Australia Spied On Indonesian President

mask.of.sanity writes "Australia tracked calls by Indonesia's president, documents leaked by defence contractor Edward Snowden reveal. The nation's top spy agency the Australian Signals Directorate tracked phone calls made and received on the mobile phone of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for 15 days in August 2009, and also tracked his wife and inner political circle. Indonesia was Australia's nearest and most important regional neighbour."

Comments

Nearest neighbour

[SirAdelaide]

Australia's nearest neighbour was and is Papua New Guinea. You can almost walk from Papua to Australia at low tide (if you have very long legs).

Second nearest is Tasmania, followed by Indonesia.

Re:Nearest neighbour

[FunkDup]

offering bouncy rides.

When Australia was first settled a few people did indeed try it. I remember a school teacher showing us some drawings of special saddles and other stuff that people had made for the purpose. The problem is that a roo large enough to carry a human is a powerful and aggressive animal, it puts up a hell of a fight. There were at least a couple of people that somehow managed to saddle the roo and then mount the saddle, but in both cases the roo just bashed them into a tree tree or something. The first seven people to try it were all killed. I've never heard of anyone trying it since.

Re:Approved by GCHQ?

[bunkymag]

While there were hints of news around this topic previously, the details that came to light are new (if unsurprising), and the story is front page news in Australia today - see for example ABC News.

False

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone spy agency would *LIKE* to spy on everyone all the time. But various factors stop that.

Budget, you don't have a $10 billion a year budget.
Technical ability, you don't get access to zero day exploits
Route, the comms doesn't traverse routes you can access.
Political reasons, your own democracy can't be spied on, because you'll chose your politicians.
Protection, the people you want to spy on are protected by a foreign spy agency
Motive, you just can't justify spying on people of no importance.
Balance, the damage the spying does far outweighs the information you would obtain.

Likewise every country would secretly like to control all other politicians, even their allies, but the same factors that stop you spying on them prevent that.

When it comes to the NSA though, all of these seem to have been removed. They have the budget, the zero day exploits, the comms crosses the USA. the democracy doesn't know, and there are enough traitors in power to prevent it being stopped, protection is gone, British GCHQ works for the CIA not British Parliament, you put a general 'collect it all' in charge, and the people doing the spying are getting budget increases so they don't feel any balance.

So no, everyone doesn't spy on everyone else. It's largely the NSA spying on the world mostly UK, Aus, Can, NZ, and in turn these 4 tools spying on the rest for the NSA.

Re:Who's on first?

[Joining Yet Again]

1) Non-interventionism was US foreign policy for most of its life - this means not preemptively collecting data about millions of foreigners to use against them;

2) Reciprocal agreements mean the US is effectively spying on its own people.

Try harder.