it count for something?
I ask this question, and nothing seems to change. I vote for people I see as less persecuting, and the problems get worse. My fellow compatriots get angry, protest and demonstrate, try to keep the issue in the light, and we are largely ignored. Fellows that whistleblow are retaliated against, persecuted, and no positive action taken.
When do we get to remind politicians that they are servants of the people and that the government should act in our interest, not its own?
<metadata>Dear NSA, I'm not having subversive thoughts, so please don't interpret my post that way.</metadata>
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I really couldn't give a fsck what one government does to another government. They all suck.
What I DO care about is my own corrupt, power-mad government spying on me and my fellow citizens as if we are all suspect.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
How dare you do... exactly what we do but with more money!
Get your act together Sweden. We expect better from you.
The problem isn't so much that countries engage in spying. That's to be expected, really. The problems are in 1) how they go about doing it, 2) whom they're targeting and 3) what data they're collecting. So if they're 1) using backdoors in consumer products without use of warrants, 2) targeting members of the public without necessarily having good cause to do so and 3) collecting everything they possibly can, then there's a big problem. Spying on other countries or persons of interest with good cause and/or warrants is what these agencies generally do. What the NSA and GCHQ in particular are doing is far more than this and far more invasive for what seems like little meaningful return and at the risk of their reputations and their respective countries' reputations.
I still don't see the problem. Spying on foreign countries has happened since they were invented, it's entirely legal and expecting it not to happen strikes me as hopelessly naive.
Spying on citizens of foreign countries is still a violation of the human rights convention. It's not legal!
Spying on foreign diplomats is a violation of Vienna convention, tapping into foreign government networks is an aggression (act of war, US. govt. said so a while ago) not legal without prior declaration of war (not all declarations of war are legal either).
Sure "legal" is hard to define, but let's just say there's nothing honest, fair or acceptable about spying on your allies!
On topic, I don't see a problem with having some level of surveillance, but it must be transparent!
If you tap cables or whatever, let the public know and make sure access, disclosure and queries are all subjected to public court hearings.
Then it's fair, honest and acceptable, let's call that "legal".
Wait what? It's no secret that the reason FRA exists is to tap the underwater cables carrying almost all of Russia's traffic and hand it over to the US. There was an uproar against the creation of FRA in Sweden - but it was met with statements from our prime minister to the effect of "It's best for us all if we don't talk about this anymore".
Earlier documents put in context with recent revelations show that Sweden has been systematically wiretapping Russia on behalf of the United States. This is clear after putting a number of previous questionable agreements and developments in context today.
http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/07/documents-sweden-wiretapping-russias-international-traffic-for-the-nsa/
it's in my head
France, which summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain allegations that the NSA spied on Alcatel-Lucent, ranks fifth in the world in metadata collection.
The only reply due to France is that they must first produce Edward Snowden - in the flesh - so that he can be taken into custody by the US Government. Otherwise the information is to be treated as a baseless allegation. The same can apply for any country or any source.
Never mind that we haven't heard from despotic countries like China and Russia aside from them being worse to their own for much longer.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As more than 90% of all e-mails are spam-mails, will the NSA & Co. also collect all of that trash? Or have they good filters at hand to avoid filling their storage capacities with junk? What filters are they employing? If their filters are good, and the monitor *all* national and/or worldwide traffic, they could do us all a big favour and filter out that junk! Or even better: identify and eliminate the sources of this nuisance. Thanks in advance!
Spying used to be a punctual stuff. You could only do as much as you could field agents, double agents, and other folk. Maybe a tapping ehre and there. But with the systematic bulk spying the NSA did, spying become a liability for the economies and diplomatic relationship between countries. It also has a shilling effect. Will me critizing the war in Irak bite me in the ass, later ? In a world where such data is lost among a sea of other, probably not and I can be a voice among other. In a world of systematic saving that in a DB for political and linking to real ID and spying purpose ? maybe (*).
(*) replace me with any young person wanting later to go into politic, or being in a firm attempting to contract bid or whatever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Spying" is misleading when what we're really talking about it mass surveillance.
Its one thing to say "Countries have always spied on each other", when it used to mean having one or two "diplomats" at the embassy and debriefing businessmen when they came back from trips to X. Its a very different affair when intelligence gathering means everyone in the country is effectively targetted (70m phone calls a month is hardly discretely targetting a country).
Mass surveillance is to spying as martial law is to policing. Instead of spying for some slight advantage, slightly corrupting negotiations between friendly countries, we now have NSA ops dictating the landscape: the communications tools used worldwide are by default cracked; the US is setting out to use this advantage to screw its partners, and they're _not_ happy about it. "Business as usual" cannot continue on these terms, and some readjustment is being demanded.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Don't kid yourself that the EU didn't know the NSA was hoovering their data. They knew (with the probable exception of bugging their embassies), and they were doing approximately the same thing.
Only ... as long as that was done in secret, only a handful of intelligence professionals, senior military officers, senior civil servants, and politicians charged with intelligence oversight knew about it (and in particular the public and parliament didn't). And such people see data-collection in a different light than the public, because they depend on it to do their jobs.
It was also readily deniable by politicians (in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary), and isolated cases where evidence did surface could be dismissed as "incidents". So it didn't have a big political dimension. As it is now, John Q. Public (who never cared before) has suddenly found out and decided he resents it. This leaves the responsible politicians embarrassed and in need to be seen to respond to it (and do something about it). In other words: it all got a political dimension.
That's the downside of Snowden's revelations, and that's what's meant by the claim that those revelations are "damaging".
My personal guess is that it will lead to a tightening of rules (for the next 10 years) for data storage by Internet companies and will cause the bill for tapping communications in the EU, Brazil, and other countries to go up and the volume and quality to go down somewhat.
What will definitely not happen is that this sort of thing will stop. Just consider: there are milions of muslims within the EU with ties to a range if Islamic nations, and if even 0.1% of them radicalise you have a steady supply of terrorists. And given the EU's openness (not to mention its porous borders) you are going to have international terrorists within your borders.
The EU knows this full well and also knows that it doesn't have the wide signals interception coverage the US has. So their intelligence professionals will advise their governments that it's in their national interest to cooperate with the US and not to make massive data collection by the US (or even data-sharing) unreasonably hard or even impossible.
Only ... the NSA must in return accord them the courtesy of staying off the front page. Nobody likes to be embarrassed, and politicians can afford it less than most.
As a country that largely depends on other countries, the US should be quite concerned with their worldwide image. In the past few month they have shown that they cannot be trusted with anything. This will bite them in the a** rather sooner than later. And even if they really wanted to change something (which they don't), it's too late for that anyway as it is incredibly hard to rebuild trust and reshape public opinion. Germany said, US-German friendship cannot be taken for granted anymore, China wants to deAmericanize the world. If worldwide industry outside of the US feels the same, the US will slowly become irrelevant.
If it's China spyng or cracking into you US systems.
You see a problem if it's some aspie looking for the hidden proofs of Area51.
You see a problem when you think that some NSA insider may be giving information from your internal secret governments to, for example, Russia.
It's odd how "Everyone else does it!" is only an ecuse for the USA's spying.
"Well, the USA does it, so why is use doing the same thing a problem" is never going to work for, for example, Snowden, Manning, Julian Assange, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, et al.
It is as if they were the two countries who defeated the Nazis in World War II. It's almost like every other western country collapsed, and only the countries with the best intelligence and geographic advantage to apply it (i.e., water) avoided being occupied by Nazis.
I don't know how many people here have read "Between Silk and Cyanide," but it is worth reading. This system we are learning about (Echelon) pre-dates 9/11 and stems from the lessons that U.S. grandparents received during World War II.
What would have happened if Merkel or Hollande had spied on the phone of Obama? How would the US react to that? Interested to hear your opinion!
The thing people forget is that with so many nations doing the spying, everyone is a foreigner to many of those nations. Even if your home country isn't spying on you, the neighbours are. And if they find anything interesting about your traffic, they let your home country know about it through "bi-lateral security agreements".
i.e. Every country spies on it's own citizens by proxy.
Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Germany. France. The UK.
There don't seem to be any exceptions. Over-reaching spy agencies seem to be the norm right now, despite their illegality.
Welcome to the NWO.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Either one of those countries, or a private enterprise, based in say, the Cayman Islands, could take their own data collection and make it completely public. What's good for the goose, is good for the gander. Then we'd have full dossiers on every politician in the world, phone records, credit info, criminal records, etc. And more and more citizens would be beset with corporations abusing their data in offensive ways. We might finally see a majority recognizing the value of privacy laws.
France is fifth in suveillance ranking, it is also fifth in GDP ranking. US is first in both ranking
That reminds me a Jean-Jacques Rousseau observation that government is the luxury of the People. The more wealth a country produce, the more a government may grow strong and oppressive.
With this idea in mind, it is not a surprise to see that GDP and surveillance ranking overlap. The interesting points are the country that rank high in surveillance but not in GDP. That suggests and odd situation.
When we see Snowden captured, then one can figure out the substance of his allegations and quantify his damage(hint: it's more than you think). In addition, one can also take care of the loose ends - the people that aided and abetted him. It will be day worthy of celebration, much like the capture of OBL.
Of course, someone would rather modbomb me into oblivion instead of replying - since I have offended the Hive Mind by disagreeing with the purpose and intent of his actions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The US would react in a way that would not be picked up by the public. We wouldn't hear about it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
gosgog:
Hell everybody spies, it goes back to the tribal days...one tribe wanting to know what the other one is up to....one country wanting to know what the others are up to,
neighbors, one wanting to know what's going on next door, lovers, & husbands wanting to know who else is screwing whom.
This whole stupid bit is Papers, T.V., radio etc., found another angle to sell what they think is news. Just more BULLSHIT to waste time on is all.
We aim to find out if their is a problem by spying and therefore only spying when there is a problem would pretty much mean never spying until after bombs start falling.