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Note that France – one of governments with commercial interests in the Airbus/Eurofighter consortium – doesn't have clean hands when it comes to spying on behal

by gojomo 6y ago

Note that France – one of governments with commercial interests in the Airbus/Eurofighter consortium – doesn't have clean hands when it comes to spying on behalf of its domestic firms: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/france-spied-on-commercial-rivals-1323422.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/france-spied-on-com... While perversion of national-security spying for generic & narrow commercial gain is concerning, arms deals are a hybrid case. To the extent a case involves government-on-government spying, it's hard for me to get angry. I tend to see it as a rare horizontal form of transparency/accountability among entities that often have too few checks on their corruption & skulduggery. Even between friendly governments, maybe friends that spy on each other achieve an even greater mutual trust - an assurance there's nothing being planned internally that conflicts with the claims made via official channels. "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" is a shitty principle when hypocritically deployed by the powerful against private people. But doesn't it kind of make sense when applied to governments? What right-to-privacy, exactly, does a government have against its citizens or allies?

chmod775 6y ago
When both allies were spying on each other, then sure, you can go "hehe look at us sillies xD". But when it's just one party doing the spying, it violates trust, not builds it, as the US has learned. It's hard to measure how much the Snowden revelations have contributed to the distancing of US allies, since there was also someone else who contributed greatly to the ongoing political isolation of the US, but it certainly didn't help build trust.