5 ms·

The fact is that spying on trade negotiations has been commonly done between the Western states, well before Trump. They should have been doing this already.

by ajb 2y ago

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
It's been public knowledge since the 2013 Snowden leaks that the US spied on EU allies, even though this was probably an open secret in the gov circles way before that since all allies spy on each other constantly to keep themselves accountable("trust but verify"). Why are they pretending like this is something new for them when they knew about this way before? Burner phones at this point in time feels like trying birth control when your kid is already 13 years old.
- watwut 2y ago
  Cause escalations are worth reporting. That is why. And no, it is not the same.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    Why isn't it "the same"? Was it somehow better when NSA under Clinton, Bush or Obama were wire tapping Germany and France? Here's why wiretapping allies is important: if the US agencies can wiretap you, then so can Russia, China, Israel, North Korea, etc. So if you notice your allies being sloppy with their InfoSec, you can also let them know about it before the enemies find out and exploit them. So it's your job to implement security that nobody else can tap. That's why citizens pay taxes to the defense sector, that's why you have intelligence and counter intelligence agencies, etc. they just need to do their fucking job instead of going after citizens who buy weed online or who call politicians dicks on Xitter.
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      because EU and US are less and less "allies"
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        Can you explain why? Last time I checked we're still in NATO and my country stil hosts a US nuclear deterrent(against Russia). What part of that has changed? Temporary internal economic disputes (these happen all the time, especially between EU members) have little to do with military alliances against external threats.
        throwaway290 2y ago
        No one expects NATO to exist for much longer. if your country is Denmark then your fellow NATO member recently threatened to invade you. The organization became a farce within a couple of months.
        esafak 2y ago
        Trump sees it as a cost and says Europeans are not paying their fair share. He has been talking about it for ten years: https://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/whats-trumps-position-on-nato/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/whats-trumps-position-on-n... I daresay his judgment is informed by his consideration of Russia as closer to an ally than a foe.
        FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        >Trump sees it as a cost. Which is true since defense money doesn't rain from the sky. Taxpayers on both sides of the atlantic are footing the bill. >He always says Europeans are not paying their fair share. Which is true when you look at per member spending percentages. Mostly Poland and a couple of other members have been meeting their agreed spending targets, but the rest have been slacking. >He has been talking about it for ten years: From your article: "While Trump has gone so far as saying that, as president, he would consider pulling the U.S. out of NATO if it is not restructured, we’ve found no instance of him saying he wants to do so at this point. And the Clinton campaign hasn’t been able to point to an example of Trump saying that either. In fact, it was during the interview with the Post, which initially brought attention to Trump’s feelings about NATO, that Trump said that he doesn’t want the U.S. to leave the alliance."
    - creaturemachine 2y ago
      Because that border officer demanding your phone so they can read your texts for anything critical of Trump is not spying.
    - drivingmenuts 2y ago
      Seems to me that if your country is not spying on allies and enemies alike, someone is not doing their job properly. The US spies on the EU and its member countries, just like the EU and its member countries spy on the US as they can. That's what they're supposed to be doing. Every country is going to massage "the truth" when dealing with others, so it's good to know how much massaging is going on. The big difference now is that the US (my own damn country) is not nearly as trustworthy as it was (for some value of trustworthy), nor is it nearly as competently led as it was (for some value of competence), nor is it behaving in rational and predictable ways (as compared to before). So, maybe we all just understand that it's in everyone else's best interest to keep a close eye on conditions in the US, because it's not going to get better any time soon. And we all should probably also understand that the US is just going to see enemies wherever it looks and that's not going to improve any time soon, either.
  - jimbob45 2y ago
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055 Both US political parties were doing this decades ago to the German Chancellor. There is no escalation beyond her. If you're willing to tap her, you're willing to tap anyone.
    - watwut 2y ago
      The checking of phones and their content on the border is an escalation for both diplomats and non diplomats. It is simply not true that this was normal and NOT an escalation.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  Before you might have at least expected officials to not have the same appreciation for Russia that this administration has. The less data they can lawfully or unlawfully get from eu politicians, the better for every european citizen i would also just be happy for something being done now even if it could have been done earlier
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    Last time I checked gas pipelines went form Russia to Germany, not to the US, and gas money was flowing from EU to Russia not from the US. And Vladimir Putin attended weddings of Austrian politicians, not American ones. And Austrian and German politicians, not American politicians, received high ranking jobs in Russian oil & gas companies at the end of their political mandates. So who's the one doing the Russian appreciation here, in practice I mean, not in virtue signaling?
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      The EU is at least officially positioned against the russian invasion of Ukraine, although some politicians have a weird ex soviet fetish. The USA administration has taken a more nuanced approach than biden, on top of not imposing tariffs on Russia
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  That's a really American view, and that it's fine or some kind of trust-but-verify thing is really not correct. You can see this from the Spanish reaction to US spies recruiting people in Spanish intelligence, to France's desire to join Five Eyes provided that a mutual no-spying agreement were signed, etc. The reason you don't see stronger reactions is probably because countries were afraid of upsetting the US leadership, but being spied on is bad.
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
They probably have been doing that before, but it wasn't reported as much. Usually western spying was kept quiet (both political "real" spying and also data collection on "normal people") if it was done by western governments (and companies), and only mentioned if china/russia/iran/... did it. Now the EU-US diplomacy is not as good anymore, and media is reporting about the US spying too... sadly EU is incapable of creating a facebook-like social network, or else we'd be reusing the "tiktok is a chinese spying app" playbook on facebook(/google/...) over here too.
- blitzar 2y ago
  > creating a facebook-like social network They also haven't created a fun loving machine that rips peoples limbs off and reattaches them facing a different direction and in a different order. Creating these things really isn't something to be proud of.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Torment Nexus or Orphan Crushing Machine?
    - blitzar 2y ago
      Americans are very proud of the innovations in the latest model of the Orphan Crushing Machine.
      - selimthegrim 2y ago
        Pookleblinky (PBUH) was prophetic about the lack of an American trickster archetype. So prescient that the populace ended up electing some f***ed up Protestant version of one.
orwin 2y ago
Yes. The US strongarmed Alstom into a merger with General electric for an insulting price (and with GE overly valued, even for people who actually believed in their cooked books). An Alstom's top executive was also inprisonned in the US during the talk. Trump only makes US corruption more visible. He did not make your country corrupt all of the sudden, he just put a shine on it.
- gruez 2y ago
  >An Alstom's top executive was also inprisonned in the US during the talk. Source? Are you talking about this? >On April 13, 2013, Alstom senior executive Frédéric Pierucci was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was accused of willful blindness of his company's suspected corruption and was imprisoned in a high security facility for 14 months and denied release on bail until the week of Alstom's acquisition by the US conglomerate General Electric.[54][55] In late 2014, Alstom was fined $772 million by the DOJ, and admitted guilt under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in relation to bribes paid to obtain contracts in various countries.[56][57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations The paragraph after also mentions their executives were prosecuted in the UK for other corruption charges, which certainly puts a dent in your implication that the US was somehow locking up Alstom's executives on trumped up charges to get leverage.
  - orwin 2y ago
    Yes. I'm not saying the charges were fake, I said they imprisoned him specifically to have the other executives agreed to a signature on the contract (in my opinion , he deserves more than 14th month, but usually, executive don't get imprisonned for corruption, and suddenly get freed exactly at the moment of the signing). The signing, the french government agreement, the GE valuation, all that reeks of political corruption, but well :/
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > He did not make your country corrupt all of the sudden, So true, but I also think they are vastly increasing the destruction. It really feels like the country was taken over by corporate raiders stripping it for parts.

The fact is that spying on trade negotiations has been commonly done between the Western states, well before Trump. They should have been doing this already.

by ajb 2y ago

The fact is that spying on trade negotiations has been commonly done between the Western states, well before Trump. They should have been doing this already.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

It's been public knowledge since the 2013 Snowden leaks that the US spied on EU allies, even though this was probably an open secret in the gov circles way before that since all allies spy on each other constantly to keep themselves accountable("trust but verify"). Why are they pretending like this is something new for them when they knew about this way before? Burner phones at this point in time feels like trying birth control when your kid is already 13 years old.

watwut 2y ago
Cause escalations are worth reporting. That is why. And no, it is not the same.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Why isn't it "the same"? Was it somehow better when NSA under Clinton, Bush or Obama were wire tapping Germany and France? Here's why wiretapping allies is important: if the US agencies can wiretap you, then so can Russia, China, Israel, North Korea, etc. So if you notice your allies being sloppy with their InfoSec, you can also let them know about it before the enemies find out and exploit them. So it's your job to implement security that nobody else can tap. That's why citizens pay taxes to the defense sector, that's why you have intelligence and counter intelligence agencies, etc. they just need to do their fucking job instead of going after citizens who buy weed online or who call politicians dicks on Xitter.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    because EU and US are less and less "allies"
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      Can you explain why? Last time I checked we're still in NATO and my country stil hosts a US nuclear deterrent(against Russia). What part of that has changed? Temporary internal economic disputes (these happen all the time, especially between EU members) have little to do with military alliances against external threats.
      - throwaway290 2y ago
        No one expects NATO to exist for much longer. if your country is Denmark then your fellow NATO member recently threatened to invade you. The organization became a farce within a couple of months.
      - esafak 2y ago
        Trump sees it as a cost and says Europeans are not paying their fair share. He has been talking about it for ten years: https://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/whats-trumps-position-on-nato/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/05/whats-trumps-position-on-n... I daresay his judgment is informed by his consideration of Russia as closer to an ally than a foe.
        FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        >Trump sees it as a cost. Which is true since defense money doesn't rain from the sky. Taxpayers on both sides of the atlantic are footing the bill. >He always says Europeans are not paying their fair share. Which is true when you look at per member spending percentages. Mostly Poland and a couple of other members have been meeting their agreed spending targets, but the rest have been slacking. >He has been talking about it for ten years: From your article: "While Trump has gone so far as saying that, as president, he would consider pulling the U.S. out of NATO if it is not restructured, we’ve found no instance of him saying he wants to do so at this point. And the Clinton campaign hasn’t been able to point to an example of Trump saying that either. In fact, it was during the interview with the Post, which initially brought attention to Trump’s feelings about NATO, that Trump said that he doesn’t want the U.S. to leave the alliance."
  - creaturemachine 2y ago
    Because that border officer demanding your phone so they can read your texts for anything critical of Trump is not spying.
  - drivingmenuts 2y ago
    Seems to me that if your country is not spying on allies and enemies alike, someone is not doing their job properly. The US spies on the EU and its member countries, just like the EU and its member countries spy on the US as they can. That's what they're supposed to be doing. Every country is going to massage "the truth" when dealing with others, so it's good to know how much massaging is going on. The big difference now is that the US (my own damn country) is not nearly as trustworthy as it was (for some value of trustworthy), nor is it nearly as competently led as it was (for some value of competence), nor is it behaving in rational and predictable ways (as compared to before). So, maybe we all just understand that it's in everyone else's best interest to keep a close eye on conditions in the US, because it's not going to get better any time soon. And we all should probably also understand that the US is just going to see enemies wherever it looks and that's not going to improve any time soon, either.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055 Both US political parties were doing this decades ago to the German Chancellor. There is no escalation beyond her. If you're willing to tap her, you're willing to tap anyone.
  - watwut 2y ago
    The checking of phones and their content on the border is an escalation for both diplomats and non diplomats. It is simply not true that this was normal and NOT an escalation.
amarcheschi 2y ago
Before you might have at least expected officials to not have the same appreciation for Russia that this administration has. The less data they can lawfully or unlawfully get from eu politicians, the better for every european citizen i would also just be happy for something being done now even if it could have been done earlier
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Last time I checked gas pipelines went form Russia to Germany, not to the US, and gas money was flowing from EU to Russia not from the US. And Vladimir Putin attended weddings of Austrian politicians, not American ones. And Austrian and German politicians, not American politicians, received high ranking jobs in Russian oil & gas companies at the end of their political mandates. So who's the one doing the Russian appreciation here, in practice I mean, not in virtue signaling?
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    The EU is at least officially positioned against the russian invasion of Ukraine, although some politicians have a weird ex soviet fetish. The USA administration has taken a more nuanced approach than biden, on top of not imposing tariffs on Russia
impossiblefork 2y ago
That's a really American view, and that it's fine or some kind of trust-but-verify thing is really not correct. You can see this from the Spanish reaction to US spies recruiting people in Spanish intelligence, to France's desire to join Five Eyes provided that a mutual no-spying agreement were signed, etc. The reason you don't see stronger reactions is probably because countries were afraid of upsetting the US leadership, but being spied on is bad.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

They probably have been doing that before, but it wasn't reported as much. Usually western spying was kept quiet (both political "real" spying and also data collection on "normal people") if it was done by western governments (and companies), and only mentioned if china/russia/iran/... did it. Now the EU-US diplomacy is not as good anymore, and media is reporting about the US spying too... sadly EU is incapable of creating a facebook-like social network, or else we'd be reusing the "tiktok is a chinese spying app" playbook on facebook(/google/...) over here too.

blitzar 2y ago
> creating a facebook-like social network They also haven't created a fun loving machine that rips peoples limbs off and reattaches them facing a different direction and in a different order. Creating these things really isn't something to be proud of.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Torment Nexus or Orphan Crushing Machine?
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Americans are very proud of the innovations in the latest model of the Orphan Crushing Machine.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      Pookleblinky (PBUH) was prophetic about the lack of an American trickster archetype. So prescient that the populace ended up electing some f***ed up Protestant version of one.

orwin 2y ago

Yes. The US strongarmed Alstom into a merger with General electric for an insulting price (and with GE overly valued, even for people who actually believed in their cooked books). An Alstom's top executive was also inprisonned in the US during the talk. Trump only makes US corruption more visible. He did not make your country corrupt all of the sudden, he just put a shine on it.

gruez 2y ago
>An Alstom's top executive was also inprisonned in the US during the talk. Source? Are you talking about this? >On April 13, 2013, Alstom senior executive Frédéric Pierucci was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was accused of willful blindness of his company's suspected corruption and was imprisoned in a high security facility for 14 months and denied release on bail until the week of Alstom's acquisition by the US conglomerate General Electric.[54][55] In late 2014, Alstom was fined $772 million by the DOJ, and admitted guilt under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in relation to bribes paid to obtain contracts in various countries.[56][57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations The paragraph after also mentions their executives were prosecuted in the UK for other corruption charges, which certainly puts a dent in your implication that the US was somehow locking up Alstom's executives on trumped up charges to get leverage.
- orwin 2y ago
  Yes. I'm not saying the charges were fake, I said they imprisoned him specifically to have the other executives agreed to a signature on the contract (in my opinion , he deserves more than 14th month, but usually, executive don't get imprisonned for corruption, and suddenly get freed exactly at the moment of the signing). The signing, the french government agreement, the GE valuation, all that reeks of political corruption, but well :/
rbanffy 2y ago
> He did not make your country corrupt all of the sudden, So true, but I also think they are vastly increasing the destruction. It really feels like the country was taken over by corporate raiders stripping it for parts.