Most comments I've seen about this issue seem very American, going along the lines of "stop the hypocrisy, everybody does it". It is useless to argue against such view, cynicism is usually unpermeable to arguments.
However, regardless if "everybody does it" or not this story will have implications. It is a very strong argument for a new kind of walled garden: the nationally restricted Internet. We should expect a strong growth of the China-style Internet.
This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism". In the name of "protection" from real or imaginary dangers politicians, bureaucrats and autocrats will enforce Internet monitoring within a lot of countries. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, expect a lot of trouble.
It makes no sense to use quotation marks around the term American Imperialism, as if it wasn't real. That the US is an empire is beyond question, and Snowden has shown that it has turned the internet into an unprecedented tool for global control.
No statesman in their right mind would allow a foreign power to freely operate such a tool undisturbed in their territory/population. Internet sovereignty should be a priority of any government interested in preserving at least some degree of national autonomy, and indeed neglecting to so after what has been made public would be either a sign of great weakness or of being a US-puppet government... or both. The later is the case of my government. The countries that have complained louder are indeed the countries with some degree of power.
Speaking of the Chinese, I think that Snowden has only proved that there is actually a lot to learn from them. They have been the smartest ones since the begining, when early on they realised the nature of Google, Facebook and the like, and refused to let their population become addicted to giving all their information for US corporations to mine, store, analyze, profit, and provide intelligence to the US government.
Of course the above doesn't mean that the Internet should become surveilled by all local governments. The point is that the changes that should be made are toward a globally decentralised web should also not lead to locally operated surveillance, but the first does not imply the second. Surveillance is a political decision.
Chinese Internet is both more autonomous and more controlled. The first attribute is desireable while the second is not. I think it is key to keep in mind the distinction between those two things to make the best out of what is coming next.
> This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism"
Funny you mention that, cause Latin America has always been treated as a colony by the US. Recent detention of the Bolivian presidential plane is a good example of this arrogant attitude.
There's less prominent, but a similar condescending tone towards Europe, which for decades has been a puppet in the US geopolitical games. It could be tolerated while the threat of the evil commies existed. That threat is long gone, but militant ambitions of the US remained.
After the decade of wars, kidnappings, tortures, drones, and general world policing by the US, Europeans and other nations have had enough of it. I see a wave of anti-American, pro-nationalist sentiment on the rise. It is unfortunate, but rightly deserved.
The irony of it is that it is the military and security complex that will cash in on this development. More threats means more money and more power, which is less freedom for us, the people.
This is a good point, one of the outcomes of this mess might be more control over internets than less control. At some point we'll need to dust off our uucp code to get back to a more independent network.
That said, when I was at USC and the 'net' was ARPANet and the Fido was just the name of a dog, it was very much a 'controlled' net with no spam (your host got detached) or commercial speech (same punishment). Which made for a pretty sterile (if geeky experience). When Berkeley and PARC started to create gateways between those 'unwashed' nodes and the ARPAnet it was quite different. I could easily see a call to go more 'milnet' on the public infrastructure with the monitoring overt and 'known' like it was on ARPAnet in the same of security. That would be a bad outcome in my opinion.
If I were a surveillance apparatus listening in on foreign internets, tighter local control is exactly what I'd want. I'd only have to hack into the national firewall to listen in on data rather than thousands or millions of individual networks.
I too fear the China-style internet as a response. However there are alternative responses which may be beneficial if we take a constructive approach. I see no better time than now for many countries to get behind the ideas of Eben Moglen and actively fund open source work in the basic hardware and software than all countries need. Some 21 countries are getting together to challenge the US at the UN. I would love it if these same 21 countries put money where their mouth is and actively funded the thousands of excellent independent open source developers who would love to actively create fully free and open-source basic software and hardware full time. These individuals are not hard to identify and support. Give them the money to quit their day jobs and build FOSS full time.
If that's the worst case scenario we're doing pretty OK. The nationalist networks will presumably be like the PSTN in the 90s: ubiquitous, reliable, safe but perceived as safer than it is, overpriced, limited, behind. All the interesting stuff will happen over tunnels to the Internet Internet.
Well, it depends how they do it, right? If they just block DNS, yeah, people who care can simply tunnel out. It still hurts, as the average non-caring citizen's knowledge is stunted. But not as badly.
If they block IPs, and closely monitor outgoing tunnels? Then it's a lot harder to get out.
I suspect you're right, they'll probably just block DNS and the worst IPs. It's easier, and DNS gets the 99%. Even The Great Firewall only blocks the 'worst' IPs (like Twitter).
I actually like this future more and more as it implies the opportunity to rebuild a new internet on top of the old internet with all the lessons learned from the first internet. It's not that the first will cease to exist. There are too many vested commercial interests for that to happen. The second internet will have the opportunity to develop separate from these commercial and government interests and will hopefully be better designed to protect against the shortcomings that left the first internet vulnerable to government meddling. Even if it takes us 10-20 years to get there, it will be worth it.
Right. It also does DNS poisoning, URL word analysing, deep packet inspection, and VPN identification & blocking. I meant it only directly blocks the worst IPs, as opposed to directly blocking all external IPs.
I do wonder whether a US Firewall will be worse or better than China's. On one hand, the US is presumably less autocratic. On the other, we have 10x the defense resources.
My little theory is that this can help Europe to become a player in the Internet. The point is that individual European countries cannot create their own internet - they are too small and too much interconnected (especially if they are in the European Union) - but on the other hand they are separate countries. The effect I would like to see is that they develop ways how to be trustworthy and also how to check if your partner is reliable. First between themselves - then their solutions will be attractive to the whole world. Which router would you trust - one from China, one from the USA or one from Germany - when you know that Germany also exports the routers to France and UK and they check them?
I think the outrage isn't that we (Americans) did it. The pros know we spy on everything we can, all the time. But the outrage is that now there are newspapers all over the world telling John Q. Public (Johan Q. Public?) what happened. That puts pressure on Merkel from her own citizens. So the Americans will take their public lumps, apologize, and everyone will get back to business.
> Mrs Merkel - an Americophile who was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - is said to be shocked that Washington may have engaged in the sort of spying she had to endure growing up in Communist East Germany.
though she expressed no such outrage when it was revealed that the NSA was conducting similar surveillance on German citizens.
What people need to understand is america is not spying just for political reasons or "national security". NSA is also basically a spying agency for hire , used by US private corporations to win contracts (weapons,it,....) or predict the foreign competitor next move (just like the CIA served private interests in Latin America, just google United Fruits and Guatemala... ).
"...According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994..."
Not saying that Airbus was the good guy btw. Also, if they help one firm why not another, and so on?
The article doesn't support the claim that the NSA is for hire, or even the Boeing knew what was going on. You can only take from it that the NSA may act in US corporate interests.
I have a suspicion that the "world leaders bin tapped" storyline is intended to set the stage for a "hey we're all in this together" kumbaya agreement where the leaders substitute their judgement for ours and allow the surveillance to continue.
Ugh, so let's stifle the media on the subject? The fact that the leader of a powerful nation is making any sort of protest should be lauded by the tech community.
It would've been 'laudable' (really? Isn't the word we're going for 'expected' instead?) if she'd have reacted in any decent way after we learned about the general targeting of Germany and German citizens. At THAT point she was supposed to shout/complain/make a fuss.
Thing is - she really didn't. NOW, after learning that she, herself, was a target for some time, the situation changed. Which is crap, disgusting and just showing how detached that person is from (the tech community's) reality.
Nope, the German government actually considered that case closed - "no rights were violated" is an approximation of the statement they issued.
NOW this eloquent girl representing my home country changes her attitude and there's a big 'HOW COULD THEY' going around. Before that? Not so much.
So she's now (ignoring the gazillion other reasons) fueling gags about her finally realizing that she's part of 'the German people'. Sarcastic publications claim (in jest, of course) that Merkel is 'outraged to be treated like a common German'.
Bottom line: Crappy government, they didn't care a damn before and needed to be directly targeted to wake up.
I don't know what you are referring to. But for a americanophile who sees the USA as the leader of the free world and protector of human rights that a way more shocking than if a known police state does it. Et tu, Brute?
Sorry there seems to only have been one directed at the Chancellory [1]
Would you really equate unconfirmed word document files (which were denied by the government) with explicit phone tapping (which was all but admitted to by the government)?
It started in 2002, Merkel was elected as Chancellor in 2005, that implies they are watching for up and coming politicians (she was CDU leader in 2002). I did find it interesting that the NSA admitted also collecting information from Washington DC in 2008 (an election year), the assurances that this was an accident are sounding more and more hollow, and the implications are frightening for a functioning democracy.
This, along with the Airbus, Petrobras and Belgacom revelations, makes it clear that surveillance is not targeting terrorists or part of the war on terror - it is engaged in for economic and political advantage, even against allies. That's quite a serious breach of trust.
"President Barack Obama promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring"
I can't decide which is more damning, that he know about it, and didn't stop it, or that he knew nothing about it, and the NSA takes it upon themselves to monitor the communications of allied politicians and interfere in other nations. Either way his reputation and his promises are meaningless now.
Along with being used by the US, raw intercept information is also shared with other allies of the US like Isreal and the UK, potentially damaging its European allies by giving out secret information to third parties, and I find it hard to believe given the lack of security the Snowden and Manning leaks highlighted, that Russia and China also don't have access to much of this intel through the many private contractors with security clearance.
While it is somewhat hypocritical of Merkel to be outraged by this and not by the widespread surveillance of her citizens, I'm pleased that this story has at last triggered such a virulent reaction in European politicians. The best thing she could do now in response is to offer Snowden asylum in Germany, and allow him to speak openly about the US security state - I do believe that would be in the interests of all the citizens of the world, if not of their leaders.
The blowback from this affair is just starting to pick up pace - it's already taken US relations with South America to a new low, and is about to do the same in Europe. Hopefully it will lead to meaningful change.
> President Barack Obama promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring, the magazine reports. He apologised to the German chancellor, it said.
Plausible deniability?!?
Wonder what else he "didn't know" and how he is justified in making sweepings statements if he is not sufficiently informed. It can't be "Don't worry, trust me" and "Oops, I didn't know" simultaneously.
That is not a bad response from his position. From say a game theoretic point of view.
Imagine is he is not the president but say a mafia boss, maybe a powerful drug lord. And it turns out one of the drug mules for a competing drug gangs gets murdered by Obama's men. Now, war is about to start. And all the drug lords have a meeting. Obama can claim he didn't personally order the murder and he didn't know it was about to happen. He has men working for him who receive general instruction like "keep the product flowing no matter what cost" with specifically no concrete instruction (especially in written form). Now that protects him. If worse comes to worse, he can simply replace a scapegoat low level employee and keep the organization going forward. The same modus operandi is probably at play with regard to a lot of this stuff from the White House.
On the other hand, the POTUS is at least supposed to look powerful in the eyes of the citizens. By recognizing that he doesn't know (and can't know) what's going on, he is announcing to the world that he is a puppet and that the POTUS is nothing but a servant to higher interests.
It's worth remembering that Barack Obama was not president of the US until 2008. It's safe to assume that in 2002 he was the subject of, not the instigator of, surveillance.
Here's a laundry list from a libertarian / conservative commentator who often says insightful things even when I disagree with him:
[Obama] was himself clueless as to the extent and severity of the problems in his signature legislation. Two weeks after the Benghazi massacre, he was still parroting the Susan Rice line about anti-Islamic videos, which the CIA knew within hours had had nothing to do with the murder of Ambassador Stevens.
Obama had no idea for three years his IRS might be slow-walking Tea Party applications for tax exemptions. He wasn’t in the loop about Eric Holder’s phone taps on Fox News or the Associated Press.
Nobody told him. The president has not been more deeply implicated in the scandals since re-election because he could credibly say, "How was I supposed to know what was going on?"
So, this time, at least grammatically speaking, Obama didn't lie when he said they were not spying on her.
I think we're making real progress here.
On the bright side, it's a good thing she's "on the list" as well, as this seems to be the only way to get her attention regarding the mass surveillance issue.
Having accurately assessed the likely effects of the programme's exposure, it seems very dumb to proceed with it. What could the NSA learn that would outweigh having Germany decide that America wasn't actually a friendly, trustworthy country, as it has presumably now done? Don't ignore either that by recognizing the programme as a betrayal while proceeding with it, the NSA admits to being utterly amoral in a way that can't be walked back from. The only saving grace is that the programme started in 2003; you could almost plead collective insanity given what American foreign policy looked like at that time.
According to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev, "SVR and GRU (Russia's external and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War"
Thanks to you I've read what Obama then said (it's linked above): "Told by the communists that she couldn’t pursue her love of languages, she excelled as a physicist. Asked to spy for the secret police, she refused."
I'm quite sure there are many governments spying (or trying to apy) on Obama's cell phone, including European governments. To expect otherwise is naive and that's why his personal electronic devices are highly secured.
> What is interesting is not whether France (or Mexico, or Brazil, or Germany) is being hypocritical in pretending to be shocked at what the US is doing. It’s whether their response (hypocritical as it may be) has real political consequences. And it surely does
The UKUSA intelligence aparatus has been long used as a justification to increase powers of spy agencies in other countries. For allies it's the perceived political returns when they deliver more intelligence and get in exchange get on the good side of USA's foreign policy, and for others it's the perceived need to keep up in the arms race.
Sometimes I wish the gov't would just come out and say what everyone is thinking:
Yep we are spying on you, (insert name of foreign leader), just like you are trying to spy on our leaders.
There are good arguments to be made against mass surveillance of the internet at large, but expecting that countries will stop spying on each other anytime soon is plain stupid.
As an American, I wish news agencies would stop conflating the US with the CIA. It suggests US citizens generally approve of their actions.
The "US" did not bug Merkel's phone. An agency under the Executive branch, which is above the Rule of Law, which is drunk with power and paranoia, who considers American citizens the enemy as much as foreigners, bugged Merkel's phone.
It would be like saying "Syria uses chemical weapons." The Syrian people had little to do with it, and the American people have little to do with this.
The US is a two-party system. First Past The Post voting ensures a vote for a third party is wasted. No significant percentage of people will ever vote for a third party (excluding transition periods between party systems).
The current ruling party is widely recognized as less warmongering and less surveillance-state than the other party.
Americans aren't completely inculpable. Our societal inability to work together (see: Prisoner's Dilemma), combined with our unwillingness to risk contentment, contributes.
But I fail to see how American citizens have any real say in the government. We present a "democracy," but the two-party system is a thinly veiled autocracy.
As a non-American, I have no rights in your country and my views no not count for diddly-squat. In fact, the NSA surveillance are specifically supposed to target at me as a non-American.
So as an America, if you do not approve of their actions then you need to do something about it. You succeeded in one revolution, maybe it is time for another.
I'm not sure whether I agree. I don't generally believe in violence.
But the average American won't rebel unless they are actually starving, no matter how much they're repressed. As long as they have their McDonald's and Reality TV, they aren't willing to die over a little warrantless wiretapping.
"Bread and Circuses" is far older than America.
Personally, I simply can't afford it. I have to work 9 hours a day, and even if I had the time, a trip to march on Washington DC is very expensive. I suspect most Americans that care are the same.
It's too easy to claim that citizens are not involved in what the government is doing. One reason these agencies are so bold is because Americans themselves are completely dismissive of the rights of foreigners, thanks to the old manifest destiny attitude.
It seems naive not to believe that other countries' intelligence services do the same, or would do so if they had the technology.
This doesn't make it right.
The reason I feel that we're justified in using the "but-everybody-else-does-it" argument to dismiss it from our concern at the moment, is that it attempts to redirect the public outrage from a major problem (NSA spying on basically everyone) to a much more minor problem (NSA spying on head of a foreign state).
Imagine the (hypothetical) case where a particular state's police force is taking fire due to the police breaking up a properly permitted, legal, peaceful rally using excessive force.
It later comes out that the police officers of the department in question regularly disobey the speed limit and sometimes run stop signs.
To be sure, police officers speeding is not something they should be doing; it's wrong and unethical to do that.
But police officers speeding is a much less serious problem than police officers depriving the people of their right to peacefully assemble and petition their government for redress of grievances.
And if the media and the audience's focus immediately goes from the more important story (unlawfully breaking up peaceful rallies and excessive use of force) to the less important story (police officers sometimes exceed the speed limit when they're not supposed to), it's bad because it means the serious problem is no longer getting the attention it deserves.
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that it's not just that "everyone does it", it's more about the fact that everyone will do it, regardless of the circumstances.
Consider for a moment what would happen if the U.S. stopped all its foreign & domestic spying. What would happen? Do you think China will stop their spy programs? How about Russia? The UK? The rest of Europe?
No. The U.S. would be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to intelligence. It's like an arms race, except instead of weapons, it's knowledge. Just because one player quits or gets caught, doesn't mean everyone else will stop. In fact, it would be to their advantage if a few players left the table.
That's why I find this whole spying thing nonsense. It's one thing to spy on regular citizens, but it's another to spy on targets (like Angela Merkel) who are political actors and/or heads of state. It should be expected.
Most comments I've seen about this issue seem very American, going along the lines of "stop the hypocrisy, everybody does it". It is useless to argue against such view, cynicism is usually unpermeable to arguments.
However, regardless if "everybody does it" or not this story will have implications. It is a very strong argument for a new kind of walled garden: the nationally restricted Internet. We should expect a strong growth of the China-style Internet.
This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism". In the name of "protection" from real or imaginary dangers politicians, bureaucrats and autocrats will enforce Internet monitoring within a lot of countries. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, expect a lot of trouble.