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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.
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
No witnesses, no crime.
Faultless logic..
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:
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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.
Didn't really expect Sweden to be part of something like this, as those Nordic countries are usually quite bullshit-free.
It is more than Sweden. -- Supo wants expanded net surveillance powers
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The NSA program is technically signed into law. There's a warrant signed by the proper authority (the FISA Court).
It is fucking secret, which might be what you meant, but it is technically within the letter of US Law. Whether the FISA Court was supposed to grant that warrant is a totally different issue.
BTW, I actually suspect that the next set of leaks will reveal that a) the Swedes and Brits are the only ones who did not lie through their teeth to this committee, and b) that most of the European nations use NSA data a lot in tracking terrorists.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that collecting data like this is a core function of government.
We want the government to have enough data on it's people to tell which ones are breaking the law, which means they need a lot of phone metadata. There are no courts that would say that phone metadata is so private it can't be used in investigations. There are plenty that say you shouldn't have a database with everyone's metadata in it just because some of people will turn out to be criminals, but collecting data like this is in many ways the entire reason we have governments.
Of course they're ignoring the French protest.
The French are the last people on earth who can lecture anyone on protecting privacy. The first time France organized a protest like this Le Monde reported that the French government was worse then the US on the next god-damn day. Literally. Only July 3rd the French protested US PRISM, and on the 4th Le Monde reported they were worse.
Here's a couple links because the October bitch-session has overwhelmed the July bitch-session in Google:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/50398/public-support-grows-for-snowden-in-europe-germany-and-france-should-offer-nsa-whistleblower-asylum
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23178284
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.
Now when will the set of leaks happen that target and identify Snowden and his helpers? Now that is information that would be deserving to be put in the light.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.