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Hi, I'm the author of the piece. What you describe, while astute, isn't what's going on here, because at the level these agreements are being made, the French i

Hi, I'm the author of the piece. What you describe, while astute, isn't what's going on here, because at the level these agreements are being made, the French intelligence services don't care that the NSA is spying on French nationals. There's no negotiation to be made: they simply want to maintain their existing capacity, but have been required to give it legal cover by the greater recent visibility of mass surveillance. In fact, among intelligence services of putative allies, having another friendly nation spy on your nationals grants you a potential advantage, since it means you can bypass domestic restrictions by simply trading intel with them. (It's also one of the reasons why bilateral agreements would be undermined, and difficult to initiate. They would also preserve the idea that some classes of innocent users are fair game for mass surveillance, while others deserve protection.) France's surveillance advantage comes from its access to submarine cables rather than local servers. That's the information it will be collecting, and potentially trading with others. Much of the problem here, I'd note, comes from not separating the defensive and offensive components of the intelligence services. Whatever you belief is the proportionate level of surveillance of a population, it's clear that an institution whose job was to protect the assets and personal data of a nation's population would have a very different attitude to letting others spy on its comma traffic than one which was primarily concerned with aggressively investigating other nations. Politicians are therefore hearing policy proposals from only one side of a debate. That's why they think that backdoors would help and not harm national security, and why they think spying on the rest of the world without oversight won't erode their own citizens' privacy.

mtgx 11y ago
I agree. The NSA/US gov could care less that France will spy on its citizens. For all we know they may already have a deal to do exactly that to bypass some of NSA's own restrictions of spying on Americans. I think it's already known they do that with the GCHQ. And they make European countries spy on each other, too, while they promise them not to spy on them themselves, but then get the data from others. Sweden spies on Germany, Germany spies on Sweden - and NSA gets all of that data. From everything they've said and done so far, it's also clear the NSA would rather maintain the status quo of an insecure Internet and insecure computers, backdoored encryption and whatnot, even if the US has the "most" to lose, as long as they can use that insecurity to spy on others, too. They much rather prefer this scenario than if say 99% of the global population were all using end-to-end encryption and let's say Qubes OS. This seems exactly backwards for a national "security" agency, especially with all of their recent calls for increased "cybersecurity", but there you go.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  The NSA makes the Swedes spy on the Germans? Is there any way they can get control of their country back? And why would they even need to when Germany is littered with US military bases?
belorn 11y ago
In part I agree fully with the notion that nation trade intel in order to bypass domestic restrictions, but state sponsored industry espionage has also recently seen an increase (if you go by number of news article). In that race you need your own system to hack, grab and steal, as it would not make sense for the US to sell information if they already got a national actor that wants it.

mtgx 11y ago

I agree. The NSA/US gov could care less that France will spy on its citizens. For all we know they may already have a deal to do exactly that to bypass some of NSA's own restrictions of spying on Americans. I think it's already known they do that with the GCHQ. And they make European countries spy on each other, too, while they promise them not to spy on them themselves, but then get the data from others. Sweden spies on Germany, Germany spies on Sweden - and NSA gets all of that data. From everything they've said and done so far, it's also clear the NSA would rather maintain the status quo of an insecure Internet and insecure computers, backdoored encryption and whatnot, even if the US has the "most" to lose, as long as they can use that insecurity to spy on others, too. They much rather prefer this scenario than if say 99% of the global population were all using end-to-end encryption and let's say Qubes OS. This seems exactly backwards for a national "security" agency, especially with all of their recent calls for increased "cybersecurity", but there you go.

happyscrappy 11y ago
The NSA makes the Swedes spy on the Germans? Is there any way they can get control of their country back? And why would they even need to when Germany is littered with US military bases?

belorn 11y ago

In part I agree fully with the notion that nation trade intel in order to bypass domestic restrictions, but state sponsored industry espionage has also recently seen an increase (if you go by number of news article). In that race you need your own system to hack, grab and steal, as it would not make sense for the US to sell information if they already got a national actor that wants it.