Court Allowed NSA To Spy On All But 4 Countries

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes A court permitted the NSA to collect information about governments in 193 countries and foreign institutions like the World Bank, according to a secret document the Washington Post published Monday. The certification issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2010 shows the NSA has the authority to "intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets, but any communications about its targets as well," according to the Post's report. Only four countries in the world — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — were exempt from the agreement, due to existing no-spying agreements that the Post highlights in this document about the group of countries, known as "Five Eyes" with the U.S.

Comments

Uh... Yeah?

[CajunArson]

Sorry, but I'm not going to get my panties in a bind that the NSA is spying on other countries' governments considering:
      1. That's the NSA's freakin' job.
      2. Anybody who thinks that the only country in the world that spies is the U.S. is either an idiot or a liar.

Re:Uh... Yeah?

[jeIlomizer]

Um...WHAT?

Yeah, I know. That sentence blew my mind! How can something you do for your job not be okay!? It's impossible!

Re:Uh... Yeah?

[Sockatume]

Forcing Microsoft, Google, et al to spy for the NSA, using secret orders from a secret court, seems rather more problematic.

Re:Uh... Yeah?

[erikkemperman]

Your panties aside, the whole problem here is that NSA is using "national security" as reason for a whole bunch of other things. Like economic, diplomatic and industrial espionage. Which is definitely not the NSA's job, no matter how liberally we interpret their mandate. Expand the acronym, there's a bit of a hint in there.

Explain to me why spying on, say, Angela Merkel or the entire Copenhagen or G20 summits is related to US national security and maybe I'll see your point.

You are probably correct that other countries do similar things (China and Russia come to mind) but you seem to be clueless to the difference in scale.

Finally, your sig: you disbelieve AGW arguments because you think Al Gore is a hypocrite? You're right about that last bit, but the conclusion, to put it mildly, does not follow.

Re:Uh... Yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it also the NSA's job to destroy the American tech industry? Because that's how you destroy the American tech industry.

It all depends on how they do it. They can sit in an embassy, pointing an hypersensitive antenna at "electronic targets", they can dig up cables in foregin countries at night, they can plant their own bugs. No ill effect on american tech industry from this. Quite the opposite, the NSA will need a "tech industry" to purchase bugs and other listening equipment from. If foreigners discover such a bug, they will either have counterintelligence feed it bogus data, or expose it and deliver some sort of official protest. Still no bad effect on american tech industry, unless the "official protest" takes the form of a boycott.

But put just one backdoor into american equipment during export, and your reputation is ruined for a long time. Those that care about such things, will take the covers off and use disassemblers these days. Or simply order from other countries. Sure, the chinese can put backdoors into huawei products - in theory. But are they doing it at the moment? The paranoid can check no matter who the vendor is. The rest will either go by reputation, as in "who has not yet been caught delivering bugged products", or ask questions like "which producing country is least likely to spy on us.

Tip: stay away from countries big enough to have aircraft carriers. The rest can't project power all over the world, and will neither have the budgets for - or the interest in - a large-scale spying operation.

Re:Agreement??

[Errol backfiring]

Well, they did not send an X-Do-Not-Spy HTTP header, so they obviously agreed.

Re:Agreement??

[JasterBobaMereel]

The USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all members of ECHELON and so already share mutual intercepted data, i.e. the NSA does not need to spy on these ....