11 ms·

N.S.A. Dragnet Included Allies, Aid Groups and Business Elite

279 points by weu 13y ago

adventured 13y ago
I wonder what this is all going to look like when it comes out that the NSA spying has at times helped companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Oracle compete with domestic and foreign competition, as well as deal with foreign government regulators.
- bananacurve 13y ago
  The entire West is complicit. http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
- mhurron 13y ago
  No one seemed to care when the French did it.
  - adventured 13y ago
    I agree that industrial spying by national agencies is rather common across the globe. The only difference here is the perception and magnifying glass / media spotlight.
    - mhurron 13y ago
      > media spotlight And as soon as that passes no one will care again.
      - dreamfactory 13y ago
        How about you?
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Magnitude isn't a meaningful difference? Sounds like saying "everybody has an army. there is no difference" in response to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
      - Zigurd 13y ago
        It's a good bet that intelligence/surveillance spending is roughly proportional to military spending.
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
        Also, the combination with having a military mestastazing like mad all over the world is what makes the spying kinda extra creepy. I guess there were times when France was declaring itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy while waging war on the poor and non-aligned (internationally, that is), but that was before I was born. That the spying itself is out of control, too, doesn't help. Then there is the amount of international communications that go through the US, versus the amount that goes through France. There's not even a comparison -- a far cry from "the only difference is media spotlight". (reminds me of Bush voters talking about liberal media btw... if that offends anyone, good, because it takes real energy or natural talent to dismiss differences of orders of magnitude that easily)
      - adventured 13y ago
        Magnitude variance is assumed. Nobody would be surprised that the Russian army can best the Georgian army due to the difference in scale. Nor that the Chinese army with its 1.2 million soldiers can best Vietnam. In the same vein, I don't think anybody has ever had an expectation that the multi-hundred billion dollar US military was going to be spying as much as the Danish military. I think it has been understood post WW2 that the American DoD does a lot of spying in general. The revelation is primarily the total invasiveness into civilian lives, and willingness to flout laws everywhere.
- declan 13y ago
  There is zero evidence in the NYT article that started this discussion that any NSA surveillance directed at EU antitrust bureaucrats would benefit US software companies. The particular EU antitrustocrat was involved in decisions relating to many other firms that FedGov might find of interest, including Gazprom, Citigroup, JP Morgan, HSBC, ICAP, ISI, UMG, EMI, Panasonic, Toshiba, Intel. I'm not defending use of the NSA's surveillance apparatus for economic espionage; in fact, I'd be happy to see all relevant FedGov employees fired, denied their pensions, and prosecuted if that's true. What I'm saying is simply let's not assume software companies are the beneficiaries when there may be legitimate reasons to spy on companies like Gazprom, which is controlled by the Russian government and likely the largest natural gas extractor in the world.
ganeumann 13y ago
They spied on UNICEF? Really? Why?
- mhurron 13y ago
  If it hasn't become clear yet, they spy on everyone.
  - angersock 13y ago
    We prefer the term "indiscriminate wideband metadata and source data aggregation".
- mladenkovacevic 13y ago
  If you look at the way NSA's been operating over the last little while a sensible answer seems to be a belligerent "Why not".
- ry0ohki 13y ago
  Let's assume you wanted to send money to help terrorists in Somalia. What better way then funneling it through a charity that already has boots on the ground? Or at least I could see a paranoid person at the NSA coming up with such a theory.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  UNICEF help people who can't help themselves. There for they are leftie liberal socialists and a great threat to the American way...
- guelo 13y ago
  My guess would be for the benefit of undercover CIA spies working as aid workers.
fidotron 13y ago
The best bit here is right in the first paragraph: "and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses." Spying on foreign governments because you think they might present a threat to you in terms of war/foreign policy is generally defensible (although many on here would disagree with that), while using the apparatus of the state to support select private enterprise through espionage is not. The US government has still not appreciated the full impact of the leaks or they would be far more concerned about cleaning things up fast as the economic consequences threaten to be huge.
- sentenza 13y ago
  The US has really dropped the ball here. We, here in Germany, have a mainstream political party whose leaders are blindly americophile. The last and current government are dominated by that party. From the beginning of the crisis, these people loudly blamed the victim, accusing NSA-critics of anti-americanism and telling us that "the NSA discussion is over". Then, with time, the industrial espionage stories started to emerge (and it became known that Merkel's phone has been bugged since 2002). Turns out, there are quite a few instances where German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors. So now even the most blindly devoted atlanticists in government know that they must do something against the NSA problem, and to make it worse, they have to do something that actually works (as opposed to feel-good measures).
  - bananacurve 13y ago
    > German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors Do you have a source for that? As far as I can tell Germany wants tighter intelligence integration with the US and howls at the slightest mention of even reducing the size of US military bases on German soil.
    - wil421 13y ago
      >German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors. I have yet to see anything like this in the news. Thats crazy to think the NSA is helping companies with trade secrets.
thrillgore 13y ago
And it just keeps on getting better.
cryoshon 13y ago
I guess this revelation should permanently put to death the canard that the NSA surveillance is strictly "for our safety" and only against suspected or potential terrorists. Of course, there will be hordes of people claiming that this piece of the puzzle is "nothing new", but it is-- this reveal is another very meaty piece of evidence for the thesis that the NSA's goal is universal control and that the terrorism justification is merely a pretense. There is literally no room to argue that eavesdropping on UNICEF is making Americans even an iota more safe.
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  Intel agencies fill these charities with spies so they can identify targets families who show up for medical care in middle of nowhere Somalia. Despicable practice that lead to lot's of shootings and kidnappings of aid workers
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Another example (of using humanitarians organizations or pretense for their own ends, and not giving two fucks about the fallout, I mean): http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/chomsky-boston-bombings-gave-americans-taste-terrorism-us-inflicts-abroad-every?paging=off http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/chomsky-boston-bom... To locate bin Laden, the CIA launched a fraudulent vaccination campaign in a poor neighborhood, then switched it, uncompleted, to a richer area where the suspect was thought to be. The CIA operation violated fundamental principles as old as the Hippocratic oath. It also endangered health workers associated with a polio vaccination program in Pakistan, several of whom were abducted and killed, prompting the UN to withdraw its anti-polio team. The CIA ruse also will lead to the deaths of unknown numbers of Pakistanis who have been deprived of protection from polio because they fear that foreign killers may still be exploiting vaccination programs.
Zigurd 13y ago
There are some curious things about the response to these revelations: 1. Zero "friendly" nations have gone beyond carping. If the NSA still thinks they can put the toothpaste back in the tube it's because nobody who matters has told them otherwise, much less acted on such a declaration. 2. Even more surprising is that zero small nations who are far down the "Eyes" hierarchy, have concluded they can't win, so they should not play the game. That is, nobody has said: "It's unacceptable for our citizens, industry, and government to be an open book to the NSA, therefore we will take action to make communication secure." You would think some nation would seize the opportunity to become the "Switzerland of data."
- abalashov 13y ago
  Given the inherently interconnected and international character of the Internet, as well as the fact that many of its key network peering and exchange points are in countries fairly high on the "Eyes" hierarchy, I would be deeply sceptical of the viability of any effort to become "the Switzerland of data". So, you build a data centre in a "Switzerland of data" and throw something like national government-level resources into its physical security, and buttress it with legislation highly supportive of nondisclosure and customer privacy. So what? To get any utility out of such a place, outside users need to send traffic to and from it. Unlike, say, copyright enforcement takedowns or what have you, the NSA's surveillance isn't highly reliant on physical proximity to that kind of facility, or nearby listening posts. Much of the Sigint took place at vulnerable transoceanic Internet traffic convergence points in countries like the UK and Germany. How would a Switzerland of Data stop that? :-)
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    Apparently PGP was scary enough for NSA to sabotage any commercialization of capable solutions. Internet security isn't as far away as you might think.
- mladenkovacevic 13y ago
  Somehow I have a feeling in federal government circles of smaller countries it is a quite bit more clear-cut on what your options are. Either play along with the 14 eyes, or join some loose alliance with the BRIC countries. The result of your decision, combined with your country's geo-political circumstances, could range from political/economic isolation and worst-case scenario military invasion, to mild prosperity in exchange for total colonialist-like obedience at the expense of your own citizens' full potential in prosperity and living standards.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lio32 13y ago
Gentle reminder: Google willingly co-operated with the NSA and provided direct access to their systems: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-... We can affect change by boycotting the services of Google and other tech giants. We all know that the Senate only listens to rich Corporate lobbyists rather than citizens.
- frou_dh 13y ago
  I'm not sure "gentle" is the right word for creating throwaway accounts to post rephrasings of that daily. Do your cause more good by coming up with some noteworthy action.
- joelcollinsdc 13y ago
  i thought it was determined that the access was obtained by tapping unencrypted interlinks between datacenters? can you provide citations of the 'willingness' part of this?
  - declan 13y ago
    No, because the allegation is untrue. In fact Google was challenging the legality of FedGov national security letters in two different courts (my article in May was the first to disclose this) even before the Snowden documents began to appear. edit: here's the link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/
    - bobbydavid 13y ago
      and did you see the transparency report Google released with the censored bar on the secret us gov requests? I loved how you could see bits of the graph peeking through :)
- declan 13y ago
  Of course that article was back in June, and if you read the followup, a day later, written by yours truly, you'll see your assertion is untrue: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...
w_t_payne 13y ago
Hmmm... although this article does not suggest it, I wonder if the surveillance of EU antitrust officials indicates a willingness to subvert the rule of law in overseas jurisdictions?
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Well, yes. Otherwise, why bother? Put it this way, if you or I hacked say, I dunno... NASA, looking for proof of , oh random subject... aliens... Would it be a defence to say, "I was just looking, I did no harm. I didn't use any data I saw"? Or would the US try to prosecute such a person? Hmmmmm
codex 13y ago
Every organization generates information of some kind; nation states especially, but even aid groups and corporations. Spying on the heads of these organizations is a very efficient way to get at the most important, post-filtered information these groups have uncovered or generated. If you assume NSA spying net benefits the United States, then a U.S. citizen should count it beneficial that the extent of the surveillance is so comprehensive. If you don't, or have interests not aligned with the U.S., these revelations are pretty horrible.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
vondur 13y ago
I'm not surprised, they apparently capture everything that they possible can and search it later for items of "interest", whatever that may be.
j_baker 13y ago
I don't get it. Why Unicef and other aid groups? I mean, foreign leaders I can somewhat understand. But what do we have to gain from spying on aid groups?
- tobltobs 13y ago
  For example to know what is the best offer for a Unicef call for bids. There are lots of american companies who depend on this kind of informations.
robomartin 13y ago
To me all of this: NSA, Wars, Obamacare, IRS, Iran-fail, etc. just screams "Enough big government!". Do you guys understand just how much all your efforts in tech could be for naught when you have government acting against you every step of the way? I would think that eventually it's got to sink in just how damaging all of this is to you. You could be an oncredible engineer or scientist and have a guy (or gal) you supported politically destroy your efforts through action or inaction. Time to really pay attention folks.
- icelancer 13y ago
  Yeah, but, who will build the roads and stuff? Most people would rather sacrifice their civil liberties so they can continue to get free ponies.
alan_cx 13y ago
I cant believe people aren't shocked that they even spy on Israel's PM. To me that is stunning. I, clearly wrongly, assumed that where it counts the US and Israel are glued to the same page. So, why spy on them? Its almost like the NSA treating some US states as enemies to spy on. Does the US consider any nation a trusted ally? Well, clearly the US and Israel are not quite as chummy as I had previously thought. BTW, is Snowden done yet? Is there a chance that we'll find out that the NSA spies on the US President and the UK Queen? (I'll take as a given that they spy on London Mayor Boris Johnson for pure entertainment value. Hell, even I'd do that.) All we need now is the head line "NSA spies on NSA", and the whole thing will implode. Sorry HN. Its just that it is getting so absurd, it has to be funny.

279 points by weu 13y ago

I wonder what this is all going to look like when it comes out that the NSA spying has at times helped companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Oracle compete with domestic and foreign competition, as well as deal with foreign government regulators.

bananacurve 13y ago
The entire West is complicit. http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
mhurron 13y ago
No one seemed to care when the French did it.
- adventured 13y ago
  I agree that industrial spying by national agencies is rather common across the globe. The only difference here is the perception and magnifying glass / media spotlight.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    > media spotlight And as soon as that passes no one will care again.
    - dreamfactory 13y ago
      How about you?
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Magnitude isn't a meaningful difference? Sounds like saying "everybody has an army. there is no difference" in response to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      It's a good bet that intelligence/surveillance spending is roughly proportional to military spending.
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago
        Also, the combination with having a military mestastazing like mad all over the world is what makes the spying kinda extra creepy. I guess there were times when France was declaring itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy while waging war on the poor and non-aligned (internationally, that is), but that was before I was born. That the spying itself is out of control, too, doesn't help. Then there is the amount of international communications that go through the US, versus the amount that goes through France. There's not even a comparison -- a far cry from "the only difference is media spotlight". (reminds me of Bush voters talking about liberal media btw... if that offends anyone, good, because it takes real energy or natural talent to dismiss differences of orders of magnitude that easily)
    - adventured 13y ago
      Magnitude variance is assumed. Nobody would be surprised that the Russian army can best the Georgian army due to the difference in scale. Nor that the Chinese army with its 1.2 million soldiers can best Vietnam. In the same vein, I don't think anybody has ever had an expectation that the multi-hundred billion dollar US military was going to be spying as much as the Danish military. I think it has been understood post WW2 that the American DoD does a lot of spying in general. The revelation is primarily the total invasiveness into civilian lives, and willingness to flout laws everywhere.
declan 13y ago
There is zero evidence in the NYT article that started this discussion that any NSA surveillance directed at EU antitrust bureaucrats would benefit US software companies. The particular EU antitrustocrat was involved in decisions relating to many other firms that FedGov might find of interest, including Gazprom, Citigroup, JP Morgan, HSBC, ICAP, ISI, UMG, EMI, Panasonic, Toshiba, Intel. I'm not defending use of the NSA's surveillance apparatus for economic espionage; in fact, I'd be happy to see all relevant FedGov employees fired, denied their pensions, and prosecuted if that's true. What I'm saying is simply let's not assume software companies are the beneficiaries when there may be legitimate reasons to spy on companies like Gazprom, which is controlled by the Russian government and likely the largest natural gas extractor in the world.

ganeumann 13y ago

They spied on UNICEF? Really? Why?

mhurron 13y ago
If it hasn't become clear yet, they spy on everyone.
- angersock 13y ago
  We prefer the term "indiscriminate wideband metadata and source data aggregation".
mladenkovacevic 13y ago
If you look at the way NSA's been operating over the last little while a sensible answer seems to be a belligerent "Why not".
ry0ohki 13y ago
Let's assume you wanted to send money to help terrorists in Somalia. What better way then funneling it through a charity that already has boots on the ground? Or at least I could see a paranoid person at the NSA coming up with such a theory.
alan_cx 13y ago
UNICEF help people who can't help themselves. There for they are leftie liberal socialists and a great threat to the American way...
guelo 13y ago
My guess would be for the benefit of undercover CIA spies working as aid workers.

fidotron 13y ago

The best bit here is right in the first paragraph: "and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses." Spying on foreign governments because you think they might present a threat to you in terms of war/foreign policy is generally defensible (although many on here would disagree with that), while using the apparatus of the state to support select private enterprise through espionage is not. The US government has still not appreciated the full impact of the leaks or they would be far more concerned about cleaning things up fast as the economic consequences threaten to be huge.

sentenza 13y ago
The US has really dropped the ball here. We, here in Germany, have a mainstream political party whose leaders are blindly americophile. The last and current government are dominated by that party. From the beginning of the crisis, these people loudly blamed the victim, accusing NSA-critics of anti-americanism and telling us that "the NSA discussion is over". Then, with time, the industrial espionage stories started to emerge (and it became known that Merkel's phone has been bugged since 2002). Turns out, there are quite a few instances where German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors. So now even the most blindly devoted atlanticists in government know that they must do something against the NSA problem, and to make it worse, they have to do something that actually works (as opposed to feel-good measures).
- bananacurve 13y ago
  > German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors Do you have a source for that? As far as I can tell Germany wants tighter intelligence integration with the US and howls at the slightest mention of even reducing the size of US military bases on German soil.
  - wil421 13y ago
    >German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors. I have yet to see anything like this in the news. Thats crazy to think the NSA is helping companies with trade secrets.

thrillgore 13y ago

And it just keeps on getting better.

cryoshon 13y ago

I guess this revelation should permanently put to death the canard that the NSA surveillance is strictly "for our safety" and only against suspected or potential terrorists. Of course, there will be hordes of people claiming that this piece of the puzzle is "nothing new", but it is-- this reveal is another very meaty piece of evidence for the thesis that the NSA's goal is universal control and that the terrorism justification is merely a pretense. There is literally no room to argue that eavesdropping on UNICEF is making Americans even an iota more safe.

dobbsbob 13y ago
Intel agencies fill these charities with spies so they can identify targets families who show up for medical care in middle of nowhere Somalia. Despicable practice that lead to lot's of shootings and kidnappings of aid workers
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Another example (of using humanitarians organizations or pretense for their own ends, and not giving two fucks about the fallout, I mean): http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/chomsky-boston-bombings-gave-americans-taste-terrorism-us-inflicts-abroad-every?paging=off http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/chomsky-boston-bom... To locate bin Laden, the CIA launched a fraudulent vaccination campaign in a poor neighborhood, then switched it, uncompleted, to a richer area where the suspect was thought to be. The CIA operation violated fundamental principles as old as the Hippocratic oath. It also endangered health workers associated with a polio vaccination program in Pakistan, several of whom were abducted and killed, prompting the UN to withdraw its anti-polio team. The CIA ruse also will lead to the deaths of unknown numbers of Pakistanis who have been deprived of protection from polio because they fear that foreign killers may still be exploiting vaccination programs.

Zigurd 13y ago

There are some curious things about the response to these revelations: 1. Zero "friendly" nations have gone beyond carping. If the NSA still thinks they can put the toothpaste back in the tube it's because nobody who matters has told them otherwise, much less acted on such a declaration. 2. Even more surprising is that zero small nations who are far down the "Eyes" hierarchy, have concluded they can't win, so they should not play the game. That is, nobody has said: "It's unacceptable for our citizens, industry, and government to be an open book to the NSA, therefore we will take action to make communication secure." You would think some nation would seize the opportunity to become the "Switzerland of data."

abalashov 13y ago
Given the inherently interconnected and international character of the Internet, as well as the fact that many of its key network peering and exchange points are in countries fairly high on the "Eyes" hierarchy, I would be deeply sceptical of the viability of any effort to become "the Switzerland of data". So, you build a data centre in a "Switzerland of data" and throw something like national government-level resources into its physical security, and buttress it with legislation highly supportive of nondisclosure and customer privacy. So what? To get any utility out of such a place, outside users need to send traffic to and from it. Unlike, say, copyright enforcement takedowns or what have you, the NSA's surveillance isn't highly reliant on physical proximity to that kind of facility, or nearby listening posts. Much of the Sigint took place at vulnerable transoceanic Internet traffic convergence points in countries like the UK and Germany. How would a Switzerland of Data stop that? :-)
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Apparently PGP was scary enough for NSA to sabotage any commercialization of capable solutions. Internet security isn't as far away as you might think.
mladenkovacevic 13y ago
Somehow I have a feeling in federal government circles of smaller countries it is a quite bit more clear-cut on what your options are. Either play along with the 14 eyes, or join some loose alliance with the BRIC countries. The result of your decision, combined with your country's geo-political circumstances, could range from political/economic isolation and worst-case scenario military invasion, to mild prosperity in exchange for total colonialist-like obedience at the expense of your own citizens' full potential in prosperity and living standards.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lio32 13y ago

Gentle reminder: Google willingly co-operated with the NSA and provided direct access to their systems: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-... We can affect change by boycotting the services of Google and other tech giants. We all know that the Senate only listens to rich Corporate lobbyists rather than citizens.

frou_dh 13y ago
I'm not sure "gentle" is the right word for creating throwaway accounts to post rephrasings of that daily. Do your cause more good by coming up with some noteworthy action.
joelcollinsdc 13y ago
i thought it was determined that the access was obtained by tapping unencrypted interlinks between datacenters? can you provide citations of the 'willingness' part of this?
- declan 13y ago
  No, because the allegation is untrue. In fact Google was challenging the legality of FedGov national security letters in two different courts (my article in May was the first to disclose this) even before the Snowden documents began to appear. edit: here's the link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/
  - bobbydavid 13y ago
    and did you see the transparency report Google released with the censored bar on the secret us gov requests? I loved how you could see bits of the graph peeking through :)
declan 13y ago
Of course that article was back in June, and if you read the followup, a day later, written by yours truly, you'll see your assertion is untrue: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...

w_t_payne 13y ago

Hmmm... although this article does not suggest it, I wonder if the surveillance of EU antitrust officials indicates a willingness to subvert the rule of law in overseas jurisdictions?

alan_cx 13y ago
Well, yes. Otherwise, why bother? Put it this way, if you or I hacked say, I dunno... NASA, looking for proof of , oh random subject... aliens... Would it be a defence to say, "I was just looking, I did no harm. I didn't use any data I saw"? Or would the US try to prosecute such a person? Hmmmmm

codex 13y ago

Every organization generates information of some kind; nation states especially, but even aid groups and corporations. Spying on the heads of these organizations is a very efficient way to get at the most important, post-filtered information these groups have uncovered or generated. If you assume NSA spying net benefits the United States, then a U.S. citizen should count it beneficial that the extent of the surveillance is so comprehensive. If you don't, or have interests not aligned with the U.S., these revelations are pretty horrible.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

vondur 13y ago

I'm not surprised, they apparently capture everything that they possible can and search it later for items of "interest", whatever that may be.

j_baker 13y ago

I don't get it. Why Unicef and other aid groups? I mean, foreign leaders I can somewhat understand. But what do we have to gain from spying on aid groups?

tobltobs 13y ago
For example to know what is the best offer for a Unicef call for bids. There are lots of american companies who depend on this kind of informations.

robomartin 13y ago

To me all of this: NSA, Wars, Obamacare, IRS, Iran-fail, etc. just screams "Enough big government!". Do you guys understand just how much all your efforts in tech could be for naught when you have government acting against you every step of the way? I would think that eventually it's got to sink in just how damaging all of this is to you. You could be an oncredible engineer or scientist and have a guy (or gal) you supported politically destroy your efforts through action or inaction. Time to really pay attention folks.

icelancer 13y ago
Yeah, but, who will build the roads and stuff? Most people would rather sacrifice their civil liberties so they can continue to get free ponies.

alan_cx 13y ago

I cant believe people aren't shocked that they even spy on Israel's PM. To me that is stunning. I, clearly wrongly, assumed that where it counts the US and Israel are glued to the same page. So, why spy on them? Its almost like the NSA treating some US states as enemies to spy on. Does the US consider any nation a trusted ally? Well, clearly the US and Israel are not quite as chummy as I had previously thought. BTW, is Snowden done yet? Is there a chance that we'll find out that the NSA spies on the US President and the UK Queen? (I'll take as a given that they spy on London Mayor Boris Johnson for pure entertainment value. Hell, even I'd do that.) All we need now is the head line "NSA spies on NSA", and the whole thing will implode. Sorry HN. Its just that it is getting so absurd, it has to be funny.