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Would we expect them not to? "An important developed nation is picking a new fighter. Let's know nothing until it's over with." is hardly good stewardship of

Would we expect them not to? "An important developed nation is picking a new fighter. Let's know nothing until it's over with." is hardly good stewardship of your own nation's trust and resources. It's the NSA's job to monitor who is friends with whom so policy makers can make policy. That's not to say the NSA should do anything they can. But it is their proper job to spy on non-Americans for America.

kjaftaedi 6y ago
So under this data sharing agreement where the US is sharing data with them, would you say the Danish FE would be failing at their job if they weren't using this system to target American politicians?
grey-area 6y ago
Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. Also spies should not be used for the benefit of corporations (in this case arms dealers) under cover of ‘national security’.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. Nations should spy on friends as well, lest they find out too late that who those whom they thought were their friends were actually working with their enemies against them.
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    Trust but verify.
- Atlantium 6y ago
  No nation is friends with another nation. Nations are allies. Ally : a state formally cooperating with another for a military or other purpose. Friend : a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations. Allies work together for rational mutual purposes, friends work together for emotional reasons. Besides, humans of all nations have far too many factions and unreasonable emotional responses to ever be fully trusted.
  - vishnugupta 6y ago
    This is a good model to refer to from time to time. I would add that "ally" doesn't mean co-operate in all spheres. It's perfectly reasonable for two nations to have border skirmishes and have bi/multi-lateral trade agreements simultaneously. A nation is a multifaceted entity and it isn't possible to model it as one single blob. Inter-nation relationships are very fluid, and evolving all the time. I find it funny when I see Indian social media flare up with "ban Chinese goods" whenever there are border skirmishes. It's as if trade and border-disputes somehow won't fit together and that there is a very sharp line between "ally" and "enemy". Unfortunately, politicians take advantage of this sharp divide in people's mind to rally large groups of people against an imagined threat from a nation to garner support/votes. My father-in-law was very agitated about India-China border skirmish thanks to all the media coverage. In his mind Indian economy would be doomed. I asked him if the condition of the shitty public road he travels by each day improve if India won that dispute. He is perfectly fine to accept the crappy day-to-day life (non-existent roads, shitty power supply, un-usable water etc.,) but would suddenly get riled with some random dispute thousands of miles away!
    - lenkite 6y ago
      I guess you are not from a military family. It is pretty well known in military intelligence circles that China wishes to annex the eastern Indian states. They already consider several areas of the Indian eastern states within their national borders - see the official national maps of the PLA. PLA has official strategy - part of their SOP inculcated into their officer corps - to regularly push incursions into Indian territory and check the response of the Indian central government. We have already lost 1000 square km over the last couple of years. 38,000 square km over the last decade if you consider our formally acknowledged boundaries. So, yes, unless you wish to lose the Indian eastern states, access to natural resources and secede control over the vast majority of the Indian water supply, one will need to remain vigilant and ready. That includes heavy military readiness. The other option is to kneel to China and become a vassal state. No double the condition of roads would improve ? All you have to do is love the CCP.
  - mola 6y ago
    Friendship rhetorics between EU and US is not rare, it's the norm. Nations can be friendly.
- Kalium 6y ago
  > Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. It's an established norm that nations spy on their friends. Everyone wants to know what their friends are thinking. It's often much more consequential than what their adversaries are thinking.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  One should keep his friends close, his enemies even closer ...
fulafel 6y ago
The article lays out the expectations (and law) of the Danes re hosting the NSA espionage center and ground rules about its non-use against Danish interests, which sound pretty modest.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  For the Danes to trust spies requires willful naïveté, no? I wouldn't be surprised to hear key Danish politicians got bribed or blackmailed into being so credulous in the first place.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
    Willful naïveté can be a strategic move as well
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Diplomacy and military alliances are complicated. When you catch another country breaking their promises you make a fuss (sometimes public, sometimes not), doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether you were are aware of the possibility before.
  - cstpdk 6y ago
    They are neither bribed or blackmailed, every danish government for the past 20 years have been informed about this agreement and has complied. It's absolutely a crime against the population (since innocent Danes are also being spied on). The reason the politicians are complying is that we are reliant on US for military support through Nato (which I guess you can call a bribe, of sorts)
blackrock 6y ago
So what you are saying, is that spying is ok. Got it. So you don’t mind if other countries spy on America, right?
- SirHound 6y ago
  Why would that be a problem? It’s our job merely to make that difficult (ie not using Chinese equipment in your new 5G network)
  - blackrock 6y ago
    Plot twist: Huawei hardware is more secure than American hardware. We all know that Cisco equipment has already been compromised by the NSA. And that all the major American tech companies are in collusion with the federal government. What we don’t know yet, is how secure Chinese built hardware and software is.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      We all know that Cisco equipment has already been compromised by the NSA. Given where it is manufactured it’s reasonable to assume Cisco kit is compromised by both US and China. Whereas Huawei is only compromised by China.
    - ccakes 6y ago
      And the reason the US is pushing such a strong anti-China narrative is so they don’t lose their backdoor into all those juicy networks half-wink-half-sad-face.jpg
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "you don't mind." I don't hope foreign intelligence services succeed. I hope our people and systems are better than theirs. But I do expect them to do it. It would be wrong for them not to do everything they can to secure their nations too.
- babesh 6y ago
skwb 6y ago
I tend to agree with this sentiment. Lets take the Turkey case for example. For all intents and purposes, they are a close NATO ally since the Cold War. They were part of the F-35 program, where the specific electronic and radar profile are paramount to the tactical advantage of the weapon system. But Turkey decided they wanted to buy into the Russian S400 antiair system as well (given that their alternatives like Pariot is frankly quite lackluster). Now lets put aside the potential of hidden Russian code providing telemetry back to the motherland about what is going on. Similar performance information about F-35 detections could easily be acquired through non technological means as well through human intelligence. The entire premise of the F-35 program is essentially that OpFor doens't really have great knowledge in the radar profile of what the F-35 looks like, meaning it could lead to an inefficient deployment of resources/unknown vulnerability in radar coverage. So much of modern air war doctrine is premised on this notion, that the concern of what nation buys into what system creates systemic risk. If it's a narrow program that is intended to understand potential risk, I think it is easily justified. If it is to try to win contracts for American companies for a profit in a form of state sponsored industrial espionage a la China, I am fully against.
- laydn 6y ago
  You do know that, there are F-35's already flying around S400 systems, right? I mean Syria is just one example.
  - skwb 6y ago
    There's a world of difference between "occasional incidental radar profiling of F-35 from the OpFor perspective" and "Consistent friendly profiling of F-35 as they land at Incirlik air base".
- mola 6y ago
  It's the latter.
martin_bech 6y ago
Fuck you.. literally fuck you.. We have entered into illegal wars for you guys, followed you in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libiya, danish soldiers have died, and gotten ptsd in the wars you started, handed over Pows in good faith, that then were tortured. And this is how you feel?.. that naturally the US should be spying on us.. fuck you!
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  I fought on the ground in Afghanistan. I know what it's like to fear dying, see friends blown apart, and expect not to see my family again. Believe it or not that's exactly why I think "trust then verify" is a good policy when handing over such a sophisticated weapon. Too many lives are at stake, on all sides, not to.
- dang 6y ago
  Hey, please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another user is or you feel they are. I understand very well how frustrating it can be, but responding this way only wrecks this place even further. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - martin_bech 6y ago
    Sorry..
christkv 6y ago
That’s why you have the diplomats and embassies.
jmnicolas 6y ago
The problem isn't the spying, it's their duty after all. The problem is the suspected strong arming that may or may not have occurred behind the scenes. I remember a Dutch politician that was vehemently opposed to the F35 that died in mysterious circumstances. I would normally put this on coincidences but when the stakes are that high I won't go for Ockham razor first.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Do you have any source for that with any evidence? It seems like a huge overreaction to murder a single vocally opposed politician just over a aircraft fighter deal - even if he was a critical decision maker (which I'm going to guess he wasn't).
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
If you were Danish, and knowing your country is part of NATO, would you be pleased to know this?
- jopsen 6y ago
  I'm Danish... On the one hand none of this surprises me. On the other hand, I wish the US would trust our politicians a bit more. There is no way we could have bought anything other than the F35, why even bother spying? :) At the end of the day I hope we'll never use the air planes -- so what does it matter if they can't fly :D Seriously, though... It might be best if I trust that the politicians we've elected makes reasonable deals. When it comes to geo politics they might know better than me. At the end of the day, I kind of trust the US more than anyone else, regardless. (Not saying I don't wish the world was different, just that in practice all of this hopefully doesn't matter much)

kjaftaedi 6y ago

So under this data sharing agreement where the US is sharing data with them, would you say the Danish FE would be failing at their job if they weren't using this system to target American politicians?

grey-area 6y ago

Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. Also spies should not be used for the benefit of corporations (in this case arms dealers) under cover of ‘national security’.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. Nations should spy on friends as well, lest they find out too late that who those whom they thought were their friends were actually working with their enemies against them.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  Trust but verify.
Atlantium 6y ago
No nation is friends with another nation. Nations are allies. Ally : a state formally cooperating with another for a military or other purpose. Friend : a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations. Allies work together for rational mutual purposes, friends work together for emotional reasons. Besides, humans of all nations have far too many factions and unreasonable emotional responses to ever be fully trusted.
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  This is a good model to refer to from time to time. I would add that "ally" doesn't mean co-operate in all spheres. It's perfectly reasonable for two nations to have border skirmishes and have bi/multi-lateral trade agreements simultaneously. A nation is a multifaceted entity and it isn't possible to model it as one single blob. Inter-nation relationships are very fluid, and evolving all the time. I find it funny when I see Indian social media flare up with "ban Chinese goods" whenever there are border skirmishes. It's as if trade and border-disputes somehow won't fit together and that there is a very sharp line between "ally" and "enemy". Unfortunately, politicians take advantage of this sharp divide in people's mind to rally large groups of people against an imagined threat from a nation to garner support/votes. My father-in-law was very agitated about India-China border skirmish thanks to all the media coverage. In his mind Indian economy would be doomed. I asked him if the condition of the shitty public road he travels by each day improve if India won that dispute. He is perfectly fine to accept the crappy day-to-day life (non-existent roads, shitty power supply, un-usable water etc.,) but would suddenly get riled with some random dispute thousands of miles away!
  - lenkite 6y ago
    I guess you are not from a military family. It is pretty well known in military intelligence circles that China wishes to annex the eastern Indian states. They already consider several areas of the Indian eastern states within their national borders - see the official national maps of the PLA. PLA has official strategy - part of their SOP inculcated into their officer corps - to regularly push incursions into Indian territory and check the response of the Indian central government. We have already lost 1000 square km over the last couple of years. 38,000 square km over the last decade if you consider our formally acknowledged boundaries. So, yes, unless you wish to lose the Indian eastern states, access to natural resources and secede control over the vast majority of the Indian water supply, one will need to remain vigilant and ready. That includes heavy military readiness. The other option is to kneel to China and become a vassal state. No double the condition of roads would improve ? All you have to do is love the CCP.
- mola 6y ago
  Friendship rhetorics between EU and US is not rare, it's the norm. Nations can be friendly.
Kalium 6y ago
> Nations should spy on enemies, not friends, lest they find themselves without friends. It's an established norm that nations spy on their friends. Everyone wants to know what their friends are thinking. It's often much more consequential than what their adversaries are thinking.
ReptileMan 6y ago
One should keep his friends close, his enemies even closer ...

fulafel 6y ago

The article lays out the expectations (and law) of the Danes re hosting the NSA espionage center and ground rules about its non-use against Danish interests, which sound pretty modest.

bigbubba 6y ago
For the Danes to trust spies requires willful naïveté, no? I wouldn't be surprised to hear key Danish politicians got bribed or blackmailed into being so credulous in the first place.
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  Willful naïveté can be a strategic move as well
- fulafel 6y ago
  Diplomacy and military alliances are complicated. When you catch another country breaking their promises you make a fuss (sometimes public, sometimes not), doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether you were are aware of the possibility before.
- cstpdk 6y ago
  They are neither bribed or blackmailed, every danish government for the past 20 years have been informed about this agreement and has complied. It's absolutely a crime against the population (since innocent Danes are also being spied on). The reason the politicians are complying is that we are reliant on US for military support through Nato (which I guess you can call a bribe, of sorts)

blackrock 6y ago

So what you are saying, is that spying is ok. Got it. So you don’t mind if other countries spy on America, right?

SirHound 6y ago
Why would that be a problem? It’s our job merely to make that difficult (ie not using Chinese equipment in your new 5G network)
- blackrock 6y ago
  Plot twist: Huawei hardware is more secure than American hardware. We all know that Cisco equipment has already been compromised by the NSA. And that all the major American tech companies are in collusion with the federal government. What we don’t know yet, is how secure Chinese built hardware and software is.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    We all know that Cisco equipment has already been compromised by the NSA. Given where it is manufactured it’s reasonable to assume Cisco kit is compromised by both US and China. Whereas Huawei is only compromised by China.
  - ccakes 6y ago
    And the reason the US is pushing such a strong anti-China narrative is so they don’t lose their backdoor into all those juicy networks half-wink-half-sad-face.jpg
ARandomerDude 6y ago
It depends on what you mean by "you don't mind." I don't hope foreign intelligence services succeed. I hope our people and systems are better than theirs. But I do expect them to do it. It would be wrong for them not to do everything they can to secure their nations too.
babesh 6y ago

skwb 6y ago

I tend to agree with this sentiment. Lets take the Turkey case for example. For all intents and purposes, they are a close NATO ally since the Cold War. They were part of the F-35 program, where the specific electronic and radar profile are paramount to the tactical advantage of the weapon system. But Turkey decided they wanted to buy into the Russian S400 antiair system as well (given that their alternatives like Pariot is frankly quite lackluster). Now lets put aside the potential of hidden Russian code providing telemetry back to the motherland about what is going on. Similar performance information about F-35 detections could easily be acquired through non technological means as well through human intelligence. The entire premise of the F-35 program is essentially that OpFor doens't really have great knowledge in the radar profile of what the F-35 looks like, meaning it could lead to an inefficient deployment of resources/unknown vulnerability in radar coverage. So much of modern air war doctrine is premised on this notion, that the concern of what nation buys into what system creates systemic risk. If it's a narrow program that is intended to understand potential risk, I think it is easily justified. If it is to try to win contracts for American companies for a profit in a form of state sponsored industrial espionage a la China, I am fully against.

laydn 6y ago
You do know that, there are F-35's already flying around S400 systems, right? I mean Syria is just one example.
- skwb 6y ago
  There's a world of difference between "occasional incidental radar profiling of F-35 from the OpFor perspective" and "Consistent friendly profiling of F-35 as they land at Incirlik air base".
mola 6y ago
It's the latter.

martin_bech 6y ago

Fuck you.. literally fuck you.. We have entered into illegal wars for you guys, followed you in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libiya, danish soldiers have died, and gotten ptsd in the wars you started, handed over Pows in good faith, that then were tortured. And this is how you feel?.. that naturally the US should be spying on us.. fuck you!

ARandomerDude 6y ago
I fought on the ground in Afghanistan. I know what it's like to fear dying, see friends blown apart, and expect not to see my family again. Believe it or not that's exactly why I think "trust then verify" is a good policy when handing over such a sophisticated weapon. Too many lives are at stake, on all sides, not to.
dang 6y ago
Hey, please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another user is or you feel they are. I understand very well how frustrating it can be, but responding this way only wrecks this place even further. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- martin_bech 6y ago
  Sorry..

christkv 6y ago

That’s why you have the diplomats and embassies.

jmnicolas 6y ago

The problem isn't the spying, it's their duty after all. The problem is the suspected strong arming that may or may not have occurred behind the scenes. I remember a Dutch politician that was vehemently opposed to the F35 that died in mysterious circumstances. I would normally put this on coincidences but when the stakes are that high I won't go for Ockham razor first.

koheripbal 6y ago
Do you have any source for that with any evidence? It seems like a huge overreaction to murder a single vocally opposed politician just over a aircraft fighter deal - even if he was a critical decision maker (which I'm going to guess he wasn't).

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

If you were Danish, and knowing your country is part of NATO, would you be pleased to know this?

jopsen 6y ago
I'm Danish... On the one hand none of this surprises me. On the other hand, I wish the US would trust our politicians a bit more. There is no way we could have bought anything other than the F35, why even bother spying? :) At the end of the day I hope we'll never use the air planes -- so what does it matter if they can't fly :D Seriously, though... It might be best if I trust that the politicians we've elected makes reasonable deals. When it comes to geo politics they might know better than me. At the end of the day, I kind of trust the US more than anyone else, regardless. (Not saying I don't wish the world was different, just that in practice all of this hopefully doesn't matter much)