U.S. taps half-billion German phone, internet links in month

[Razgovory]

France is rather notorious for industrial espionage and didn't Volkswagon get in trouble for spying a while back?

And?  I mean this sort of strikes me as nonsense like Americans cannot be upset about blah blah because our country has done such and such.  Which is ridiculous.

And calling out unfair when someone does what you do to others is not exactly consistent.

[Zanza]

I believe you were the one who brought up industrial espionage in the first place.

No, certainly not. I am exclusively interested in large-scale government surveillance of private person communications.

To put it bluntly the privacy of Germans is not really the concern of the American government.  If that's your concern then you should probably invest more money in counter intelligence.

Fair enough. I can understand that perspective, even if I don't share it. I expect more than that from democratic, liberal governments. Yours and mine.

[Razgovory]

I believe you were the one who brought up industrial espionage in the first place.

No, certainly not. I am exclusively interested in large-scale government surveillance of private person communications.

To put it bluntly the privacy of Germans is not really the concern of the American government.  If that's your concern then you should probably invest more money in counter intelligence.

Fair enough. I can understand that perspective, even if I don't share it. I expect more than that from democratic, liberal governments. Yours and mine.

Sorry, that was Iormland.  What exactly do you expect from a democratic liberal government?

[Berkut]

Do you know? If so, care to share your knowledge? I sure hope that the German intelligence agencies have more respect for privacy of unsuspicious persons than the American ones purportedly have.

This is exactly my point  - of course we don't know! That is why it is called "espionage", by definition the public doesn't know!

Last week you didn't know about the particulars of this "scandal", but that doesn't mean it wasn't happening, nor did it mean that anyone with even a modicum of sense was aware that it was happening.

Yes, and? That makes it okay somehow? 

No, it makes your demand for evidence that the Germans are doing it as well rather ridiculous.

If you have a problem with espionage in general, why weren't you all broken up about this a year ago? Or ten years ago? Or 100 years ago?

What does this specific revelation have to do with the general issue of espionage?

[Berkut]

I believe you were the one who brought up industrial espionage in the first place.

No, certainly not. I am exclusively interested in large-scale government surveillance of private person communications.

To put it bluntly the privacy of Germans is not really the concern of the American government.  If that's your concern then you should probably invest more money in counter intelligence.

Fair enough. I can understand that perspective, even if I don't share it. I expect more than that from democratic, liberal governments. Yours and mine.

You certainly get a lot more than that.

Here is the thing though - you only hear about the stuff that some douchebag leaker tells you about, so of course you never have the entire story. Assuming that the tiny slice you are shown by someone like Assange or Snowden is the entirety, then becoming mortally outraged at it is a little, well, immature. You know you do not know the entire story, so why are you so bent out of shape at the tiny little piece you know about, when you also know you know nothing about the relationships involved, how the data is actually used or shared, what kind of arrangements are actually in place between liberal, democratic countries, etc., etc.

All you know is what people with very clear agendas and who by definition are devoid of honesty wish to tell you - maybe there is something to be pissed off about, but in truth, you probably no LESS now than you did before this latest "revelation".

[Zanza]

No, it makes your demand for evidence that the Germans are doing it as well rather ridiculous.

I never demanded such evidence.  I am sure that my government does this as well and expressed my dislike of this in this thread.

If you have a problem with espionage in general, why weren't you all broken up about this a year ago? Or ten years ago? Or 100 years ago?

What does this specific revelation have to do with the general issue of espionage?

The ubiquity of communication and data creation has increased exponentially in the last years and so has the ability of governments to collect and datamine such data. No government ever had the ability to track so many different peoples' communications, whereabouts, networks and analyse that data with modern datamining techniques. This also meant, that governments, short of total and utter police states like East Germany, could simply not spy to that degree on unsuspicious persons. They had to concentrate on the few most likely dangerous persons.
The ability to spy on everybody at the same time is a recent development due to technological progress. The ability to do it was known to everybody who cared, that it was done was suspected, that it was actually done was revealed by Snowdon to a large public.

I am not sure why you bring up the general issue of espionage in your discussion with me when I clearly only talk about the government surveillance of private persons.

[Zanza]

You certainly get a lot more than that.

Here is the thing though - you only hear about the stuff that some douchebag leaker tells you about, so of course you never have the entire story. Assuming that the tiny slice you are shown by someone like Assange or Snowden is the entirety, then becoming mortally outraged at it is a little, well, immature. You know you do not know the entire story, so why are you so bent out of shape at the tiny little piece you know about, when you also know you know nothing about the relationships involved, how the data is actually used or shared, what kind of arrangements are actually in place between liberal, democratic countries, etc., etc.

All you know is what people with very clear agendas and who by definition are devoid of honesty wish to tell you - maybe there is something to be pissed off about, but in truth, you probably no LESS now than you did before this latest "revelation".

That's a fair and good objection. I admit that we all only know few details on it. Those that I know make me suspicious though and when it comes to governments overstepping their boundaries, I prefer to err on the side of caution. I would be very happy to hear that our governments actually do have good mechanisms in place to safeguard the privacy of innocents. I just fear they don't.

[The Minsky Moment]

How could you possible have US judicial oversight of Us government agencies engaged in espionage in foreign countries?

That doesn't even make sense.

It's not that crazy if you view the federal government as a government of limited powers - in that case the Bill of Rights is not just a set of freestanding "objections" to government power that can be invoked by certain protected persons but set of fundamental rules limited the way in which the government can act.  And if it is the latter, then the government can't suddently be clothed in new authority it never had once an invisible national boundary is crossed.

That said for prudential reasons or others, the federal courts have generally taken the view that the government can act in an extra-constitutional way when it acts in its capacity as a sovereign in foreign affairs.  So practically you are correct and the courts won't consider these kinds of objections.  But it isn't inevitable or obvious that has to be the case.  One could imagine a world in which the government has to go through a FISA like procedure before engaging in overseas surveillance and in which it must adhere to constitutional norms in its foreign actions and one could argue that this is more consistent with the structure of constitutional limited governement.  There is the danger that a government that gets used to acting extra-constitutionally overseas will not be able to shake the bad habit, and that such violations will begin to bleed over into domestic conduct (indeed that did happen in the Nixon years and MAY be happening here).

[The Minsky Moment]

From what I read, the FISA court is just approving everything that is given to it, so in my humble opinion it fails in its oversight role.

It's a little more complicated, IIRC the FISA court ultimately approves the vast majority of applications, but a significant number are required to be modified first.  The approval rate is suspicious but the bigger problem is that without access to the details, it it hard to gauge the validity of the decisions being made.

[Tamas]

Are you pro-Big Brother types wilfully ignoring the point of all this? AFAIK, it's not like "there are some suspicious musselmen in Germany which Bourne reported. lets tap their laptops." It's more like "let's track and log everything the Germans do on the parts of the internet we can access, because who knows, we might make some use of it someday."

[Razgovory]

Are you pro-Big Brother types wilfully ignoring the point of all this? AFAIK, it's not like "there are some suspicious musselmen in Germany which Bourne reported. lets tap their laptops." It's more like "let's track and log everything the Germans do on the parts of the internet we can access, because who knows, we might make some use of it someday."

Would you object if we tapped phones of of everyone in Pakistan?

[The Brain]

I don't give a flying fuck about the privacy of people in other countries. And I fully expect other countries to spy on us. What rubs me the wrong way is my government spying on me. Fuck that.

[Ed Anger]

I want to spy on Brain.

[Jacob]

I want to spy on Brain.

It would be ideal if you could do it on behalf of the Swedish government.

[Ed Anger]

I want to spy on Brain.

It would be ideal if you could do it on behalf of the Swedish government.

It'll be Mr Hands pt. 2: Electric Bugaloo