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German Vice Chancellor: the US Threatened Us Over Snowden
siddesu sends this report from The Intercept:
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. 'They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,' Gabriel said.
You cannot implicitly denounce invasive intelligence while enjoying its ill-gotten fruits.
I can understand why they might have refused to take the risk. But it hardly seems like a smart idea to allow a country we value to be destabilized over one man. What affects the one, affects us all. If Germany became destabilized due to our childish antics, it wouldn't end well. Best case scenario, the euro zone would collapse. Worst case, nuclear power plants would be pilfered.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Without getting into the moral implications of such a threat by the US, this is the cost Germany et. al. pay when letting the US foot the defense bill. The US defense budget pays for a large portion of the defense of the first world. If they don't want to be beholden to the whims of the US, don't depend on the US for defense.
By trying to prevent its allies from giving Snowden asylum, the USA has forced him to take asylum with a relatively unfriendly nation, Russia.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
they aren't outsourcing it, the situation with defense was forced upon them, and who wants a fully armed german military? Europe burned down twice because of that.
We should give Mr. Snowden a medal for providing the information. It is blatantly obvious that the full power of the US government would make any fair trial impossible. And the really stupid part of it all is that alerts and warnings work both ways. If we deprive Germany of terrorist information you can bet that Germany would also not notify the US if their agencies picked up any information about an attack against an American interest. Further is the US wants to win the war against terror we have a simple way to make the Arab region very interested in hunting down terror nuts. Simply block 100% of the oil shipments out of the mid-east. That would cause every government and person of power in the region to eagerly hunt down terrorists with a great zeal. We could also seize all assets held outside of the mid-east. We could also keep the mid-east from importing anything at all.
The US, a country that couldnt prevent 9/11, shut down its own government twice, couldnt stop the Boston Marathon bombers, couldnt protect against the fort hood shooting, cant pass legislation to protect itself from school shootings, and cant prosecute detainees in or close the prison at guantanamo bay is threatening to withhold intelligence information from the country it routinely wiretaps and spies on anyway?
im sure if Germans knew about this, the question of the day would be, "Who the fuck cares."
Good people go to bed earlier.
... is for revenge and the mistaken idea that punishing Snowden would be a deterrent.
Snowden is no hacker any more than Manning is. Both were inside the perimeter and walked off with the goods.
The Snowden documents (not Snowden himself) will reveal more as time goes on.
The best tactic for US is to just leave Snowden alone to minimize the publicity.
In the matter of threatening Germany, that's no surprise -- and it worked.
Move along, nothing to see ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
who, this germany?:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
americans are and should be angry at the NSA
but other countries complaining about the NSA is hypocrisy
if i was german, would i be worried about the NSA? or the BND and the BfV?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
if you live in a country outside the USA, and your biggest privacy concern is the NSA, you're a moron: your own country is doing everything the NSA is doing, and in many countries, far worse. obviously, they can also abuse you a lot easier than the USA can. and they do
again: i don't have a problem with americans complaining about the NSA. americans SHOULD complain about the NSA. but i do have a problem with other countries complaining about the NSA when they do the same or worse
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anyway, Snowden would be stupid to trust Germany. Only sovereign on paper, Germany is America's lapdog.
It's strange, but during the 80s, Italy as a major lapdog of the US (having important NATO bases and naval bases for the US 6th fleet and 688 nuclear submarines stationed in Sardinia) had one of most ballsy (and crook) prime ministers of the last 40 years. Bettino Craxi had the balls to go against the US when Italian interests were at risk. He even went as far as having a military showdown between Italian military special forces and US navy Seals in Sigonella air base. The US forces retreated and Reagon was furious. One of the major air bases from which the US military launched missions against Libyia. Nowadays no European politician (prime minister or president) would dare defy the Amercans. How sad. And I say this as a European.
It's all about motivations. Manning was just fucked up and betrayed his trust. Snowden had a point to what he was doing.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
In Canada there is huge pressure from the US for us to pass bill C-51 which might as well be called Orwell's law. There is endless talk about this country being dangerous or that country. But it seems to me there is exactly one country on this planet that is causing problems for just about every democracy or not.
What I love about these tools that think that they should be able to spy on us to "protect" us. Yet in Canada we have a motorcycle gang that all wear special clothing, have special tattoos, and hang out in known HQs; yet our national police force can't shut them down with every law needed already in place. Prisons which have pretty well no constitutional protections for privacy or intercepted communications are filled with drugs. So even if they manage to completely remove privacy and rights they have proven themselves incompetent at doing their jobs with simplistic criminals.
What hope do they have against actual terrorists with an IQ over 90? Or lone wolves who communicate with exactly nobody?
My assessment of all these laws is that they are there to protect vested interests. The politicians want to protect their friends in big business in the name of national security/stability. But my guess is that they mostly want to protect themselves from the erosion of power that is happening through the internet where the press and other investigators can find out what corruption is happening. Thus the ideal situation is that whistleblowers will be nervous about contacting the press because they don't know if their communications are secure. That even politicians will be nervous about trying to reduce the power of the security services because not only might they be listening but that the security services will be well placed to leak data about they or their friends.
Remember that this sort of power is very insidious. For instance when the government goes to appoint someone to a watchdog or judicial position that will oversee the security services the security service does a "background check" this is not only to make sure that the person isn't an enemy spy but to protect the politicians from embarrassment if it turns out that their potential appointee is unsavoury in some way. This could be something like anti women views or even something like they are 60 and often date 20 somethings. Thus if the person is going to a hanging judge and is happy to give the security service free reign they can give the person a clean bill of health during the "background check" but if the person has long been a defender of privacy and generally anti authoritarian then they will compile a list of rumours and innuendos that suggest the person will be an embarrassment.
Thus as we hear about judge after judge giving their blessings to insanely unconstitutional behaviour, and we hear about watchdogs that aren't watching keep in mind about who vetted these people in the first place.
What scares the shit out of these people is when they don't have control over them as in the case of politicians in other countries. This is where they have to play hardball. But my simple question is how many politicians in various G7 countries have had information "leaked" about them by the US security services? Leaked during elections where they were successfully running against right wing hardliners that the US would prefer to win?
Umm, Germany has the eighth largest military in the world. Or were you unaware of that?
Japan has the ninth, in case you were interested.
Aside from the Big Three (US, Russia, China), Germany is behind India, UK, France, and South Korea. Which puts them about where they were in 1939 (what, you didn't know that the Wehrmacht in 1939 was smaller than the French Army, much less the combined Anglo-French forces they faced in 1940?).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The need for that imposition died of old age roughly 15 years ago.
The only reason Germany ran wild twice was because we (the victors of WWI) botched the unholy shit out of things the first time, basically wrecking Germany and creating a power vacuum.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The only reason Germany ran wild twice was because we (the victors of WWI) botched the unholy shit out of things the first time, basically wrecking Germany and creating a power vacuum.
I'd say it was a bit more complicated than that. The issues were not Germany's alone, nor that of the losers, nor even the occurance of the Great Depression. The entire 20's and 30's was a three way battle between the idealogies and factions of Democracy, Fascism, and Communism. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany fell to fasicsm before WW2 even started.Before they did, there was a see-saw battle in the streets. The foundations of the Nazi party gained prestige when they helped overthrown a communist coup in Bavaria. There was even debate in the US along those idealogical lines.
It's easy to blame the US but we didn't create most of the problems facing the world. Europe did with colonialism. Though the US is responsible for the rise of ISIS, the political boundaries that aided the creation and much of the problems of the middle east are related to the divvying up of the middle east by Europe after WWI and the subsequent colonization that took place later. The problems Europe created will haunt us for a long time to come, probably several hundred years.
Up until WWII the US was neutral and outside the fucking around in the western hemisphere pretty well minded their business. We didn't create the problems, we've just been dealing with them. And you should fear greatly the day people like me get our way and turn this country back neutral and start looking out after our own and stop caring about everyone else. Europe, Canada and many others will be in for a shitstorm when they have to start paying for their own defense.