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As a reminder, this is just the tip of the iceberg : The US has since 2001 built a techno-legal spying system that the Stasi would have been proud of (relying

As a reminder, this is just the tip of the iceberg : The US has since 2001 built a techno-legal spying system that the Stasi would have been proud of (relying a lot on US companies, especially the GAFAMs), and worse, (ab)used it on non-US people, specifically people located in EUrope (especially as revealed by the Snowden scandal in 2013). Since this violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in 2015 the Court of Justice of the European Union has effectively declared US companies to be illegal in EUrope : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (Technically speaking, that's not strictly the case, but good luck having a business when you can't have access to your EU customer's personal data, which, depending on the context, includes things as basic as their IP address - and the context might change as your business evolves...) There have been attempts since 2015 between the US and the EU to try to find an agreement, but so far nothing has stuck, and it's hard to see how it can (unless the EU just chooses "denial" at some point), since, again, it's the whole US techno-legal spying system being in violation of EU fundamental rights that we're talking about.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
- dangrossman 4y ago
  It sounds fairly accurate to me. This is what killed the US-EU Privacy Shield program, twice. That was the government's attempt at creating a way for US companies like Facebook to legally process data of EU citizens under GDPR. It's been struck down by the EU courts, due to our federal government's spy powers and the CLOUD Act, that invalidate any claims US companies make about protecting personal data in their possession.
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    I was referring to comparing the US intel operation to the Stasi.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      It was hyperbole. But it is not a conspiracy theory if it is true. All this has been documented well enough.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Indeed, US spying machine is mich more advanced. Poor inefficient Stasi
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      I could see this reaction if my focus had been on US citizens - which last I checked, still have some protections, and the NSA still reports, albeit quite indirectly to them, in a still somewhat democratic system. But my focus is specifically on non-US citizens, worse, on those of supposedly "allied" nations (some of which have since then built similar systems of their own, but the same caveat applies, and their reach is still not comparable to that of GAFAM/NSA). Can you see how it becomes a HUGE betrayal of trust after all the post-cold war promises of a "global village" (which was always a bit naive, but at least we seemed to have started to build one in the West) ?
    - pyrale 4y ago
      Yeah, it really cheapens the effort the US has put in their surveillance network to compare it with the chumps at Stasi writing some stuff down on paper...
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      In terms of quantities of data collected this likely undersells US efforts. In terms of nefarious use it perhaps oversells the issue… at least so far. But calling it a conspiracy is disingenuous when the potential is clearly there, and OP's comparison was clearly about the quantity of data collected.
      - matkoniecz 4y ago
        Also, the claim made was about capabilities, not about nefarious use.
- fncivivue7 4y ago
  Hyperbole requires intent and exaggeration, can you point out either? I'm not seeing it. It's also 100% on topic. You not liking the discussion doesn't change that.
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    You believe the US intel operation is comparable to the Stasi?
    - fncivivue7 4y ago
      Completely? Of course not. On the grounds mentioned above? Yes, of course. Stating comparisons isn't hyperbole just because you don't like the comparison. Neither is it a conspiracy theory. Five eyes shitfuckery is extremely well documented.
    - helpfulclippy 4y ago
      The Stasi would be very proud of themselves if they constructed something on the scale of what the USIC has managed. I’m honestly a little surprised anyone would quibble with that point.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Lets do the actual comparison , shall we? Which metric would you like, amount of information stored, people spied on, which are not accused of any wrongdoing, speed of retrieval, operational efficiency? In every comparison US intel wins hands down. The comparison is a little unfair to the stasi, they did not have modern computers. . But only US could place a microphone in every household and make people pay for it. Stasi wouldn't think of this. If you are convinced it's incomparable, present some metric we can measure where US sysyem looses.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      In term of capabilities? Yes.
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
  If only! The US has been obtaining intelligence information on private citizens globally without cause for decades, and this is well-known. It does this to Americans, Europeans, and pretty much everyone else. When it makes sense to collect that data through its own signals intelligence, it does that. But Constitutional and diplomatic concerns often prevent it from taking such a direct approach. So it relies on private companies like Facebook or Google to harvest this information for them, and then relies on a variety of means to obtain it from there. One really obvious one is when it goes and buys that data -- for instance, while it would not be lawful for the police to directly track your location without a warrant, it is presently lawful for the government to buy location data from cellular providers in bulk, and it does so routinely. Similarly, it was happy to obtain information from phone companies to allow it to supervise the communications of pretty much everyone, without a warrant or individualized suspicion of any kind. If companies like Google or Facebook don't want to sell the government what it wants, then it often simply compels them using the legal system, or quasi-legal processes that do not actually require judicial oversight, like national security letters that bypass anything resembling ordinary due process. This allows the government to greatly expand the already considerable reach of what is permitted under law, because even when these letters request data that the government has no right to, the strict non-disclosure provisions make it extremely difficult to fight. (For years, you weren't even allowed to disclose that you received an NSL to your attorney!) And when it can't get what it wants by those means, it will use more aggressive tactics like secretly tapping communication links (as we know that they did to Google's fiber links between datacenters). Encryption presents a threat to those methods. E2EE would mean that the government can neither purchase nor intercept the data, so at any given time there is always some effort underway to deter, sabotage or outright ban the adoption of meaningful encryption. This happens through legal means (by attempting to use the courts to compel manufacturers to break their own security, as the FBI attempted with Apple), quasi-legal means (such as laws like FOSTA/SESTA and attempted laws like EARN IT that don't directly outlaw privacy, but add so much liability that companies must undermine it themselves), technical means (as with the various key escrow proposals floated over the years), or outright lies and deceit (see: Dual_EC_DRBG). The explicit, publicly-acknowledged motive in doing all of this is ensuring state security -- in the end, the same motive as the Stasi. Of course, the Stasi never had the sheer scale of information that the US Intelligence Community has access to. When GP says that the Stasi would be jealous of what the US has built here, that is clearly not hyperbole! Unsurprisingly, the EU is no longer thrilled to give unrestricted access to private spy agencies to operate against its citizens anymore. Again, none of that is hyperbole. It is actual, literal fact. So, this is a "conspiracy theory" only insofar as gravity is a theory -- well-supported by a tall and unambiguous mountain of evidence, and is actually quite relevant as to why the EU does not want private spy agencies like Facebook compiling dossiers on their citizens anymore.
- cronix 4y ago
  Here's a really good interview with one of the former technical directors of NSA, Bill Binney, who resigned just after 9/11. He disagrees. Conspiracy theory? Hah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
matheusmoreira 4y ago
No idea why this is being downvoted. It's high time there were consequences for the USA's global warrantless surveillance. Every single country should do what Europe is doing.
- DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
  > No idea why this is being downvoted my first reaction was that people might be unaware of the CloudAct, or the FVYE arrangement (AABill) that forces Austrialians working in any Tech company to stay silent if their government forces them to hide a backdoor in code (likely on behalf of yank big brother). but then anyone who today defends Snowden is called a "tankie" and friend of the Russian invasion of UA. The truth is probably that Snowden today is ignored in the infosec community because we no longer remember that he embarrassed the worlds biggest industrial complex by sharing audi footage of obese American drone pilots laughing at brown civilians getting murdered from the safety of their air conditioned containers in Utah. Any of this is brushed aside as "whataboutsim", because in times of a manufactured external threat any country and its people move closer together thanks to propaganda. And let's not forget Americans are the most propagandized population in the world. Absolutely free Ukraine ... but let's not forget Europe is not at all sharing the ultra-capitalist values of ding-dong, mad-as-a-hatter America.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Not to minimize the horrible fratricidal war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2014, while Russia (and China) are worse in theory, they don't present nearly the same "insider" threat to the EU as the US does with the GAFAMs. ... though China has been catching up fast : TikTok, their (not so) low end smartphones flooding the market, Huawei basically owning EU's telecom infrastructure (with a bit of US' Cisco)... : https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068

Hnrobert42 4y ago

dangrossman 4y ago
It sounds fairly accurate to me. This is what killed the US-EU Privacy Shield program, twice. That was the government's attempt at creating a way for US companies like Facebook to legally process data of EU citizens under GDPR. It's been struck down by the EU courts, due to our federal government's spy powers and the CLOUD Act, that invalidate any claims US companies make about protecting personal data in their possession.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  I was referring to comparing the US intel operation to the Stasi.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    It was hyperbole. But it is not a conspiracy theory if it is true. All this has been documented well enough.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Indeed, US spying machine is mich more advanced. Poor inefficient Stasi
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I could see this reaction if my focus had been on US citizens - which last I checked, still have some protections, and the NSA still reports, albeit quite indirectly to them, in a still somewhat democratic system. But my focus is specifically on non-US citizens, worse, on those of supposedly "allied" nations (some of which have since then built similar systems of their own, but the same caveat applies, and their reach is still not comparable to that of GAFAM/NSA). Can you see how it becomes a HUGE betrayal of trust after all the post-cold war promises of a "global village" (which was always a bit naive, but at least we seemed to have started to build one in the West) ?
  - pyrale 4y ago
    Yeah, it really cheapens the effort the US has put in their surveillance network to compare it with the chumps at Stasi writing some stuff down on paper...
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    In terms of quantities of data collected this likely undersells US efforts. In terms of nefarious use it perhaps oversells the issue… at least so far. But calling it a conspiracy is disingenuous when the potential is clearly there, and OP's comparison was clearly about the quantity of data collected.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      Also, the claim made was about capabilities, not about nefarious use.
fncivivue7 4y ago
Hyperbole requires intent and exaggeration, can you point out either? I'm not seeing it. It's also 100% on topic. You not liking the discussion doesn't change that.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  You believe the US intel operation is comparable to the Stasi?
  - fncivivue7 4y ago
    Completely? Of course not. On the grounds mentioned above? Yes, of course. Stating comparisons isn't hyperbole just because you don't like the comparison. Neither is it a conspiracy theory. Five eyes shitfuckery is extremely well documented.
  - helpfulclippy 4y ago
    The Stasi would be very proud of themselves if they constructed something on the scale of what the USIC has managed. I’m honestly a little surprised anyone would quibble with that point.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Lets do the actual comparison , shall we? Which metric would you like, amount of information stored, people spied on, which are not accused of any wrongdoing, speed of retrieval, operational efficiency? In every comparison US intel wins hands down. The comparison is a little unfair to the stasi, they did not have modern computers. . But only US could place a microphone in every household and make people pay for it. Stasi wouldn't think of this. If you are convinced it's incomparable, present some metric we can measure where US sysyem looses.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    In term of capabilities? Yes.
helpfulclippy 4y ago
If only! The US has been obtaining intelligence information on private citizens globally without cause for decades, and this is well-known. It does this to Americans, Europeans, and pretty much everyone else. When it makes sense to collect that data through its own signals intelligence, it does that. But Constitutional and diplomatic concerns often prevent it from taking such a direct approach. So it relies on private companies like Facebook or Google to harvest this information for them, and then relies on a variety of means to obtain it from there. One really obvious one is when it goes and buys that data -- for instance, while it would not be lawful for the police to directly track your location without a warrant, it is presently lawful for the government to buy location data from cellular providers in bulk, and it does so routinely. Similarly, it was happy to obtain information from phone companies to allow it to supervise the communications of pretty much everyone, without a warrant or individualized suspicion of any kind. If companies like Google or Facebook don't want to sell the government what it wants, then it often simply compels them using the legal system, or quasi-legal processes that do not actually require judicial oversight, like national security letters that bypass anything resembling ordinary due process. This allows the government to greatly expand the already considerable reach of what is permitted under law, because even when these letters request data that the government has no right to, the strict non-disclosure provisions make it extremely difficult to fight. (For years, you weren't even allowed to disclose that you received an NSL to your attorney!) And when it can't get what it wants by those means, it will use more aggressive tactics like secretly tapping communication links (as we know that they did to Google's fiber links between datacenters). Encryption presents a threat to those methods. E2EE would mean that the government can neither purchase nor intercept the data, so at any given time there is always some effort underway to deter, sabotage or outright ban the adoption of meaningful encryption. This happens through legal means (by attempting to use the courts to compel manufacturers to break their own security, as the FBI attempted with Apple), quasi-legal means (such as laws like FOSTA/SESTA and attempted laws like EARN IT that don't directly outlaw privacy, but add so much liability that companies must undermine it themselves), technical means (as with the various key escrow proposals floated over the years), or outright lies and deceit (see: Dual_EC_DRBG). The explicit, publicly-acknowledged motive in doing all of this is ensuring state security -- in the end, the same motive as the Stasi. Of course, the Stasi never had the sheer scale of information that the US Intelligence Community has access to. When GP says that the Stasi would be jealous of what the US has built here, that is clearly not hyperbole! Unsurprisingly, the EU is no longer thrilled to give unrestricted access to private spy agencies to operate against its citizens anymore. Again, none of that is hyperbole. It is actual, literal fact. So, this is a "conspiracy theory" only insofar as gravity is a theory -- well-supported by a tall and unambiguous mountain of evidence, and is actually quite relevant as to why the EU does not want private spy agencies like Facebook compiling dossiers on their citizens anymore.
cronix 4y ago
Here's a really good interview with one of the former technical directors of NSA, Bill Binney, who resigned just after 9/11. He disagrees. Conspiracy theory? Hah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

matheusmoreira 4y ago

No idea why this is being downvoted. It's high time there were consequences for the USA's global warrantless surveillance. Every single country should do what Europe is doing.

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
> No idea why this is being downvoted my first reaction was that people might be unaware of the CloudAct, or the FVYE arrangement (AABill) that forces Austrialians working in any Tech company to stay silent if their government forces them to hide a backdoor in code (likely on behalf of yank big brother). but then anyone who today defends Snowden is called a "tankie" and friend of the Russian invasion of UA. The truth is probably that Snowden today is ignored in the infosec community because we no longer remember that he embarrassed the worlds biggest industrial complex by sharing audi footage of obese American drone pilots laughing at brown civilians getting murdered from the safety of their air conditioned containers in Utah. Any of this is brushed aside as "whataboutsim", because in times of a manufactured external threat any country and its people move closer together thanks to propaganda. And let's not forget Americans are the most propagandized population in the world. Absolutely free Ukraine ... but let's not forget Europe is not at all sharing the ultra-capitalist values of ding-dong, mad-as-a-hatter America.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Not to minimize the horrible fratricidal war in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2014, while Russia (and China) are worse in theory, they don't present nearly the same "insider" threat to the EU as the US does with the GAFAMs. ... though China has been catching up fast : TikTok, their (not so) low end smartphones flooding the market, Huawei basically owning EU's telecom infrastructure (with a bit of US' Cisco)... : https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068