MEPs Vote To Suspend Data Sharing With US 180
New submitter mrspoonsi writes with this news, excerpted from the BBC: "The European Parliament has voted to suspend the sharing of financial data with the U.S., following allegations that citizens' data was spied on....The European Parliament voted to suspend its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US, in response to the alleged tapping of EU citizens' bank data held by the Belgian company SWIFT. The agreement granted the U.S. authorities access to bank data for terror-related investigations but leaked documents made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden allege that the global bank transfer network was the target of wider U.S. surveillance."
Good luck (Score:3)
How do they plan to stop it? I am being serious here. It sounds like the NSA has taps on all their data already, whether Europeans give it freely or not.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).
SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.
The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.
Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!
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Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!
Yeah it's not like TFTP is very secure...
(ducks)
Re: Good luck (Score:2)
Actually the backup data centre is outside of the EU, located in Switzerland.
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That would NEVER happen. The tourism industry would probably launch a coup themselves if the government even *suggested* the idea.
never say never (Score:2, Insightful)
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How about the "business industry". They tend to travel a bit.
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Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do they need to even bother to stop it? If the US are doing things that we don't want them to do anyway, why go to ANY effort to help them do them legally? This is about removing our assistance that we give them to do it, not stopping them being able to do it.
Let them take the administrative burden (and I highly doubt they are monitoring every flight and every person on every flight, or else the agreement wouldn't have existed in the first place anyway), let them take the fall when the data is released by accident, and let it look to EU citizens like you're not caving in to the US (which is what we all accused them of when this agreement first appeared).
Nobody expects it to STOP the US stealing the data, but why should we help them do so at enormous expense to us? It's like piracy - the data is going to be stolen anyway, so why bother putting in a system of controls, contracts and everything else to our cost?
But, to be honest, this is nothing to do with data leaks or agreements. If you're not already reading this as the first step to broken EU/US relations, then you haven't been paying attention. That this happened is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than what's actually happened. No more easy rides for the US when they want something from us. (As it should be, because they never play ball when we ask for something).
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
And then you can say bye-bye to us lending a hand for things like extraditions and terrorist bug-hunts. The EU followed the US into a pointless, long and very, very expensive "war" that never was (you can say what you want - it was NOT a war, legally or ethically - it's was a criminal hunt with guns in foreign countries), in the middle of massive economic troubles, and what did we see from it? Much stricter airport controls for ourselves, giving the US all our data (and getting nothing back), and lots and lots of expensive military action.
And what do we get back for our assistance? The US spied on us and then couldn't even be bothered to keep the information properly secret (Note: A whistleblower running around the world telling people all these things is TEN TIMES more damning than the fact that you spied them in the first place - it's just amateur). That's not how you treat an ally.
The biggest thing here is that the EU no longer wants to play ball with the US. If more things emerge, that distrust will deepen. You can play the "most important country in the world" card all you like, the fact is that the EU has more money in trade, and a much greater influence over other countries. It's going to hurt if the US continue to piss off the EU, and there aren't that many people in the EU who would care.
It's a question of how long before this affects US trade and before we're the ones imposing sanctions and forcing agreements on the US. Because, seriously guys, you might be big, but without the co-operation of your allies, you're in serious trouble.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
As a EU citizen, I can only agree. We're increasingly seeing the US (government) as the actual terrorists, which is the only truth as far as i'm concered. I'm happy these economic and data sharing relations are crumbling down. Maybe it will knock some sense into the US government.
It's a pity for the social and human aspect though, I've been twice and love the country and people.
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As a EU citizen, I can only agree. We're increasingly seeing the US (government) as the actual terrorists, which is the only truth as far as i'm concered. I'm happy these economic and data sharing relations are crumbling down. Maybe it will knock some sense into the US government.
It's a pity for the social and human aspect though, I've been twice and love the country and people.
Don't pity us. Be happy. The demise of the NSA and US security empire as it exists begins at the extremities... we should never have annexed EU data in the first place.
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My guess is the nsa wouldn't mind if their servers were hacked by concerned Europeans. That's the same as what they do anyway. And don't complain. My national security is a national matter.
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If the US are doing things that we don't want them to do anyway, why go to ANY effort to help them do them legally?
We were supposed to be friends. We always sort of knew that the Americans were assholes, but the recent revelations are beyond what most people believed. Now we have proof and are naturally unfriending them.
Unfortunately the UK is full of arseholes as well, and now the people I used to do business with in the EU don't want to know me. We picked the wrong group to have a "special relationship" (i.e. gimp) with.
All your base are belong to US (Score:2)
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined, and the EU doesn't have a military chain of command worth speaking about.
So this info "sharing" (aka data fealty) agreement is going to end. Perhaps this is for the best even for the US. As a citizen of the world, I think it's a move in the right direction.
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Not everything has to be about violence (Score:5, Insightful)
What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined
As surprising as it apparently is to a certain kind of American, not everything in international relations has to be resolved with violence.
The US is committing hostile acts against EU member states, and measures like withdrawing cooperation in these programmes are a reasonable and proportionate response. Trade sanctions would be a more serious step up: no-one would win in the short term if that happened, but the US would probably lose a lot more. There would be direct costs, of course, but also probably irreparable damage to the United States' wider international credibility and reduced cooperation from other nations who were already less predisposed to support the US on matters of mutual interest.
From the outside, it seems very strange that so many people in the US are so proud of their vast military-industrial complex and security services. Here in the UK, the most damaging coverage of the US recently had nothing to do with spying or wars, not that those are winning many friends here. The really sad stuff was shots of pathetic posturing from the political leadership of both the main US parties, juxtaposed with footage of federal workers in DC holding banners saying "Please do your jobs so we can get on with ours", and stories of couples whose wedding days were spoiled, and descriptions of children with very serious health problems who weren't getting experimental drugs that were their only hope because the programmes to trial them were suspended. The idea that such a dysfunctional government, run by politicians so completely out of touch with the basic needs of their own people, should be trusted with anything of significance, security-related or otherwise, just seems bizarre at this point.
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What are they going to do? We have far more military might than the EU combined, and the EU doesn't have a military chain of command worth speaking about.
Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.
Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": (1) economically punish the US: impose import/export tariffs on relevant US goods/services (particularly tech but perhaps also bandwidth/peering etc), make it much much harder for US citizens to get visas to come ove
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Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.
Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": [a list of things which would be highly unpopular with their constituency or go against WTO rules]
Almost of these things you mention are very costly responses to the US, in some cases, the EU would actually lose more (e.g.: uprooting of a US base from German soil would likely have an economic effect like a tactical nuke).
About the only things I think are low-cost for the EU would be the diplomatic moves - i.e., high profile, no major business or strategic impact. The removal of extradition/rendition agreements are probably for the best - given the dark and dirty uses they've been put to since the "war
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Do what their legal system says or keep helping a nice 'general', 'political leader', 'boss' who visits from time to time with expensive splitting optical "work"?
Will that 'general', 'political leader', 'boss' protect them from their own internal security forces and any new investigations?
Next up. (Score:2)
How long before we hear calls to declare the whole EU as terrorist sympathisers?
As more of this comes out, I hope others join the EU and we start looking at a embargo on sharing information with the US until it learns.
Re:Next up. (Score:5, Funny)
How long before we hear calls to declare the whole EU as terrorist sympathisers? As more of this comes out, I hope others join the EU and we start looking at a embargo on sharing information with the US until it learns.
I think Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News are already doing that.
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So, let the USA ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, let the USA ... (Score:5, Informative)
I think that's the issue (and why this sharing has been a bit controversial over here), is that those reciprocal agreements don't exist. The US have been given a view into EU data, and the same sharing doesn't come in the other direction. (whether it was sought... I don't know, but one-sided arrangements are troublesome in and of themselves)
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That was sort of my point. I just forgot the <irony> tags.
Industrial/financial espionage aside, the USA is instantiating a policy much the same as that of the Warsaw pact nations and the USSR following WWII. The next war, or terrorist activity, will be fought on EU territory as a buffer zone. Not in the USA. Unlike the World Wars, there is no physical 'front line'. But a logical one can be created by making an asymmetrical defensive barrier.
I think the EU is starting to realize this. And they are no
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Not hugely suprising (Score:4, Informative)
The TFTP was a pretty one-sided agreement, and it's therefore politically fragile and the first thing that's likely to be pulled when the trust in the USA's respect of EU data breaks down.
Re:Not hugely suprising (Score:4, Funny)
TFTP is not one-sided, it actually is an ACK'd protocol.
maybe EU should give the US the BOOTP, then. (but even that is not one-sided, exactly).
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Oh no! (Score:3)
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? The US is in the middle of seriously pissing off all its allies, and your response is simply "We don't care! We'll do what we want and you can't stop us!"
And people use to wonder why the Middle Eastern countries hated America. This is Europe getting some of the same treatment.
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Given that the whole reason this agreement was set up in the first place is because it was data the US felt it desperately needed and couldn't get then I think that lock is already there.
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Except this is not a robber stealing your TV. This is an invited guest who is supposed to be a friend.
First thing you do is stop inviting them around your house.
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middle eastern (what you really mean is muslim) countries hate ALL non-muslim nations. the US is just a proper subset of that.
US spying is wrong and evil, but this has nothing to do with why the disagreement based on religion exists so strongly in the M.E.
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You've been taken in by the whole religious wrapping on what is essentially political\economic friction. It suits those in charge for people to believe it's about religion (even if they claim it isn't) because that way they won't look for the real reasons. Religion is just a convenient tool to manipulate/motivate/con the masses.
The ones in charge are ultimately motivated by the same basic things that motivate everyone; ownership and access to resources. i.e. Money and power. If you want plenty of bot
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Are you aware that Islamist terrorists have attacked London and Madrid more recently than the US?
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So the Boston bombings were really only a failed attempt at beef Wellington? That explains the cookware involved!
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Seriously? The US is in the middle of seriously pissing off all its allies, and your response is simply "We don't care! We'll do what we want and you can't stop us!"
And people use to wonder why the Middle Eastern countries hated America. This is Europe getting some of the same treatment.
Minus the bombs...
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You are attempting the same dishonest trick many people try in internet discussions. I didn't say "same treatment", I said "some of the same treatment".
Comparing two different things is not saying they are they are exactly equivalent in all possible ways. It is saying they have some similarities that may help in understanding one or other. If they were exactly the same, then they would be the exact same thing, and noting a comparison would be pointless and redundant.
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It costs more time and money to obtain the data covertly than overtly, time and money that would have to be redirected from other parts of the NSA's work.
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well SWIFT is based in Belgium. Now their failover datacenter is not in America anymore the US theoretically doesn't have much political leverage left, and will have to rely on hacking. How good their IT security is anyones guess, but they've been around a while and more importantly will be on the alert. A lot of this hacking was invisible for so long because nobody was looking for it. You'll notice that once Snowden started leaking the GCHQ operation against Belgacom was busted, Merkel's phone being tapped got busted by German intelligence, etc. Belgian counter-intelligence will probably be a part of defending SWIFT. They know 5 Eyes are coming for them, and when you know an attack is coming it's much easier to fight it off.
Information Security Jobs (Score:2)
All I can get from this cold-war type move is that Info Sec will be a hot market in the coming days. Intrusion / CounterIntrusion will be the new game by which big organizations (including governments) thrive or suffer.
Children it is your own fault. (Score:2, Redundant)
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:3)
Can be intellectual property next? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Business as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Informative)
It's non-binding because the EU Parliament is not a real Parliament. It's very weak and has limited influence, the real power at the EU level is in the European Commission which is sort of like an executive branch that is directed by national governments. The EU Commission may still decide to ignore the Parliament on this one, but I guess that wouldn't do a great deal for their legitimacy, which is at any rate already heavily weakened after years of sustained attacks on their decision making ...
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Cuts both ways (Score:2)
Europe is a lot closer to, and has been more impacted by, terrorist strikes than the US. A reduction in data sharing will impact both sides of the Atlantic.
Of course, MEPs aren't really -accountable- to anyone for their decisions, it's the European sovereign governments who will be left holding the bag if terrorist strikes increase.
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Why should the US share data with Europe, if Europe closes TFTP? That's my point (albeit perhaps not particularly well made.)
Re:Cuts both ways (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, until there's an Edward Snowden equivalent from UK, France, Germany, etc; I'm not sure I believe there are no reciprocal data sharing agreements.
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Well, there have been indications to that effect. But my response is not -predicated- on the prior existence of such agreements.
Rather it asserts the willingness of the US to share -in the future- would be impacted by an European unwillingness to share.
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Thus, the Germans have allowed foreign spy agencies to set up operations in Germany while in turn they do the dirty work of spying on German citizens, which the Germ
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Do you really think a French MEP's re-election will be impacted by a terrorist strike in the UK, or vice versa?
Translation (Score:2)
"So we found out that even though we're giving you all that information for free, you're also spying on us and taking it secretly. That seems kind of redundant. It'd save money if we just let you steal the info yourself instead of handing it over."
TFTP out, FTP in (Score:2)
TFTP is known to be insecure (Score:2)
I mean, it doesn't have any authentication or authorization methods at all. What's wrong with these Europeans? It's not my fault they didn't guard their router configs...
Germany leading the way (Score:2)
I see talk about trade sanctions and so on as a way for the EU to "punish" the US.
Germany are leading the way in that regard. I work for a UK company with subsidiaries in Germany. We are looking at moving various services in the cloud (management's bright idea), including Office 365 and one of the cloud based authentication services to tie it all together.
At the moment Germany are pretty much vetoing it. Nothing can be US hosted. That rules out Office 365 for email, anything running on AWS or Azure... unles
Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we're surprised that shills keep posting "we already knew this" and thinking they're clever.
Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection [wikipedia.org] 1960?
Thanks to Snowden we have the history needed for the dreamy sock puppets. I saw one offer that the US does not really 'use' the info for finance or domestic political needs.
A huge change from its not possible, would never work, would be found out, the data sets are too large, the US brands would never help, the political and legal protections
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How old are you? When I got on the internet in 1992 as a 9th grader, the NSA didn't even officially exist, but I knew full well that the NSA was monitoring foreign and domestic network traffic.
The Room 641A story was on the cover of the New York Times 7 years ago.
I don't think saying "we already knew this" is clever. It's a fact. I knew this. And since I did not have any special access to information, I have to assume that everyone else who paid any attention also knew this.
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When I got on the internet in 1992 as a 9th grader, the NSA didn't even officially exist,
Even when I got on the Internet in the early 1980's, in college - and probably still.
Doesn't NSA stand for No Such Agency?
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Re: The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:2)
Get yourself educated, the NSA is a little bit older than the 90s.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency [wikipedia.org]
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There was a practice on Usenet by some to put many random but suspicious words in signatures, as a joking attempt to clog up the NSA computers. This goes back to the 80s I think.
This is still in Emacs, for example I just got this output by asking:
global ANZUS fundamentalist CipherTAC-2000 assassinate NWO pipeline Ceridian Area 51 Treasury analyzer Marxist Janet Reno embassy CESID
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace [wikipedia.org] was ~1982.
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Hell, even Gary Seven [wikipedia.org] had an NSA ID.
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Especially since the correct response, if we already knew this, should be directed at the MEPs and it is "I told you so".
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Where this conversation went off track is this: The NSA *is* supposed to be doing all of this just as foreign SIGINT services are supposed to be doing it.
The real surprise, hence the real problem, is that this spying is not being used purely for State related safety. It is being passed to various other entities to be used for common criminal prosecutions. This is just plain invasive and abusive. It gives WAY too much power to the unethical greedy powermongers.
I recall back in 2011 when Bush made the stateme
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For that you would need a Vichy "tech" to actively help and collaborate to hide foreign telco tech within France/EU.
The UK, Italy, Germany is understandalbe as client or defeated nations. France and other more tech savvy EU nations should have been able to understand their own internal (global) telco networks. How is the NSA getting all the data out?
Is France and others looping the
Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with ISP administration, like my father's experience as a Telefonica engineer, is that you don't have to be a genius to have a very substantial level of technical responsibility - but you do have to be one of the lads.
And that means you're very chummy and utterly loyal to the environment around you. Your god-like powers give you god-like beliefs, especially over your ability to monitor the behaviour of others. After all, you have so much responsibility and so much control, which means you must know best, right?
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"The French and other EU nations are just talking about weapons of mass destruction too much on the phone?"
Yes, they prevented all the terrorist acts Angela Merkel was planning too.
Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"There's no way we wouldnt already know if they were doing that."
And from the last several years,
"Obama is going to fix all the abuses of the warmongering Republicans. So whatever evils were there they will be going away."
In the end we have purchased what has befallen us, but not through informed consent. It's simply been done through willful ignorance and denial. It takes minimal awareness to recognize how clueless most Americans are, wholly consumed with the mind-rot like Jersey Shore or Facebook.
So yes, most are/were surprised.
Re: The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:2)
Well, he did fix the illegal activities of the previous administration.
He's a law professor.
So now all these stuff has been made as legal as possible.
See, you should be happy that you've lost your privacy legally, aren't you happy?
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Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:4, Insightful)
most Americans are, wholly consumed with the mind-rot like Jersey Shore or Facebook.
I have yet to see the proof that mindless entertainment has a negative effect on people using their brains. I suspect it's one of those things that simply sounds reasonable and appeals to our ego, but there's absolutely no proof of. Like sex, drugs, and violence in the media causes those things in real life.
I suspect it's actually that most Americans are consumed with trying to get by, or are too discouraged by the news to try to make a difference. Honestly, where do you start being active? CISPA II, climate change, the NSA, the patriot act, the war on drugs, budget cuts, patent reform, education reform, health care reform, scaling back TSA, scaling back the rest of the government, regulating chewing gum additives, decreasing defense spending, pro choice or pro life debate, electoral college reform, campaign finance reform, the debate of the minute about taxes, EPA standards, the carbon tax, gun control (pro or con), term limits, gerrymandering, third party politics, national ID laws, net neutrality, affirmative action, immigration, etc. No matter what your political beliefs, no matter your news source, it's tough to flip on the news and not come to the conclusion that everything is going to hell. That's kind of the goal of the news. After a while, most people get burned out if they ever cared.
I have no proof that THAT is the reason people are clueless beyond that's why I often ignore politics, but it's more plausible to me than Jersey Shore (which, by the way, ended about a year ago) or other entertainment forms you don't personally like ruining America.
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Why should Independent nations not react ? (Score:3, Interesting)
The NSA is chartered to do that by a specific nation. The USA.
Why should independent nations not react to the (very real and ilegal) actions ot the NSA against those nations' interests and citizens?
For anyone that is minimaly informed about history and politics, the desire of the NSA (or any other inteligence agency) to have access to EVERYTHING is obvious.
My surprise is limited to the extent to which the NSA as been allowed to gain that information.
The level and volume of information that it is said that t
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> For anyone that is minimaly informed about history and politics, the desire of the NSA (or any other
> inteligence agency) to have access to EVERYTHING is obvious.
> My surprise is limited to the extent to which the NSA as been allowed to gain that information.
And anyone that is minimaly informed about history and politics, shouldn't be surprized.
Its very simple to see what is up. All you have to do is look at the way they make decisions, with their secret briefings, their threat assesments etc. Th
yeah, tit for tat, that oughta teach 'em! (Score:2)
get caught spying, get expelled from NoValueIstan. this is the same thing.
otherwise known as shit on the neighbors, they won't like you any more.
something three-year-olds catch onto quickly, but governments never do...
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and we are all surprised?
Just curious, how much does the NSA pay you for these posts? I'm broke, the holidays are coming out, and I don't mind stepping on my morals to help the US fuck over the world.
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I don't mind stepping on my morals to help the US fuck over the world.
This is probably fair, as we have a large group of people dedicated to fucking over the US -- we call them politicians, especially US politicians.
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No-one is surprised. Some people are, however, apparently surprised that such "chartered" activity may have repercussions when the other parties find out about it.
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Let's just take it as given that nobody is surprised.
Doesn't that make suspending data with the US *more* urgent? They are having high-profile leaks of this information! You don't share private information with people who can't keep it private.
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Of course you are going to spy on your allies. They can be much more dangerous than your enemies ever could.
Re:The NSA did what they were chartered to do ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, take America for example.
America is currently as much of a threat to the rights and freedoms of everyone else in the world as the people they purport to be watching for.
Why would anybody continue to trust the US when they're acting like a bunch of self entitled assholes who think their rights trump ours?
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Of course you are going to spy on your allies.
I suppose that's why the US government spies on its own citizens. A cowardly way of thinking, but definitely not an excuse thugs would be above using.
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Would you be friendly with someone who was spying on you?
If she's cute, I might even be more friendly.
Allies are always potential adversaries on any subject. Or do you expect allies to always have the same agendas and always vote and have the same political views on everything?
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Monitoring international money transfers is like massacring people?
Isn't monitoring just that what you expect to be doing to find criminals and enemy activities? All the governments are cracking down on their own banks over potential money laundering violations for the same reasons and monitoring the systems, intentionally.
Re:The laws! They do nothing! (Score:4, Interesting)
The amount of information obtained in the "french affair" isn't attainable via "tapping cables".
It entails access to switching equipment, call detail records, etc.
This access is via either of two ways:
- Backdoors
- Agents in place that have access to those systems.
It also entails some very fat "pipes" connecting to those systems.
These aren't new issues regarding security (and I don't mean "cyber security").
Maybe the powers that be need to start mandating more security to that part of the infra-structure.
That, and :
- Auditing of software and hardware (and not just rubber-stamping)
- Increased security for physical assets (data-centers, overland cables, etc...)
- And active enforcment of anti-espionage laws
will mitigate the problem.
What won't solve it, and will certeanly lead to more abuse and friction between states, is just shrugging
it of or brushing it under the carpet.
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Maybe Europe could create a super Navy to defend them from foreign evil like the USA.
Europe doesn't have the money (though France's military is larger than most people realize). On the other hand, the US doesn't have the money either, and the coming decade will see massive cuts to all this sort of thing: military, NSA, spying in general, you can cut all of it with less squawking than cutting social programs, so we will.
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The courts would need the full protection of their respective security forces.
Think Poland ~ 1980 or around East Germany in 1988...