4 ms·

please provide something to educate me. Who has more spy bases around the world? Who has disseminated their spy tools so widely that they have become available

by elif 10y ago

please provide something to educate me. Who has more spy bases around the world? Who has disseminated their spy tools so widely that they have become available to 3rd parties? Who else is tapping undersea fiber? Who else is behind the SSL layer at google? I like primary documents obviously, but publications are fine too.

ajross 10y ago
So "egregious" behavior extends only to digital surveillance? OK, fine. Surely the US is the worst at that, I think that's a fair assessment. I thought you were talking about seemingly-Wikileak relevant things like secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations... Y'know. Boring stuff. Not "egregious" I guess.
- freeflight 10y ago
  >like secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations How about "secret police stuff" like the illegal abductions of people to put them into torture "black sites" all over the world? [0] Massive control over global media trough lobbying and propaganda instruments? [1] A long history of successful, and not so successful assassination attempts aimed at the "ideological opposition" all over the world? [2] The point here not being that the "US is the worst", the point being that the US hardly has the "moral high ground" on these issues just because they use these methods mostly against external "enemies" and not their own population. Questionable methods are questionable because of their methodology, not because of their targets. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition [1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op... [2]https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_1945 https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_...
  - ajross 10y ago
    Sorry, what does any of that have to do with the seeming lack of objectivity in Wikileaks decisions as to what to seek and publish? You bury it in there ("The point here not being..."), but I think you agree with me. No?
  - azernik 10y ago
    Compared to: 0. People straight up disappeared in Syria, people arrested and locked up for political reasons in Russia - DOMESTIC stuff. 1. (Leaving aside that sock-puppet commenters are not the same as "massive control over global media".) The use on a massive scale of paid trolls by Russia, and the outright censorship of mass media outlets in countries from Russia and China to US allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 2. Assassinations of journalists in Russia, and of some particularly high-value opposition targets abroad.
    - mhermher 10y ago
      Compared to having higher rate of incarceration, not only in per-capita terms, but also in absolute terms. Even with China's extra billion people and their repressive laws. The US is way ahead and it isn't even close.
    - freeflight 10y ago
      How about you set the bar even lower and start comparing with North Korea? The US influence on global media extends far further than a mere sock-puppet program which btw predates the notorious Russian "troll factories" by a couple of years. Only very few people know what classified operations are running in addition to that sock-puppet operation, but you can be certain there are more operations like that. Like influencing foreign media trough NGO's [0] in addition to that US media are the dominant news outlets on a global scale. And again: If you want to complain about assassinations then the US is in no position to point fingers at anybody. Just because the US does conduct these kinds of operations on a global scale mostly targeting foreigners, while being rather successful in suppressing publicity about similar actions on a domestic scale, does not make these actions any "better" or "just". Even the US has no shortage of journalists dying in rather mysterious circumstances, Gary Webb comes to mind and if they don't die under weird circumstances they are straight up put on drone kill lists [1]. I realize this is a matter of "national pride" for many US Americans, to keep the facade of "We are the exceptional good guys, number one in everything!" intact, but as somebody who's seen "both sides" of this I consider that a rather absolute and dangerous view on reality. Note: Not a fan of using huffingtonpost as a source, but it's the only English-language source I found about this due to it being a rather German-centric issue. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobbying-medi_b_7179422.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobb... [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list-this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-hunted-by-drones-a6980141.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list...
- belorn 10y ago
  Which leakers would go to wikileaks and not one of the multiple international news papers that are happy to report on "secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations" located in say Syria, Russia or China? Just looking at news paper in my own language, I think I will have a hard time to find one that do not publish articles about things in Syria. What service do Wikileaks provide to leakers in those cases?
phkahler 10y ago
>> Who has more spy bases around the world? Who has disseminated their spy tools so widely that they have become available to 3rd parties? Who else is tapping undersea fiber? Those are all evidence that other parties have secrets.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Evidence that the other party thinks they have secrets and no longer do.
bluGill 10y ago
That is one of those "known unknowns". That is something you know you do not know that answer to and can never know. If I pick a random poor third world country and tell you they are you can never be sure I'm wrong - "all those villagers going to the river for dirty drinking have a phd equivalent in spying: they only go to the river when people are looking, the rest of the time they use the running water in the basement of the hut - I'll bet you didn't know those grass huts have mansion sized basement underneath with full electric: see how good they are". This of course completely bogus but you can't actually know that for sure.
- finid 10y ago
  If I pick a random poor third world country and tell you they are you can never be sure I'm wrong Off course, we will be sure you're wrong, but please, go ahead. Name a "random poor third world country" that has a military base in one of its neighboring countries. And while you're at it, which one has a base in Kuwait, Turkey, Iraq, Bulgaria, Romania, Djibouti, etc, etc, etc.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I'm no more psychic than you are, but it sounds like you're assuming the US is worst because it's had the most leaks, and it's had the most leaks because it's worst. That seems like circular logic. I'd be very surprised if we're the only nation tapping undersea fiber, for example.
dredmorbius 10y ago
The supertanker-sized hole in your "truth" argument is that selective truth is not truth. You're now throwing up a diversion by suggesting that surveillance be the only criterion by which to judge a state (or non-state) actor's badness (or goodness). There is plenty to criticise the US on. I strongly recommend (and have frequently posted to HN) examples such has histories of violence against labour movements, corporate crime generally, the Johnson County War, the West Virginia Coal Wars, and more. There are authors such as Howard Zinn, or Noam Chomsky, or Mark Twain, or Upton Sinclair, or Martin Luther King, Jr., among many others, who can detail atrocities and evil done by and on account of the US. But, in recent years, the United States hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, made a habit of hunting down and killing its own dissident journalists, politicians, and activists, as Russia has. On which Wikileaks is ... very curiously silent. An action I'll argue is markedly worse than just listening in on conversations, as it takes the value of such surveillance one step further: the acting on it with lethal force. Has the US managed to kill people? Sure: drone strikes (of questionable validity, but against a generally defined enemy, modulo innocents slaughtered), the killing and subsequent coverup of Reuters photographers in Iraq in 2007 (http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.photographers.killed/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.photographers...), the friendly-fire killing and cover-up of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, massive security failures in avoiding the 9/11 attacks. But consider then, Russia's apparently false-flag attacks on its own people (Moscow apartment bombings), the assasinations already mentioned, Syrian attacks, and more. And from Wikileaks: an increasingly inexcusable silence. This from a former defender of Assange, and a current defender of both Snowden and Manning.

by elif 10y ago

ajross 10y ago

So "egregious" behavior extends only to digital surveillance? OK, fine. Surely the US is the worst at that, I think that's a fair assessment. I thought you were talking about seemingly-Wikileak relevant things like secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations... Y'know. Boring stuff. Not "egregious" I guess.

freeflight 10y ago
>like secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations How about "secret police stuff" like the illegal abductions of people to put them into torture "black sites" all over the world? [0] Massive control over global media trough lobbying and propaganda instruments? [1] A long history of successful, and not so successful assassination attempts aimed at the "ideological opposition" all over the world? [2] The point here not being that the "US is the worst", the point being that the US hardly has the "moral high ground" on these issues just because they use these methods mostly against external "enemies" and not their own population. Questionable methods are questionable because of their methodology, not because of their targets. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition [1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op... [2]https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_1945 https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_...
- ajross 10y ago
  Sorry, what does any of that have to do with the seeming lack of objectivity in Wikileaks decisions as to what to seek and publish? You bury it in there ("The point here not being..."), but I think you agree with me. No?
- azernik 10y ago
  Compared to: 0. People straight up disappeared in Syria, people arrested and locked up for political reasons in Russia - DOMESTIC stuff. 1. (Leaving aside that sock-puppet commenters are not the same as "massive control over global media".) The use on a massive scale of paid trolls by Russia, and the outright censorship of mass media outlets in countries from Russia and China to US allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 2. Assassinations of journalists in Russia, and of some particularly high-value opposition targets abroad.
  - mhermher 10y ago
    Compared to having higher rate of incarceration, not only in per-capita terms, but also in absolute terms. Even with China's extra billion people and their repressive laws. The US is way ahead and it isn't even close.
  - freeflight 10y ago
    How about you set the bar even lower and start comparing with North Korea? The US influence on global media extends far further than a mere sock-puppet program which btw predates the notorious Russian "troll factories" by a couple of years. Only very few people know what classified operations are running in addition to that sock-puppet operation, but you can be certain there are more operations like that. Like influencing foreign media trough NGO's [0] in addition to that US media are the dominant news outlets on a global scale. And again: If you want to complain about assassinations then the US is in no position to point fingers at anybody. Just because the US does conduct these kinds of operations on a global scale mostly targeting foreigners, while being rather successful in suppressing publicity about similar actions on a domestic scale, does not make these actions any "better" or "just". Even the US has no shortage of journalists dying in rather mysterious circumstances, Gary Webb comes to mind and if they don't die under weird circumstances they are straight up put on drone kill lists [1]. I realize this is a matter of "national pride" for many US Americans, to keep the facade of "We are the exceptional good guys, number one in everything!" intact, but as somebody who's seen "both sides" of this I consider that a rather absolute and dangerous view on reality. Note: Not a fan of using huffingtonpost as a source, but it's the only English-language source I found about this due to it being a rather German-centric issue. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobbying-medi_b_7179422.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobb... [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list-this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-hunted-by-drones-a6980141.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list...
belorn 10y ago
Which leakers would go to wikileaks and not one of the multiple international news papers that are happy to report on "secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations" located in say Syria, Russia or China? Just looking at news paper in my own language, I think I will have a hard time to find one that do not publish articles about things in Syria. What service do Wikileaks provide to leakers in those cases?

phkahler 10y ago

>> Who has more spy bases around the world? Who has disseminated their spy tools so widely that they have become available to 3rd parties? Who else is tapping undersea fiber? Those are all evidence that other parties have secrets.

sqeaky 10y ago
Evidence that the other party thinks they have secrets and no longer do.

bluGill 10y ago

That is one of those "known unknowns". That is something you know you do not know that answer to and can never know. If I pick a random poor third world country and tell you they are you can never be sure I'm wrong - "all those villagers going to the river for dirty drinking have a phd equivalent in spying: they only go to the river when people are looking, the rest of the time they use the running water in the basement of the hut - I'll bet you didn't know those grass huts have mansion sized basement underneath with full electric: see how good they are". This of course completely bogus but you can't actually know that for sure.

finid 10y ago
If I pick a random poor third world country and tell you they are you can never be sure I'm wrong Off course, we will be sure you're wrong, but please, go ahead. Name a "random poor third world country" that has a military base in one of its neighboring countries. And while you're at it, which one has a base in Kuwait, Turkey, Iraq, Bulgaria, Romania, Djibouti, etc, etc, etc.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

I'm no more psychic than you are, but it sounds like you're assuming the US is worst because it's had the most leaks, and it's had the most leaks because it's worst. That seems like circular logic. I'd be very surprised if we're the only nation tapping undersea fiber, for example.

dredmorbius 10y ago

The supertanker-sized hole in your "truth" argument is that selective truth is not truth. You're now throwing up a diversion by suggesting that surveillance be the only criterion by which to judge a state (or non-state) actor's badness (or goodness). There is plenty to criticise the US on. I strongly recommend (and have frequently posted to HN) examples such has histories of violence against labour movements, corporate crime generally, the Johnson County War, the West Virginia Coal Wars, and more. There are authors such as Howard Zinn, or Noam Chomsky, or Mark Twain, or Upton Sinclair, or Martin Luther King, Jr., among many others, who can detail atrocities and evil done by and on account of the US. But, in recent years, the United States hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, made a habit of hunting down and killing its own dissident journalists, politicians, and activists, as Russia has. On which Wikileaks is ... very curiously silent. An action I'll argue is markedly worse than just listening in on conversations, as it takes the value of such surveillance one step further: the acting on it with lethal force. Has the US managed to kill people? Sure: drone strikes (of questionable validity, but against a generally defined enemy, modulo innocents slaughtered), the killing and subsequent coverup of Reuters photographers in Iraq in 2007 (http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.photographers.killed/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.photographers...), the friendly-fire killing and cover-up of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, massive security failures in avoiding the 9/11 attacks. But consider then, Russia's apparently false-flag attacks on its own people (Moscow apartment bombings), the assasinations already mentioned, Syrian attacks, and more. And from Wikileaks: an increasingly inexcusable silence. This from a former defender of Assange, and a current defender of both Snowden and Manning.