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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."
"I didn't spy, YOU did!"
"No I didn't, YOU did!"
"Well, okay, but I didn't spy on Bob."
Bob: "Oh yes you did!"
"Shit. Okay. we all fucking spied."
"yip"
Table-ized A.I.
The delay in publishing this story is excessive, even by slashdot standards. Was GCHQ reluctant to release it on their tech news site while the Democracy Forum conference in Bali and CHOGM in Sri Lanka were still ongoing?
I would be far more surprised if Australia wasn't doing this. What's more there would be a real problem if they weren't.
In terms of potential conflict with another sovereign state Indonesia simply has to rank highly for Australia. It is close by, has a large military, and has a history of conflicts with Australia. The risk may be very very low, but like house insurance, the risks of your house burning to the ground are low but you still take out insurance.
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.
I'm a fruit pirate. I bought a watermelon once, and spat the seeds in the back yard. They grew into another watermelon,
Please shoot the man that wrote this comment. Now, I don't claim to agree or disagree with him, but he very clearly needs to die. Again I claim no pro or con to his argument, but he has done considerable damage to this website and needs to be shot
Since ancient times, governments have always spied on one another with varying effectiveness. It's just in our modern times, with the advent of the Internet, governments not only spy on each other but on as many others as they possibly can. Unlike governments of course most people don't have such deep dark secrets and their communications with one another are almost always quite boring. Would it not be nice if all the spies got bored to death by all the mundane things we have to say to one another?
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
You're not particularly thoughtful are you?
Killing him won't destroy his documents. It's certain he's got multiple backups with multiple people.
Why would the US government risk egg on their faces and a further highlight the degradation of American Ideals for nothing?
Indonesia was Australia's nearest and most important regional neighbour.
So has Australia swallowed it whole like a fratboy scarfing a goldfish and I just missed the news?
You guys just don't get it. You're the very thing you claim to despise: The government comes and squishes free speech because it's unpopular... but then here you are, doing the same damn thing. The government isn't suppressing us: WE are suppressing us. We're plugging our ears and singing "Glory Glory Hallelujah."
You have the right to free speech, you don't have the right to force anyone to listen to it. You got downmoded, this isn't jackbooted thugs stepping on your throat. This is the collective public saying they think you're a moron and have no interest in listening to the drivel coming out of you. The paranoid schizophrenic hobo shouting on the street corner about the CIA using woodpeckers to control the russians has the right to say his nonsense. That doesn't mean I have to listen to it.
There are quite a few reasons not to kill Snowden.
First and foremost: It's pointless. The cat's out of the bag and unless he's REALLY stupid, he's got some kind of dead man switch going. Like "if I vanish, publish that crap". Possibly he even informed the relevant places that this is the case. Or maybe he informed them and is just bluffing. And even if not, the damage is already done, there is precious little he could add to it anyway. At any rate, killing him won't accomplish anything beneficial for the US government. But there are some decisive drawbacks to it.
First, he's not in some insignificant backwater -stan country, he's in Russia. Remember that speck on the map? If not, ask your daddy, he'll tell you about them Russkies and how they used to be the other side of the nuke equilibrium. Also their special forces ain't what you're used to fighting. They're not some half trained religious nutjobs with outdated guns, they're top trained completely insane nutjobs with modern equipment who don't even ponder whether "collateral damage" could possibly have some kind of political impact. The kind of insane nuts that flood a theater full of hostages with nerve gas 'cause some terrorists might be inside. Not quite the kind of enemy you really want to fight over an insignificant nuisance.
And then of course there's the other reason: Public opinion. The US government already has a pretty bad rep, both with its citizens and with people abroad, but even with various governments that got pissed by having their cells and other forms of communication tapped and sniffed into. And then the US goes and kills the person who exposed it. Not only will it instantly raise the question why, and whether he had something even more dangerous to say, it also destroys the last form of goodwill the US still have. Technically, the US, and especially its government, would lose the last bit of credibility and trust it might have with some parts of the world.
In other words, the best thing the US can do right now is to simply wait for it to blow over and possibly start a war or two to distract the world.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or Australia goes on a drinking binge again...
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.
Linky for those who missed it, last time this happened.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Enlighten me: exactly what demands did Snowden make? The man is an idealist - nobody will disagree - but it is ridiculous to label him a terrorist for whistle-blowing things the government is doing. If what your government is doing terrifies you, I'd argue the problem is with your government, not the whistle-blower.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Zoom in! Enhance! Zoom in some more here! Enhance! Zoom in on that reflection! Enhance! Zoom in! Ehance! Rotate around so we can see his face in the reflection instead of the back of his head! Enhance! We've got him!
While the most frequent reaction here is "Well, duh!" (and I must admit it was my first reaction too) that's not the point.
The point is that my government is doing that, and I strongly disapprove of it. Your government is doing that and you (perhaps) strongly disapprove of it. If we have the luck to live in democracies, it's our fucking duty to do something about it.
In fact the only thing that will surprise me is if it later turns out that spying on each others presidents is all these two countries did.
I'd be even more surprised to find out that Australia had a president. Unless the Indonesians mistook the President of the Australian Senate for an important political leader.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
You and that cold fjord guy should totally hook up. You've got so much in common, I'm sure you'd hit it off straight away.
I am still not convinced that girlintraining and cold fjord are different people. Cold fjord seems to have a style of being 'lucid with possible poor citation' while girlintraining is longwinded, pulls reasonable sounding things straight out of her ass and tends to be far more eloquent.
Both push this similar mishmash of ideas, and just like the shill accounts are quickly modded up to +5 only to be modded back into oblivion the next day.
"Nothing Snowden has leaked has shown anything that hasn't being going on prior and since WWII."
Most of these programs began in 2011, the internet mass surveillance began in 2002, was stopped in 2005, and restarted in 2007. The technology to mass spy on everyone on the planet didn't exist even in 1995, let alone 1945, GCHQ's 'Tempora' only began in 2011 and is still waiting a law to make it legal. New Zealands mass surveillance officially only began in June this year.
These programs weren't even running during the cold war on the democratic side of the wall. Stasi and KGB had a go at it, but the technology wasn't there for true remote mass surveillance.
So no, it's new.
The fact that modern democracies have these grey-shaded institutions and make use of them to spy on each other is something that we probably will have to live with, and maybe even appreciate. As long as the targets for the espionage is large centralized power centres, like government, the military or organized, violent groups. In some way I think that we need, as in Iain Banks culrure-books, someone to step in in "special circumstances." Assassination, revolt or similar should of course rather NOT be the job of our intelligence services. Think if MI6 and CIA hadn't instigated a coup in Iran in 1953 against one of the regions first democratic government? How would the middle east have looked today?
But the really big wrong that Snowden has revealed is mass-surveillance of the entire population. This kind of technological spying can only be used for one thing: anti-democratic, cost-heavy practises, targeted against the press, grass-root and the very population that the system was intended to protect.
"The facts are the facts; he's a threat to national security, right or wrong. "
You got that wrong. He's a threat to the National Security _Agency_!
National security is quite OK.
Who said that? The prevailing opinion is that it was some variant of fentanyl. I strongly suspect you're joking, but I'll humor you. Xenon wouldn't make any sense for a number of reasons. Some of the hostage-takers used gas masks, but they weren't self contained breathing systems with their own oxygen supply from any report I've seen. If anything had been used that lowered the oxygen content of the air, the gas masks would have been ineffective. Also, reports are that hostages smelled the gas. Xenon is odorless. Also, Xenon is very dense compared to regular air, it could displace oxygen, sure, but you would have to fill the theater from the bottom up with a massive amount of it. Symptoms of the affected after the event are also not consistent with simple oxygen deprivation.
I remember the outrage in 1987 when Jonathon Pollard was caught spying on the US for Israel. A simpler, more naive time perhaps, but the harsh reality of the World is that information is power. Nations are willing to forego an occasional bit of moral outrage in their Machiavellian quest to retain and grow their influence.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Well. I don't think you are a troll. I think you are just way off. So I will respond.
> can we not manage to deal with this one, simple, irritation?
Nope.
> This is an honest question; I simply do not understand why we're holding out on this one guy, when we've sent in Seal Team Six to give people who have done less in economic damage severe and sudden lead poisoning and then dumped their body uncermoniously in the ocean where it'll never be found.
The world cheers if Seal Team Six caps pirate kidnappers or OBL. However, the world has already decided who the good guy is in Snowden vs. NSA. I suggest you read some publications and polls outside US for a change. It's not hard. You have Internet access.
Even the pressure on Hong Kong and Russia to extradite him cost US reputation, let alone your hare-brained ideas of assassination. Even US cannot wipe away globally popular icons. Not to mention the fact that the Russians have better radars (can't drop in ST6) than Pakistan :-).
I know the economy is tough. You aren't applying for a job at the offices of Peter King or Michelle Bachmann, are you?
> he wants to be a martyr
Whatever gave you that idea? He never said that. Don't let your imagination run wild to support your fevered fantasies. He asked for a pardon.
> What about making him a martyr is so unappealing
The international backlash. A few years ago, I would have also said: The Fifth Amendment.
> this isn't a moral judgment on whether he's right or wrong
Oh, I think you are well past making moral judgments.
> When a hungry bear takes a run at you
On what planet is he a hungry bear? He is not even deciding what articles get published now. The journalists are doing that. Next, you will be calling on capping them too, I guess.
Do you think that if a dissident fled a third world country to US and exposed secret service overreach of his country to NY Times, would you say that the said country ought to cap him too?
> he's done more damage economically than they have
He did? I thought that the "Ha Ha. We can do whatever we want because no one is ever going to find out" attitude that is damaging the economy.
If we find out tomorrow from a Chinese dissident that Beijing has commandeered Huawei gear for espionage, would that be the dissident's fault or Beijing's, for lost sales?
> why aren't we doing our signature move on this guy?
Wow. Just wow.
> but we're all thinking it.
No. I'd say, just a few people like you, at least over here.
> how do you think all those Jews got exterminated? They voted for Hitler. And then they stopped talking. They let the government do whatever it wanted
Who is the Hitler here again? You mean if only Germans rabidly demanded for more assassinations like you, Nazis would not be in power?
Anyway, you parade around with a "Cap Snowden" banner in the real world and lets see how people will speak up... to you anyway.
> The government comes and squishes free speech because it's unpopular... but then here you are, doing the same damn thing.
Ah, the irony. The fascistic lady who calls for extra legal assassination of a non-violent dissident who leaked information to respected journalistic institutions thinks her free speech is in question because she got... oh! the horror... down-modded. Do you even know what free speech is?
Calm down lady. NSA overreached. This is not a subjective opinion. The guy who wrote the patriot act authorizing NSA thinks so. The guy who invented the WWW also thinks so. There are enough US Senators and Congressman who voiced support for him, even though everyone wishes it never needed to come to this in the first place.
Now, as a civilian, I could not care less if US wiretaps diplomats and presidents of other countries. But the point of these leaks is to puncture holes in the argument that the reason we need to tolerate global electronic surveillance apparatus and a domestic Soviet style surveillance state, is to defend us against terrorism. Greenwald and others are demonstrating that it is not the case.