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Edward Snowden Says NSA Engages In Industrial Espionage
Maow writes "Edward Snowden has been interviewed by a German TV network and stated that the NSA is involved in industrial espionage, which is outside the range of national security. He claims that Siemens is a prime example of a target for the data collection. I doubt this would surprise AirBus or other companies, but it shall remain to be seen what measures global industries take (if any) to prevent their internal secrets from falling into NSA's — and presumably American competitors' — hands." AirBus is a good example of a company that has experienced spying from both sides.
There has existed a perception that large corporate compilers of information reluctantly acquiesced to the full might of national security orders and subpoenas..
What's in it for me? is a sweet, sweet incentivizer, too.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Can be found here http://www.tagesschau.de/snowden-interview-deutsch100.pdf
The French was epic in industrial espionage until the Chinese caught up.
Never to be left behind, the United States jumped on the wagon - and applied the lesson learned from both the French and the Chinese, the United States of America has perfected the art of industrial espionage to such degree that no one, not even the Chinese, can ever dream of matching their success.
But unfortunately, 99% of the American corporations don't get to enjoy the fruit of the industrial espionage. Only HUGE industrial complexes (such as Boeing, Google, Corning, Citibank) get to benefit from the gems NSA manage to gather.
That is why, even today, most of the SMEs in America are still struggling, but on the other hand, those HUMONGOUS corporations grow leaps and bounds.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If you accept that argument, then all economic activity falls under the umbrella of national security, and the Constitution goes out the window.
Oh, I see what you did there.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Get ready for leaks about NSA using spy data to short stocks on major stock exchanges around the world! Who said crime didn't pay?
But only Timothy engages in systematic linkbaiting & selection of the summaries that try to sensationalize what everyone already knows.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
If America with all our resources can't work out some cheap knock-off without resorting to industrial espionage, we deserve to fail.
Let's be honest though, the NSA serves only a small portion of our population and sees the rest of us as their adversary.
Fair enough, but you can't get upset the next time China is caught spying on U.S. companies.
It's a free market all right, it's a free "to spy on everybody and steal their secret" market !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What does this exposition have to do with helping preserve the privacy of citizens?
Well that depends, if you got a situation where America is artificially taking work away from other nations by simply stealing their knowledge, product designs and so forth then that might mean those nations become less stable and more likely to want to hurt America when they find out the only reason they're poor and unemployed is because America stole from them.
Not to mention the harm this does for it's ability to partake in international politics, how silly will it look telling China off for manipulating it's currency to it's benefit when America has similarly been artificially propping it's economy up simply by stealing from everyone else? It's a dangerous game as if America wants to get in a race to the bottom it's going to lose hard because countries like India and China will be able to cope with reduced living standards far more than Americans will be able to without rising up and rioting. Those countries also have far less scruples about stealing from the US. You think China will now have any reservations about hacking US companies? It was supposedly doing so before but now it doesn't even need to care if it gets caught as it can just say it's fair play whilst America if it wants to be taken seriously still needs to retain some semblance of decency.
Or in other words, engaging in this sort of subversive manner against foreign states might be exactly the sort of thing that starts World War 3 creating such instability and such threat to the US in the first place.
I once worked for one of the companies involved in the JSF project. As soon as we knew that Lockheed Martin had a web app for performing a certain task, I was asked by my boss to get the entire web app's jar files, reverse engineer it, and tell him how good or bad LM's implementation was. The company for which I worked then went on to steal LM's implementation and incorporate it into its own commercial product.
Which, and this is the best part, they then sold. To Lockheed Martin.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
That's not what the stolen information is used for. It just saves US companies from having to spend money on R&D to develop their own solutions, or helps them win contracts overseas.
Besides which the NSA made sure that American products are compromised by weakening security protocols and not notifying companies about backdoors. Worse still since Snowden was able to gain access to all this information relatively easily it is probably safe to assume that foreign agencies have their own spies collecting it too, so know all about the NSA backdoors and vulnerabilities they discovered.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This just gets more and more rich as time goes. So what if every spy agency does it? That does not make it right. It is time for ordinary people to figure out whether they want this kind of action being done by their governments.
I am very happy Snowden is choosing to release this material one drop at a time. It is like Chinese water torture against the intelligence apparatus. Please, keep the love coming!
I think after the Murrah bombing, 9/11, and the marathon bombing, we have established that the security agencies are not capable of stopping actual terrorist activity against American citizens. Not when every supposed thwarting is really just an FBI set-up. So it is time for us to really consider what these agencies are actually doing, since they are apparently not stopping terrorism.
Cute, but no.
Spying on one uncooperative American company to help a favored American competitor wouldn't really help national security as much. The balance of economic power between nations would be unchanged.
Offhand, I don't know of any section of the Constitution that would be affected here. The Constitution doesn't actually afford any protection for foreign nations, but I'm sure the hordes of wishful thinkers will insist otherwise.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
German sender ARD/NDR has now published the english interview in OV after substantial criticism.
Being deceptive and manipulative works out great when everyone thinks you're legit. Once you're outed as a conniving liar though, the consequences aren't always fun. I suspect the NSA/USA's 'spy-on-everyone-including-your-friends' tactic is in the process of backfiring spectacularly.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The idea is that if everything is released at once then the story will ruffle some feathers for only a few weeks/months and die out quickly.
By releasing their dirty secrets one at a time and once a month, the story can be kept in the media for years (or so Snowden says). This ensures the pressure is kept on the NSA and government to do something. Though, so far the crooks are trying to justify everything they do and are quite defiant in defending their practices.
It's funny to hear U.S gov and confused Americans say the Chinese are stealing technology, a discussion and argument that bears no logic whatsoever, but at the same time they're doing everything they can to get information and secrets on trade, technology etc. while saying it's to protect the U.S. Hilarious.
I recall Canadian Echelon operators spying on their US counterparts to win a grain trade deal with China in the 1970s.
Yes. Shooting the messenger is always a good idea.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
It is probably pretty easy to 'justify' this type of national security corporate espionage in the name of national security. This type of corporate espionage was probably able to help us create the Stuxnet virus as that used vulnerabilities in some pretty specific hardware to do it's job and the companies themselves are not always going to help out the US Government, especially if they are a foreign entity. So they could easily say there is a national security need for this type of information collection as it could be used for similar reasons, though there are plenty of other reasons I'm sure we could come up with to 'justify' it too. I mean, this is a country where we are able to 'justify' the need to collect everyone's phone call information even with nothing to show for it.
What will happen with international treaties related with intellectual property when one of the main proposals of them officially don't respect the intellectual property of te companies from the other signers? Should be repelled all around the world as bad jokes?
I find that there is no shortage of false things that "everyone already knows" on Slashdot.
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
Sure we can, that's what makes this politics.
I remember reading a story, which may well have been apocryphal, about organized crime and foreign agencies exploiting the old FBI carnivore e-mail intercept system to use for extortion and industrial espionage.
It seems to reason that if the NSA is compromising telecommunications protocols, having routers forward copies of data, stuffing radio transmitters in computer equipment, etc., then some enterprising third parties are going to piggy back on it for their own purposes. That, and the NSA can't possibly be the only players in town undermining the integrity of the system. It seems to me that we've enabled a new class of criminal information enterprise, not just by or for the NSA.
Almost, more accurately it passed from the NSA to select insiders who individually claim the technology and screw profits out of other Americans with stolen patents. Industrial espionage, criminal act and extortion espionage, business insider trading espionage all having nothing at all to make any country safer and everything to do with enriching select political insiders. Should it trigger cyber warfare the only question is will it be profitable for the select few.
Once you accept that sort of espionage then fuck it, only one small step to consider foreign banks your piggy bank and start embezzling money straight out of them. Three cheers for the good old USA for working so hard to trigger global economic warfare.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Regarding China, the most useful information probably relates to contract negotiation. Stemming the tide of Chinese corporate purchases and Chinese oil company investment in Africa and so forth, but also allowing companies like Apple to better negotiate terms with their manufacturers.
But in general there have been a lot of military deals that European firms for example were set to win because they'd put in the best bid (objectively so) only for the deal to be cancelled last minute, sometimes after being signed citing "corruption" only for American firms to be handed the deal on a platter without restarting the tender process (which is what would happen if corruption was a real concern).
If during take over and purchase negotiations and so forth America is able to get e-mails saying things like "We'll take $250,000 for the company but let's push for $500,000" then the American firms know they can hold out until that minimum and not risk losing the deal giving them an artificial advantage in negotiations.
There are many examples, and I don't pretend it is just America doing it, I think the UK and France at minimum do a lot of it too, but it's not really a good idea long term as you're just legitimising the practice and it's simply then just a race of who does it best, until someone loses, then when someone loses a race that shouldn't even have been happening in the first place they'll get angry, and get their own back another way.
It's just not a good idea building global distrust like this.
"The difference being the American armaments were received before the revolution, and when it was legal."
But that's what you're talking about now? You talked about Siemens selling to them once sanctions are lifted. There's no difference.
"The point being that intelligence agencies can have a legitimate interest in commercial activity besides theft of trade secrets."
Of course they can, but that's not what espionage is, and espionage is the accusation here.
Well that depends, if you got a situation where America is artificially taking work away from other nations by simply stealing their knowledge, product designs and so forth then that might mean those nations become less stable and more likely to want to hurt America when they find out the only reason they're poor and unemployed is because America stole from them.
What have we done to China so far?
Developing countries are known for bootstrapping themselves by stealing IP from more developed nations. (The US did it when it was a developing nation: look at the history of textiles.) China has been doing it to the US for years, and our response has not been WWIII, but rather to work on gradually improving IP protections.
I think he's trying to make the argument that if corporate espionage counts as "national security" then so does any NSA interference in "commerce," which due to the absurdly broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause means that the NSA can do literally anything at all.
It's not actually that big a leap, I think.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you accept that argument, then all economic activity falls under the umbrella of national security, and the Constitution goes out the window.
Only if you accept that it's okay to toss the Constitution out the window any time "national security" is invoked. Granted that that is the position of the current (and last several) administrations, but that doesn't mean it's true.
However, I think it clearly is true that all economic activity of sufficient scope and scale is relevant to national security. And, actually, I think the NSA even has a legitimate role in assuring the security of large-scale US economic activities.
I once worked on a project with serious implications to the security of a major piece of the US payments infrastructure, and the NSA provided oversight for the project, reviewing all designs, double-checking the implementation and generally providing a lot of really high-quality advice on how to make sure it was properly secured. It was really helpful, and I greatly appreciated their assistance. Unfortunately, the NSA has apparently decided in the last few years to ignore that part of their mission -- increasing US infrastructure security -- in favor of being able to spy on everything, and so switched to trying to pre-compromise all of our most important security tools.
I don't care too much one way or the other about the NSA spying on foreign corporations to help their US-based competitors, mostly because I assume that everyone does it so telling the NSA not to would just tilt the playing field against US companies. But it really pisses me off that the NSA appears to be actively working against the security of US companies.
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Right, though I'd add it's not only the administration that takes that position. Congress and the courts have been willing accomplices, and an alarming number of ordinary citizens think "national security" is more important than "civil liberties." What should and should not be justified under the rubric of "national security" is still a separate discussion from the scope under which that rubric applies.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"What have we done to China so far?"
http://www.wired.com/wiredente...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...
Given that China has the second largest output for research papers nowadays I'd imagine there's quite a lot for the US to learn from them even if they are stereotyped as a backwater state which the US could learn nothing of value from.
a world government for the .000001%
hmmm,
85 people own as much as the bottom 350000000 people on earth combined - supposedly - (not half the planets wealth as reported because of course the bottom 350000000 people don't own that much) but still a metric fuck ton of planetary resources control. :)
85 divided by 7 billion =~ 0.00000121%, i think you over estimate the size of the world government there.
Not to mention further revelations exposes the lies of excuses from each previous round of revelation.
This, here, is the real trick.
There has been a lot of this:
1) Assert 'A' ...and so on...
2) Government denies 'A'
3) Prove 'A'. Assert 'B'.
4) Government admits to needing to do 'A', but says it would never do 'B'.
5) Prove 'B'. Assert 'C'.
The fact that the government FELL FOR IT for so very long this summer and fall says a lot about their arrogance. Well that and how little they know about what he actually took.
I am fervently hoping Greenwald, et al expose enough proof of US crimes against other countries to totally and effectively destroy TPP and any other secret hell-spawn akin to it.