Germany Scores First: Ends Verizon Contract Over NSA Concerns 206
schwit1 (797399) writes with word that, after revelations that Verizon assisted the NSA in its massive surveillance program, Germany is cutting ties with Verizon as their infrastructure provider. From the article: The Interior Ministry says it will let its current contract for Internet services with the New York-based company expire in 2015. The announcement comes after reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt provide Internet services to the German parliament and other official entities. ... Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said Thursday that Germany wants to ensure it has full control over highly sensitive government communications networks.
Now it's time for New York to nut up! (Score:5, Insightful)
New York and New Jersey.
Verizon has been fucking them for years...hard!
Never thought I'd feel bad for people from Jersey...
Jersey deserves it. (Score:2)
...never forgiven them for blighting us with that abortion they called a "reality show".
As for TFA, I'm kind of surprised that Germany's Interior Ministry hadn't been with Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile all this time.
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I guess it depends on where you are from, where I hail from nut up and ball(s) up are synonymous.
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Go ask the IRA about their "nutting squad" . . . or . . . maybe it's a better idea not to . . .
My first thought was, "Whose nut, youse guys?"
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The way to evade beta, for now, is to use the URL http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 [slashdot.org] before you open any other Slashdot page. It's a cookies thing.
This public service announcement was brought to you by Beta Sucks (tm).
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http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 [slashdot.org]
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You don't understand. It could be impossible for him to disable it. The footer link and the nobeta=1 QS parameter sometimes just don't work at all for me, I guess because Slashdot Beta is just that fucking broken. But other times they do work just fine. It's a crapshoot, really. Even legends like Bjarne Stroustrup or Sir Tim Berners-Lee could get stymied by the same bug, and they'd have no choice but to make similar complaints, too. The real fix is just to totally get rid of the dung heap that's called the
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I wonder how many people are disabling the footer with no script or something? And I would guess that the do not track stuff built into browsers as a work around for websites ignoring the do not track marker might be the problem with the nobeta=1 QS parameter.
Of course those are guesses but if you haven't looked into it, perhaps it might lead you somewhere productive. I disabled cookies altogether a while back and found most all of my web pages loaded differently and on some, I had to log in every time I cl
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It only ever happens to me on mobile, so no no-script there. What happens is you can see the link to use classic, and then it disappears behind some other div. To top it off, the stupid fucking website is "responsive," so it squishes itself down into a useless wad of mobile-site and fuck you if you'd rather it stayed a normal full page. So far as I know there's no way to disable CSS Media Queries without browser plugins so the design weenies have finally managed to get us good and stuck in their sweaty a
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I feel your pain there. I use dolphin which I think is a Safari clone or based on the same engine or something like that. Anyways, I had to set it to pretend to be a desktop browser to get Slashdot to appear correctly. I don't know if it was beta or what, I didn't stick around long enough to pay attention before switching it out. But there are stupid pages where ads don't size properly and crap like that so I guess if I happen to get the same beta issues on mine, I might have to stop browsing slashdot from
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You don't understand. It could be impossible for him to disable it.
It's easily disabled. There was a time when only techies read /.; now techies are the exception rather than the rule.
Sad times.
Re:wtf forced on beta again? (Score:4, Informative)
the low tech solution? login. I only see slashdot classic. the conversation view is better, it is easier to follow long threads. The best part? Slashdot classic allows you to login once and keeps you logged in. Mobile and Beta slashdot log me out of the system after every post, If I can login at all.
One would think Slashdot would have tested user logins without someone like 1password or apple keychain providing login every time.
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I log in. I still get the beta pages (about 2 out of 5 articles) even though I've specified classic view. You can see in the comments how I'm dealing with it. There are [pipedot.org] alternatives [soylentnews.com].
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No it isn't. From mobile it is no longer possible to disable, it just redirects nobeta links to beta, and there is no login to beta, so no way of logging in and enforcing your settings. Yeah it is THAT broken.
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Sane people all over the world eh? That's about 10 people tops so they are definitely a minority. If you are upset about the international intelligence operations please keep in mind that spying on foreign competitors and adversaries is a time honored tradition going back to the time of the Pharaohs. It's a time honored rule that countries have no friends they only have interests. And thankfully US interests in other countries are finally taking a backseat to it's own domestic interests. The narrow minded i
Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants anything communications-related from the U.S.A. anymore.
Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of fools would trust their internal government communications to a foreign company in the first place?
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I was shocked to read that. I could see some small, poor country just not having the resources to run a decent network and outsourcing it to a big private company. But Germany? Come on.
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Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Germany probably thought that the US were their allies . . .
. . . fools, indeed! The US doesn't have any allies any more; just enemies. Or, at least they treat everyone as enemies.
Hell, even the citizens of the US are treated as enemies by their own government . . .
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Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.
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No... it means that the people running the equipment produced by AMD, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun are from the same country as you.
Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Funny)
Because Americans are bad at math?
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Yes, we exported our religious zealots and criminals to the US. Clear example of GIGO.
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The Nazis didn't outsource the creation of Enigma to the Americans. They brought it from the Poles (who had already broken it and given the keys to the British). Or something like that.
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"tabulating machines". they did very simple computations. punched card based.
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Correct, and though you can pretend you don't know what they will be used for, if you sell military vehicles, punch-card tabulators, or cucumbers to the Nazis, you're still doing business with the Nazis.
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No, he was German - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]. Or were you thinking of this guy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Are you getting it yet? (Score:2)
Or you, you know, saw the film Enemy of the State 16 years ago and knew even then it wasn't far off the mark.
Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
FWIW I'm *still* a paranoid freak. I don't believe that ANY centralization of power under the control of humans can be trusted. People are corruptible, and worse, some among them are psychotically driven to seek positions of power. At some point any position of power will fall under the control of one of them, and his (these characters are extremely predominately male) first act will be to extend his current power, and his second will be to increase his immunity to repercussions for his illegal, or at least immoral, actions.
Please note that this doesn't mean I think there is any reasonable way to eliminate such concentrations of power. What it means is that I think it should be made as difficult as possible to reach such a position by political maneuvering and scheming. To this end sometimes I suggest that the holder of such a position should be selected by lottery among those technically qualified. This will produce an inefficient government, as those selected would be less adept at diplomatic negotiations and compromise. OTOH, look at the current congress, and contemplate whether it could do worse. I am bothered by isolated positions of power such as the POTUS, but my real feeling is that they should be devolved into purely symbolic offices, and the real power should vest in some small committee, selected, as suggested above, by lottery....and not from any small pool of candidates.
OTOH, I can see the value of voting, if not of plurality wins voting. So I am also moderately supportive of Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting. They would clearly be an improvement over the current system, though they would increase the problem of information overload at election time.
As for Germany...I suspect that their motives are basically economic, but this time it's causing them to make the correct decision. They should not trust a foreign country with their governmental communications.
Is it any different with anybody else? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you contract with Deutsche Telecom, you'll be subjected to German intelligence interception certainly.
Realistically---you'll be subjected to German, British, Chinese, French, Russian, American and Israeli intelligence interception to some degree or another.
Re:Is it any different with anybody else? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Is it any different with anybody else? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you 13? I think you are 13.
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So let them listen. That's what encryption is for.
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And if they already have a dozen ways to break encryption?
What then?
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I'm sure the NSA does, and many other countries too - but even for them, it's non-trivial. They may be able to subvert encryption on targeted suspects by compromising the endpoints or using false certificates, but they can't monitor entire populations that way.
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How delusional are you?
They already are.
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Only because so much is either sent in cleartext or stored in centralized and monitorable locations (eg, facebook).
If all traffic of any importance were encrypted, and only the recipient had the key, the NSA would be unable to monitor everything without detection. They could use endpoint hacks or active MITM on targetted individuals, but doing so en mass would be quickly noticed.
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Then the obvious solution is to make sure everyone uses encryption for even the most trivial things. Enable it by default.
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Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, do a traceroute to slashdot or GTFO.
Well I live in Canada, the only time my ISP(teksavvy) routes to the US now is if I'm requesting a US based address. Not even traffic going to europe or asia is routed through the US.
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Yea, you should probably traceroute a few more things before making that claim. Teksavvy buys a lot of bandwidth from the US: http://fixedorbit.com/AS/5/AS5645.htm
Many routes to europe or asia will take US carriers unfortunately.
Re:Are you getting it yet? (Score:5, Informative)
Just because none of the routers on the traceroute is in the US, doesn't mean the routing doesn't go THROUGH the US.
http://cablemap.info/
Yes. (Score:1, Insightful)
Snowden is truly a hero.
This rocks.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Funny)
No, he's a traitor to his country's attempts to act dishonorably without widespread knowledge. Shame on him.
How many of these will it take? (Score:5, Insightful)
For their corporate lobbyists to actually get some movement on Capital Hill and attempt to undo this.
For the love of God, don't put most of your point (Score:5, Funny)
in the title.
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The educational move away from junk US encryption and their tame academics standards has begun.
The gov move away from junk US encryption and their tame standards setting bureaucrats has begun.
The divestment from named US brands has begun - brands that might be connected to vast US pension funds that factored in ongoing vast international sales.
A slight change in the way some US software brands are seen by the consumers is already
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Sorry. Everyone has a short memory. In a decade nobody will even think about this, and even next year it will be "O, yeah. That's true."
There will continue to be some people who are concerned, but they were already concerned. Now they just have a bit of evidence to point to, if they can get anyone to listen.
My suspicion is that this is really economic, and the contract will be awarded to some German contractor who is "good friends" with the right people.
Zimmerman telegram? (Score:5, Informative)
Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico [wikipedia.org] was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
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Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico [wikipedia.org] was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq maybe that country would not now be on the cusp of becoming an Islamist Caliphate and 179 British soldiers would not have died what is increasingly looking like pointless deaths. At least the Germans had the good sense to see that the CIA 'evidence' for Iraqi WMDs was a steaming pile of horse manure and the strategic foresight to realize that intervention in Iraq would highly probably become the kind of FUBAR it currentl
Re:Zimmerman telegram? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq maybe that country would not now be on the cusp of becoming an Islamist Caliphate and 179 British soldiers would not have died what is increasingly looking like pointless deaths. At least the Germans had the good sense to see that the CIA 'evidence' for Iraqi WMDs was a steaming pile of horse manure and the strategic foresight to realize that intervention in Iraq would highly probably become the kind of FUBAR it currently is. Could it be that Germany (and France for that matter) learned some lessons from WWI, WWII and the cold war proxy conflicts that Britain might be well advised to take to heart?
Ummm - they did. In the time between Colin Powell's UN address and the State of the Union address by President Bush, I was able to read links on foreign media where MI6 was warning the CIA and the CIA was passing the warning upward. That's "the facts fixed around the policy" for you: only a tiny minority of the USA's population knew as Bush spoke that he was deliberately using hoaxed information as a pretext for an unjustified war.
Similarly, "full" transcripts of Hans Blix's testimony to the UN about the findings of weapons inspectors in Iraq were carried on CNN and the BBC - but the BBC's was the one actually full. The rest of the world got to see the entire thing; most of the US public had omitted from its media all the most convincing evidence that WMDs in Iraq were a fiction, and no cause for war.
Don't let someone cover their ass at Langley or in DC. The falsification of evidence started from the top.
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http://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/
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Except:
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Not really. German subs had already started unrestricted attacks on US shipping. The Zimmerman telegram was not necessary to get the US into WWI.
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The American public opinion remained split — plenty of people thought, it was the victims' own fault, that they chose to, despite Germany's fair warnings, to travel to UK or ship goods over there.
The telegram — and other, less famous, bits of intelligence obtained the same way — provided very important insights to the British and our own governments.
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The telegram was contributory, but the submarine attacks would have drawn the US into WWI by themselves.
https://history.state.gov/mile... [state.gov]
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Not at all clear. Just as many have blamed America itself for the 9/11, plenty of people thought, those, who died from the German submarines, had only themselves to blame. Public opinion was rather split — the large Irish population, for example, was heavily anti-British. It is not obvious, we would've sent actual troops to Europe — or as many, had it not been for the intercept... We didn't have much of a standing army back then — the call-up consisted of President asking the State militia
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The map on that page is quite interesting, the red line shows how far north Mexico used to reach.
If those borders still stood The USA wouldn't have much of an illegal immigrant problem but Mexico sure would.
Wall Street says not a big deal (Score:2)
World Cup (Score:5, Funny)
Mineshafts! (Score:2)
Mr. President! We must not allow...a mineshaft gap!
That's basically what this whole "We'll control it all ourselves. Mineminemineminemine!" idiocy is.
De-americanization has officially began (Score:5, Insightful)
Will be somewhat off-topic but still (somewhat) related.
De-americanization has officially began when Russia signed gas deal with China bypassing dollar. This process started long ago but with this deal it's now official. Things seem to speed up since then. Germany Verizon thing is just another domino piece falling. Regardless of what Americans think of it, I see it as a good thing. Aside from taking (most of the) world of american hegemony, ending of US imperial project can benefit Americans themselves - granted that their (incompetent and incredibly corrupt) government manages to transition from imperial power to ordinary (but better managed) country in orderly way (that is, without inciting WW3).
Message to fellow Americans: you're still one of the most progressive folks in the world (yet NOT the most ones), it's just your fucked up government that sucks, causes mayhem (Ukraine being the last manifestation of this) and blocks your potential. It's time to abandon your imperial/global hegemony policies - you can prosper pretty damn well in a multipolar world (much better than most of the rest). It all depends on you. BUT there are few things to do. You need to bring your fucked-up out-of-control government back in control, forget about american exceptionalism and learn to live in (competitive) multipolar world (ie. do not solve all problem using military or inciting civil wars).
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As much as I would like for the US to withdraw to its borders and let the other democracies defend their own borders in a big, bad world -- the last time we had a multipolar world we got World Wars I and II out of it. A big reason we got WW II is that the US did withdraw to its own borders after WW I and the multipolar world outside proceeded to screw it up on three continents at once.
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> De-americanization has officially began when Russia signed gas deal with China bypassing dollar.
Relatively local trade of that sort has often avoided conversion into a third currency. Nothing new.
The idea that Russia or Chinese currency would make significant inroads against the dollar is preposterous. The ruble is so untrusted that commerce within Russia often is done in dollars as Russia is the largest holder of US banknotes in the world.. China - well let me know when their currency flows are not re
Russians like money (Score:2)
Russians have gas/oil and need money.
EU has the money and wants gas/oil.
They exchange them.
Putin has the power to upset everybody a great deal, to the point where he might not survive such a disruption. EU doesn't have the power to upset it's people by pushing Putin into such a situation- they still have democracy... Either way, they are not going to change their economic situation for long.
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Ahem.
Google Victoria Nuland.
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It's not the nineties anymore.
I am letting you know thus. [bloomberg.com]
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You're making too much damn sense to be on slashdot. Are you a troll?
Re:De-americanization has officially began (Score:4, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Most nations may not want to be at some "plate" allowed crumbs by a 'superpower' if they elect a good party or live under a tame dictator.
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Regional conflicts are a whole lot less nasty than the world wars that were going on before the US became a superpower.
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Regional conflicts are a whole lot less nasty than the world wars that were going on before nuclear weapons created MAD seems more accurate, the US seems to have created more conflicts since WWII then any other country with many of those conflicts being a long way away from the US borders and the only thing that America seems to respect is nukes.
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The only reason US developed nuclear weapons was to put an end to wars that it didn't start and didn't want to be involved in.
Maybe Germany should think back to how lucky it was that the US didn't complete the Manhattan project before the end of WWII in Europe. Yes, the US probably would have nuked German cities if the war was still going on. Britain also wanted to nuke Germany in retaliation for Germany's blitz of London etc. - the first time mass bombings of civilian cities had been carried out.
While nucl
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I'm sure America and others would have developed nuclear weapons no matter what as they were an invention whose time had come, just like America developed aircraft carriers during peace time and also was a major contender in the naval arms race between the wars until a treaty limited the numbers of capital ships.
Nothing you say challenges the idea that after WWII, especially after the Soviets also had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, large scale wars such as the world wars became impractical d
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Quite right. the problem is what is the correct way in a place like the Ukraine. People are telling america to get involved and to protect the ukraine, but that leads directly to them saying we didn't do it right.
America shouldn't be the sole super power, I wouldn't mind having a United Europe with equal military strength so that America doesn't have to shoulder the burden alone. Take Libya it took American fighters and awacs to clear out the surface to air defenses so that Europe could send in air cover
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The veneer of the US being the great good guy is also wearing thin inside the US. Jingoists aren't really saying we're good, they're saying "We're the home team". In that sense they've got a point, but there's no reason to expect that anyone outside the US would feel that way.
P.S.: The US has so far been more altruistic and honorable than previous countries have that fell into the same role. This has been declining over time, as should be expected. Human institutions that centralize power become corrupt
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People have been out protesting, but the press is centrally owned by those who don't want to encourage such behavior. So they don't cover it. It's not like the 1970's, when each city had its own independent newspaper, and many had independent TV stations. Mind you, if you search for protests you can find them documented. They aren't really suppressed, and they are covered in various small areas. But nobody does, so the protests die away...or transform into posts on You-tube.
Additionally, as the populat
Better yet ban the company from the whole country (Score:4, Interesting)
We the people (Score:3, Informative)
Please correct me if i'm wrong.
This story has close to none coverage in Germany.
It's been dug up by a blogger (1) and reblogged by netzpolitik.org (2), who then started to ask questions.
There are some articles gathering up by now, but the big media seems to shush things.
The leading tv-stations (ARD & ZDF) that are publicly funded have no real content regarding this story.
This being said: ZDF does list a story in which the government looks as if it has addressed this problem entirely by itself. Some reuters-bot-written junk. (3)
But this was not the case, the government clearly had no intention to reveal it's ties to Verizon. If it wasn't for the blogger, they wouldn't have had to.
Now they're trying to downplay the story and to make the provided services look like a fallback routine or - even better - like an unused source.
The Fed. Ministry of Interior posted yesterday that it had contacted Verizon in 2010, ...they forgot to tell us when this would happen, but now it seems like they are ready for the big transition m(
telling them they would slowly withdraw from the contract, since the Verizon services were being replaced gradually by a new infrastructure for the Government. (4)
After the internet died last summer, this is a bad joke.
Anyhow:
also yesterday the big coalition has managed to finalize their decision regarding a hearing of E. Snowden.
They hold a majority within the exclusivly formed task force regarding the NSA affair.
They have decided mutually that a hearing can not take place on German soil - given the 'fact' that an extradition treaty with the US is in effect. (5)
1: Daniel Luecking http://medienkonsument.de/
2: https://netzpolitik.org/2014/arbeitserleichterung-fuer-die-nsa-deutscher-bundestag-bezieht-internet-von-us-anbieter-verizon/
3: http://www.heute.de/bund-baut-kommunikationsnetz-neu-ohne-us-partner-verizon-33792814.html
4: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/DE/2014/06/bund-wechselt-netzbetreiber.html
5: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nsa-affaere-grosse-koalition-verhindert-befragung-von-snowden-a-977742.html
What about themselves? (Score:2)
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It's one thing to help the US to spy on someone else, it's another thing to allow the US to spy on them. No surprise. No ethics, either, but that's no surprise.
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Better start prepping (Score:2)
So, first other countries start dropping the dollar as the international reserve currency. Now they’re going to stop buying our products and services. Our economy is going to hell in a handbasket.
economic might more powerful than spying (Score:2)
Are these guys really that stupid? (Score:2)
First, what kind of numbnut country outsources their state communications services? Come on man.
Then who are they going to get as a replacement? Some other company that has no doubt already been suborned by a secret agency?
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Later the tame German staff who grew up with/advanced into the post 1960's telco upgrades just kept selecting staff that where happy to serve under/with the GCHQ and NSA.
German domestic and foreign intelligence just kept telling every elected gov that its was very secret and very vital.
A few dec
Encryption (Score:2)
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The German gov staff hope this will allow Germany to be trusted by the US and UK and get more export grade US mil equipment.
Good! (Score:2)
This sort of thing is starting to hurt, right in the pocket book where it counts. That is exactly the right response to companies stabbing their consumers in the back.
Economic destruction (Score:2)
The NSA has not only undermined our trust in the government (well... that's assuming there was any to begin with), but it's also wreaking huge devastation on our economy. How many US-based companies have lost huge amounts of foreign business due to these revelations?
It's NOT Snowden's fault for revealing these actions. It's the US Government's fault for having their fingers in every conceivable cookie jar in the world, and forcing US-based companies to assist them with it (willingly, unwillingly, and even
Re:How is Verizon involved? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they shared nothing but the name, that would be one thing, but they actually share the same management as far as I know.
A $2 whore is still a $2 whore even if she moves to another country.