It is unfortunate, though, that the subject is generally, as within the EU report document, framed within a nationalist perspective - nationalism itself being something of a time-honoured trap for the same class of victim.

My most favoured quote of late is Einstein's description of nationalism: an infantile disease; the measles of humanity. Our generation's challenge is to conquer this.

And in the case at hand, it doesn't help that the US government seems to consider it fair game to have all data of foreign users of US web services handed out to them, in secret and without the users having a say in this.

Well, all the other first world countries learned the hard way, first-hand how bad nationalism can get.

Japan's politicians visiting Yasukuni, and Korean citizens mass-protesting "the japanese" as an abstract concept....

The problem is that it's usually those living in large imperialistic countries that say so (how we should all be "above and beyond countries"), while their countries royally fuck smaller countries.

As long as there are people willing to live in their land, with their own way of life, and no submit to some large foreign power, nationalism is good (and I mean a feel of belonging and love for your country, not offensive/militaristic nationalism and bigotry).

If you feel like just "passing by" from your country -- ie. if you feel it more like a hotel than a home--, then you're doing it a disservice. That might work if your country is a military and economic behemoth with nothing to fear (e.g the US), but not for a poor country were people strive to make it better. Of course some people only think about what's best for themselves. I wouldn't like to live in a society filled with with those kind of people.

>Interestingly, I found the USA to be the most nationalist 1st-world country there is. By far.

It is. But it's not just nationalism that causes these things (like industrial espionage). Simple, the US government is also a power elite, as is the leaders of big US industries. And those tend to favor their own kind (for profit, of course).

So, the top dogs in Washington can give top information to say GE, but it's not like they're doing out of "love for the country". They could probably not care less about the US citizens...

In Europe, nationalism is a real problem. Within the european union, every state fight to bring more benefit to its own nation rather than looking for the whole union to get better.

This is pretty much the case in the United States too, except we call this phenomena "pork barrel legislation" where Congressmen allocate parts of the federal budget for funding infrastructure or other projects in their district at the expense of everyone else.

For example, California residents pay way more in Federal income and corporate taxes than they receive in federal funding for schools, infrastructure, etc. Alaska, for example, is quite the opposite and receives a lot more federal money than it pays in federal taxes. This is all due to political dealing in Congress.

Why, exactly? Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?

Nationalism says that people in your nation are special, that, in effect, rights pertain to them that are not granted to other nations - it is incompatible with morality.

On your Hopi/Swedish point, the question here is whether the Hopi child deserves government by the same standards and access to the same opportunities as the Swede. Yes. Yes, she does.

If anything, the worst crime of which history will accuse America is of taking excellent stated ideals and subverting them for the purpose of oppression - thus discrediting the original excellent ideals.

Hanlon's razor. But the difference here is, in this case it is impossible to not be incompetent. Just as it is impossible to deliver what you intend for the world without being incompetent in the sense of being 'non-oppressive'.

That's vastly different.

Children among the Hopi are raised to believe literally that the Kacina dancers are literally gods from somewhere else who have come to work miracles on the village. Once every 3 years, the children ages 7-9 are gathered together for induction into the religious community of the village. This induction involves ritual beating and betrayal (showing that what they have been taught all their lives is a carefully constructed lie), and thus induction into the religious community is also a somewhat temporary and violent initiation into atheism as well. However this tearing down of belief in relatively visceral and violent ways is considered necessary for passing on the Hopi understanding of religion.

The problem I have with this sort of international humanism is that it leaves no room for cultures like that. I mean Think of the Children!!! They are being abused!!! and so we go out of our way to impose our own culture on everyone else in the way of proving that nationalism and ethnocentricity must go.

[1] see Gill, Sam D. 1996 "Disenchantment: A Religious Abduction." In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 230-39. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

I don't think religion has any bearing on whether something is acceptable or not. The Hopi may beat their children for religious reasons, but plenty of parents beat their children for non-religious reasons. What matters in the question of whether this should be allowed is not the reason why they do it, but the consequences of doing it. Laws regulate actions based on their consequences, not based on their motive.

The fundamental question is how much deference we give to culture generally and who is making these decisions. Do we want white folks telling Hopi they can't have what remains of their culture anymore? Do we want folks from China and India telling white Americans what should constitute free speech?

My view is that if we don't allow for local culture and decisions about such things to be made at the local and cultural level then we lose our basic humanity. For cannibalism or ritual sacrifice, if it is internal to a population group, I think that this is for that group to work out. If it is between groups, well then that's cause for war.....

A lot of things in culture are really structurally variable. For example is it a human right to be able to choose not to ever have children? Does this mean that cultures that expect retirees to be cared for by their children are violating human rights and every culture must have something like social security? Now, if you agree that's a cultural issue, then something like same-sex marriage also must be a cultural issue too.

(Religion, in my view, isn't about God. Religion is about community.)

That said, I don't for a second believe that there's any reason for us to accept that all cultures are worth saving, or that some cultural norms should not be actively fought. However I see that as an entirely orthogonal issue to the first.

> That said, I don't for a second believe that there's any reason for us to accept that all cultures are worth saving, or that some cultural norms should not be actively fought.

The question is who has the right to fight them and how. It's one thing to critique another culture. It's something else to go out to try to force them to see the error of their ways. The problem is that the latter is usually just an exercise of nationalism if we define nationalism as hating other national/cultural groups.

The question is, how sure should an outsider be of the context of an action? Or is this better left for the members of the culture to navigate and evolve as meets their needs? I side generally with the latter unless it involves conflict between cultural groups. That's different and poses different problems.

Is it more abusive to subject children to a single coming-of-age ritual designed to teach them to think, or to allow children to transition to adulthood physically unharmed yet full of ideas designed to hold them back from full enjoyment of their faculties?

It seems that the Hopi would be entirely justified in saying that all other Americans are guilty of child abuse.

Which brings me back to my point. Who gets to make the rules?

Isn't the greatest justice served and the greatest abuses of power prevented by keeping these decisions as local as possible?

That's federalism, not nationalism.

Nationalism is "Deutschland Uber Alles"

But isn't everyone special in this regard?

> On your Hopi/Swedish point, the question here is whether the Hopi child deserves government by the same standards and access to the same opportunities as the Swede.

So no more of the ritual beating as a part of rites of passage into the religious community of the village for Hopis? We don't even have to ask why they do it? We can just say "it's abhorrant and not up to our standards" and that settles it?

I'm more than five years old, so I accept that I'm not as special as I once thought. Nationalism is similarly infantile.

And you're not responding to my argument about the Hopi, just repeating your own; I didn't even address your point about them at all.

Edit: Whoops, that was sloppy of me. In fact I didn't address your Hopi/Swede point because I hadn't seen it yet. I'm not sure what I think about it (except that in principle it's a good idea to disabuse kids of their childhood beliefs, if not by beating them).

I'm not prepared to treat that as I would child abuse in larger society, though.

That is exactly the problem with nationalism.

I suspect you're probably saying that it's understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects "their own", and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.

We have social obligations first to those nearer us and later those further away. We owe our parents more than we owe strangers. If we are in a crowded theater and fire breaks out, we have a greater obligation to save our own kids' than our neighbor's, but we have a greater obligation to save our neighbor's kids than a stranger's. So obligations start at the family and household level and spread out in concentric circles of community. This is healthy and it is more or less the way humanity has always worked. The outer two levels might generally be classified as the ethnos and lastly everyone else.

Where I hesitate is where you say "in many cases outright denying the existence of" because that's a problem, but not because we owe no more to our own than to others.

The problem is also wider than mere denial of the existence of innocent drone strike victims, but this idea that because we believe we have justified reasons for engaging in drone strikes, everyone should just understand that. A healthier attitude would be to expect and value the fact that Yemenis and Pakistanis will value their family and community members more than Americans, and where too many people off base is that they don't expect or value that. They think the Pakistanis should be grateful that we are killing bad guys and that's where the problem lies. Attitudes like that make it impossible to build bridges between our peoples, to understand and respect eachother.

The alternative is to say that communities shouldn't matter. Why should the Pakistani not have American liberties? But then why should African Americans not be protected by European hate speech laws? Why should American Muslims not be protected against people insulting their religion?

In the end, I think that community (as a series of concentric circles) is important and as much governance needs to be as local as at all possible. This means tolerating all kinds of things we might believe are abuses of rights in our own culture while trusting that other people have the ability to make things work in a basically just way.

I'm not even sure we're talking about the same thing, and I'm anything but certain we disagree on any point of substance.

Nationalism itself did not come to prominence until the latter half of the 18th century (the term itself was not even coined until this time), and a lot of the modern nation states that people came to identify with were artificial constructions created largely as a result of the gradual evolution of local governance and culture coupled with the outgrowth of popular political involvement and the growing prominence of national media where culture started becoming more uniform across what we recognise as modern states often because of limitations of language.

Nationalism is not a requisite for local governance or local culture to survive at all - both pre-dated nationalism for millennia.

The "nation state" is a somewhat new model to some extent. The older models were more fluid, but the idea of loyalty to one's nation (not necessarily the same as one's state) can be found going back into antiquity, and you can find similar patterns just about everywhere, whether early Ireland, Scandinavia, the Goths during their time in the Roman Empire, India, China, and so forth. The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.

You can see in racial stereotypes much the same thing going on actually. The old division is between people who "act and talk like we do" vs "everyone else."

[1] Compare the colors of the Varnas to the colors of the Gunas and the colors of the classes in the Scandinavian poem Rigsthula and you see that the three colors in common are white, red, and black which represent spirituality, war, and labor of the earth respectively. Also note that if you compare functions to the labels of classes in Solonic Athens, the bottom three match-- Hippeis to Ksatria, Vassyia to Zeugmatis, and Sudra to Thetis), while the designations of the upper three match between India and Ireland. There are also long-standing spacial associations with these which can be found across Ireland, India, Scandinavia, and the Greco-Roman world. On this I conclude that the 5-fold division of a king and four castes was brought by the Sanscrit speakers fully as a ritual division of space and implemented in ceremonial divisions of society.

> Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?

Whether or not one agrees with your claim that pre-nation state forms of group loyalty or tribalism were equivalent to nationalism, you here yourself divorce the existence of traditions of local governance from your interpretation of nationalism ("The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.")

The point is that culture and governance are not implicitly linked, and did not used to be. Contrary to your implication in the quoted part that the lack of nationalism would be a treat to survival of local culture, on the contrary, the rise of modern nationalism has had a substantial effect in threatening many cultures. A lot of nation states have explicitly set out to eradicate alternative cultures. Witness the Turkish state long held insistence that there were no such thing as Kurds, for example - just "mountain Turks" - and the number of states that at various times have outlawed the teaching of minority languages (including, again, Turkey) or even mentioning the minority (I knew a Turkish journalist in Norway as an asylum seeker because he had received death threats from the Turkish government because he was writing about the plight of the Kurds).

In Norway too, since you bring up Scandinavia and I'm Norwegian, a lot of modern culture are constructs of modern nationalism: Our two official languages are both artificial and recent - one constructed as an amalgamation of dialects spoken around the country, and one constructed largely from Danish, and are increasingly pushing local dialects aside. Around Oslo, for example, many kids are not even aware that their speech has elements of old distinct dialects, and no effort is made to preserve them (note that I am not arguing that they should be preserved - I don't particular care about the preservation of such dialects).

Unlike in most English speaking languages, the government even dictates the vocabulary and the rules of the language.

Most of the mythos and trappings of the Norwegian national identify date from ~1800 onwards, especially as constructions of the Norwegian national romanticism movement from the 1840's onwards.

This modern Norwegian culture that arose as a result is largely the result of a local elite that stimulated and utilised this nationalism as a means of asserting power and/or making their local seats more prominent in the face of a government in Copenhagen that had for hundreds of years let Norway remain a under-developed backwater.

First in trying to gain independence in 1814 when Denmark-Norway was sufficiently weakened by having been on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and they managed to get recognition for our constitution, and then again to build popular support for full independence from Sweden after we were handed over to Sweden as a "price" to the Swedes for supporting the victors.

Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era.

The lyrics to our national anthem even is one long national romantic representation of a myth of some thousand year tradition of a unified Norwegian nation.

So not only is nationalism not a pre-requisite for protecting culture - it has been a major driver for steamrollering older local cultures over the last century in particular.

But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions

Personally I see the loss of local dialects in Europe (which is happening many places to various degrees, sometimes with government help, sometimes without) with a great degree of sadness. It used to be that you could walk from Amsterdam to Munich and never encounter a line where the dialects on one side were unintellible to those on the others, because the various sound shifts existed as gradients rather than hard boundaries (raising the question of whether Dutch, Low German, and High German were just dialects of the same language).

> Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era.

FWIW most of the Icelandic material mostly mentions Norwegians as Vikings too but that probably mostly has to do with geography.

> But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions

Those are good points. Thank you for sharing them. Perhaps the question is how we define a cultural community worth preserving. What you describe is not something I like. Again, I think the old idea was one of concentric circles, centered on the household (while Aristotle was the first to articulate it, my sense as a global traveller is that it is a very pervasive traditional model).

So the question is what we do about it ;-)

I don't know if politicians make that distinction though.

It's also a catchy sentence that could be used to disguise nationalism or discredit other politicians's stance on the country they live in.

I am reminded of German nationalist (pre- and during WWI) Guido von List who said, essentially that German heritage was immensely valuable and all Germans should all appreciate it, but the same applied to other heritage of other countries and groups as well.

He died just before the end of WWI, and it was after his death that the real nastiness of German nationalism took off. The only reason the SS could find von List acceptable was that they were so batshit crazy[1] regarding their views on the German race that they couldn't see anything else about what he was saying.

[1] For example by the time the Nazis took power, a common theme in nationalist circles was that all languages were descended from the ancient Germanic mother-tongue. Of course once you get to that point, the Germans had to be descended from Aryans (the folks who brought Sanscrit to India). Why? Because the Aryans brought Sanscrit (a language!!) to India and therefore must have been Germans! If you want sources on this idea I am happy to cite them. Again though there were the crazies in List's time but they were nothing compared to the crazies after the war.

Humans want something to fight for, we want goals and "teams", and history/evolution/cultural tradition have equipped our brains to handle that kind of environment.

I think part of the reason that the US is so keen on nationalism is our military strength. We have the mindset that the US can do whatever it wants anywhere in the world and nobody can really do anything to stop us.

Those of us that are self-motivated to learn and create could still drive "progress" forward and perhaps be afforded more freedom in pursuing those goals, rather than being stifled by the artificial retardation instituted by the control freaks currently in charge. I don't really know what we'd do with them though, maybe designate an island where they can act out their primitive ape instincts and vie for control of each other.

I'm not saying Socialism is good or bad, but I do think that people give too much credit and loyalty to Democracy. What we have isn't a Democracy, the handful of representatives we have are bombarded constantly by self-interested groups and corporations who couldn't care less if anyone indirectly suffers from their actions.

I agree that humans should have larger goals and responsibilities such as providing basic needs and should funnel a large majority of funding into projects that are progressive for humans and life in general. The problem is that there are 7+ billion people on the Earth right now, most are hungry, most are religious, most lack sufficient education. Most Americans can't wait to watch a play-by-play of every pointless sporting event that they can find time to watch. I find it refreshing when someone gets on stage and tells then entire world to get their head out of their ass. Unfortunately, group think is strong and ignorance is rampant. We've come so far, but have such a long way to go. Humans are very similar but environment plays a huge part in personality, thankfully rational and logical debate are tools that we are able to use to inspire progress.

Sure, there is the possibility that there is a "God" in another dimension, but the US in particular has an overwhelming percentage of adults and brainwashed children that what the bible says goes, that discrimination is acceptable because "God is on our side", and that progress is evil. I've always considered myself agnostic, but after encountering so many people who blindly consider themselves Republican Christians, I have slowly become against organized religion. We need more community centers and less Churches. I wish I had a community center to turn to for life advice, mentors, and guidance in general that my parents and teachers were unable to provide, but instead my community pooled all of its funds towards a huge new chapel for everyone to come worship a myth. /rant

Transparency is key. Checks and balances need re-balancing. Preventing corruption should be a top priority. Only then can we efficiently progress as a species.

Belloc should be on everyone's reading list in this way because he represents a very cogent criticism of both capitalism and centralized efforts to resolve the fundamental class struggles that inevitably occur.

Belloc notes that the classes have different goals out of class warfare. The employed class wants security while the capitalist class wants profit. The ultimate arrangement which perfectly provides both would be a system of regulated slavery, where the would-be slave knows he gets certain guarantees and the would-be slave-owner gets compulsatory work for his own profit. He notes further that through the ancient world, this was the normal economic order. His thesis then is that the working poor are willing to let things move towards slavery in exchange for subsistence, and this is the logical direction for the elites to push.

So what he suggests then is that class warfare is most often won by the elites, and history agrees with him. He then argues that without land, and ownership of one's own tools, the workers cannot be free. He then attacks worker protections as undermining the status of the worker as a free agent and suggests that instead we should seek to eradicate the border between worker and business owner.

If we take Belloc's theories reasonably seriously, I think we have to consider the possibility that the social democracy of FDR directly lead to the Neoliberalism of Reagan, and that if we don't seek to undo the damage caused, we will simply slowly regress to classical liberal capitalism of the sort that both Belloc and Marx believed was unstable, but with the added factor that self-employment will be heavily discriminated against, and the prison system with forced labor will be the safety net for the poor.

Forget wages. Focus on land, tools, and business opportunities.

1. Tax rental income unless the rental agreement is convertable to a rent to own agreement.

2. Get rid of the estate tax, or at least exempt productive property from it, since such a tax privileges corporate ownership over individual ownership.

3. Exempt businesses with fewer than 5 employees from most federal and state regulations. Make it the default and require that Congress or the state legislature explicitly includes such businesses when passing additional regulations.

4. Provide tax breaks for businesses owned and operated by married couples.

5. Tax overseas increases in balance sheet equity (assets minus liabilities) as corporate income, thus eliminating a major loophole major corporations use to pay less or even no taxes.

In other words decentralize the economy. Let's encourage self-employment and household self-employment, and let's encourage even the middle and lower classes to go into business for themselves and own their own homes without going through the banking system.

BTW, one of the amazing things about open source software is that it brings the worker ownership of the tool ideal into a reality in a way that we seem to be otherwise losing.

If you assert that nationality doesn't matter, then we should be doing everything we can to impose our culture on everyone else just because we think we know best. We need not understand the value that these practices provide for these populations. We can look to our culture to define human rights and everyone else must comply.

Humanism is nothing but concealed nationalism.

Children are not property. The expression "their children" is (at least to a humanist) an oxymoron since they are not owned by their parents. From that simple statement it follows that if something is done to a child that is a crime when done to an adult person, then that is a crime because a child is a person.

I dunno man, just offering my take.

For example, is it a violation of the human rights of African Americans that someone can get up in front of a KKK meeting and advocate genocide, and then defend the statements as protected by the first amendment?[1] The US is quite exceptional there.

Instead most cultures recognize that there is a right not to be harassed politically by private individuals on account of race, religion, etc. and so uncivil discourse including advocating genocide or other hate speech can be regulated. If you post a cartoon in France glorifying 9/11 expect to be prosecuted for "condoning terrorism" (see the case of Denis Leroy whose conviction was upheld by the ECHR).

Your rule, I think, would again move every aspect of culture to the mode, would it not?

[1] In Brandenburg v. Ohio, excerpts held to be protected included "Kill the niggers... we intend to do our part..." as recorded in footnote 1 of the majority opinion. Vile stuff, but the court held that in the absence of actions to imminently incite lawless activity, the words alone were protected. I can't think of any other culture in the world which holds that freedom of speech extends so far.

Would you rather have KKK meetings in public or private? At least in public they are inspiring conversation and debate about the issues. Restricting the first amendment would allow for a secret KKK which everyone speculates about and rumors materialize out of thin air, that wouldn't be good.

Freedom from persecution for speaking your opinion (whether right or wrong) is probably the greatest freedom we have. Discussion leads to ideas which eventually leads to progress.

Sure. But if nationality no longer matters, then everyone else gets a say in how far we recognize this, right? That's my point really. If we are so sure nationality no longer matters and we should be one global culture, are we going to be happy with the tradeoff? I don't think we would.

BTW the other is just as valid. My wife is Chinese-Indonesian and she and I have shared what are essentially very foreign views with eachother regarding these sorts of things. I can say without a doubt that American culture in this area is not something that you just show people and they come running to.

Just as a little sanity check here: could you please define what you mean when you use the word "nationalism"? Because that's not what I take it to mean.

The first alternatives to nationalism that come to mind are global capitalism and global humanism. Global capitalism seems to be winning out over global humanism and is, in many ways, worse than nationalism. Global capitalism, for example, isn't particularly concerned about environment damage to any given country.

That's correct, but only because [free market] capitalism reflects the moral values of the individuals that participate in it, and "conserve the world's environment" is not a globally accepted value. If people come to value not trashing other people's homes, then that value will be reflected in the market as a value that competes with "just get me my stuff cheap".

Then there is the Marxist concept of capitalism, which I think reflects the state of our neoliberal society more accuratly - that growth and ownership of capital are values unto itself. And, that system probably cares less about environmental damage, although it is more close to the above form of capitalism than, say, mercantilism, or feudalism, or communism.

What exactly is "global humanism"? And if the humans in this system you're proposing don't value not trashing other people's homes, then how exactly does it solve this problem of environmental damage?

"Global humanism" would be the global acceptance of a framework of values meant to better the human conditon for all of humanity. And you're completely right: humanity doesn't agree on values so if global humanism somehow manifests, it will be as a pretext for a global imperial order.

The Airbus thing rings true, but industrial espionage for L&H tech? Who'd want it? It was hardly a strategic technology unlike Aerospace. At best, the NSA themselves might like to use it for transcribing calls, but given the tons and tons of open academic research on speech, it just sounds like the typical IP bullshit of firms accusing other firms of "stealing" algorithms because someone else independently developed something similar.

Next the French will be claiming the NSA is stealing important tech from DailyMotion.

Subsequently ScanSoft (now called Nuance) ended up owning the wreckage of L&H, and Dragon's assets are back in US hands.

So that example has some basis in national security issues.

There are, however other examples that make it difficult to not be the pot calling the Chinese kettle black.

British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager asserted in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes.[10] Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[6][11] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.[12] An article in the US newspaper Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that European aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the US National Security Agency reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[13][14] In 2001 the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the US intelligence agencies.[6]

The Listening - 2006 (specifically on Echelon) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVK906Xzr8

The Conversation (1974) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g

The Lives of Others (2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

Spying on the Home Front (PBS, 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/

The Enemy Within (PBS, 2006) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/

The Wire, Season 1 (HBO, 2002) Brazil (1985) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Hackers are computer specialists with the knowledge to gain access to computer networks from the outside. In the early days, hackers were computer freaks who got a kick out of breaking through the security devices of computer systems. Nowadays there are contract hackers in both the services and on the market." (emphasis added)

What? This is an official EU report?

I guess we Germans have a questionable talent of taking english words and making them our own e.g. "Handy" for cell phone. :)

Of note - how the NSA spies on the Americans it's not supposed to: send the relevant info to UK/Aus/NZ/Canadian SIGINT assets and have them do it...