Snowden Reveals US Spies On EU

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This is some crazy stuff. What did the US hope to gain by spying on its allies? America is on national security overload.... So, is Swoden a traitor, or a freedom fighter?

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/...over-reports-it-spies-on-european-allies?lite

Of course the source is MSNBC. What did you expect? FOX?

 

Hey Chandos,

Long time little see for some odd reason. Anyway good to see ya.

About spying. I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening.

Spies are *not* just spying on enemies. They spy on friends too.

Consider a few years back when a couple of people were arrested in the USA for spying for Israel.

Why spy on allies? Well you want to know how they are doing, if they are really supporting you on ___, if they aren't of the verge of a crash, and probably a long list of other reasons.

I would be surprised if the secret service did it because I was under the impression they focus on other things like counterfitters and protecting the President and people around him.

CIA or NSA I could easily see doing this, the secret service strikes me as a bit odd.

Germany is a major player in Europe right now so keeping a close watch on them actually makes some sense.

Though the number of emails & calls makes me ask if they are all being read or if this is that metadata thing where a computer sorts through them.


Now a difference that should be taking place between the US & China is that the emails, if they are read, shouldn't be ways for US companies to gain an advantage (China does that-including stealing tech for its companies).

I'm also less surprised because a lot of the internal commentary & criticism is about the US spying on its own citizens. This argument leaves the door wide open for spying on foreigners (to the USA).

 

Not being a viewer of MSNBC, I'm curious as to what their spin on Snowden is? I know on Fox, there have been numerous spirited debates over the past few weeks as to whether he is a hero or a traitor.

My personal spin is, I can't make up my mind. I'm probably leaning towards traitor (the position of the Obama administration which is strange for me). However, my entire rationale is I don't like the current company he is keeping. I might lean more towards hero if he was hiding out in France, Switzerland, or even Brazil. Hiding out in China and Russia just doesn't help someone look innocent of treason. Where is he going to go next, North Korea, Cuba, or Iran?

 

What BTA said. If Snowden would stay in most western European countries, they would extradite him as soon as they found him.

And as for the NSA PRISM program spying on EU diplomats, it should cause a political scandal, but I'm not sure that it would. From what I understand EU national security agencies could also request information gathered by this PRISM thing, or at least the Dutch version of such could as far as I gather. No-one is quite clean on this, it seems.

 

I don't agree with that. Haven't you ever heard of Roman Polanski?

 

Too much murkiness all around.
Snowden did good.
And I hope he gets away with it. He totally should, if you keep in mind with what stuff the Obama Admin gets away with.

See to your liberty, People. For Obama's Rule is dark and full of terror.

 

It's absurd to call him a criminal while governments commit what were once crimes, and get away with it by retroactively making legal what was once illegal, after they did it. America was founded on the idea that you shouldn't have blind faith in your government. Snowden's leaks were absolutely vital to the debate about to what extent the government should have access to vitally important and revealing information on all of it's citizens, something the Constitution obviously wanted to prevent. In what way have they proven themselves responsible enough to hold such information on citizens while at the same time enacting laws giving you virtually no legal defense if they say so? When they rewrite the law to protect telephone companies, spy on and beat the s**t out protesters, put Bradley Manning in almost torture-like conditions, cut his legal defense at the knees, and set out on a character assassination campaign against him for leaks that caused no real harm to the much-abused word "national security"?

We know that, in our nation's history, the FBI and related agencies have been used to disrupt and discredit political groups and maintain the status quo, or as they said, "maintain the existing social and political order". This is indisputable. Is there any reason to doubt then, given the current way the government is attempting to treat activists as terrorists (http://www.tarsandsblockade.org/transcanadapolice/), that they wouldn't attempt to do the same thing?

 

If I were an American citizen, I would label Snowden a traitor. It looks pretty cut and dried to me -- he made sensitive Government documents available to foreign political entities. I'm sure he breached confidentiality agreements as well as Federal law by so doing.

His justification seems to be that he feels he is following his conscience and exposing Government misconduct. As someone with a great deal of respect for conscience, I get that to a degree. I also have respect for the rule of law, though, and don't feel people should flout the law at will while invoking conscience.

As for US spying, it doesn't surprise me one bit, and to lay it all on Obama's doorstep is laughable. I'm sure this sort of thing has been done for years and crosses party lines. Those doing it probably invoke conscience as well, telling themselves that it is necessary in order to maintain National Security even though it is illegal.

But here's the thing -- I'm not American. I flat out do not like the idea of the US monitoring communications of other sovereign states. Given that Canada is right next door to the US, I'm sure they have been doing it for years to us. They have the technology, economic might, and the sense of entitlement needed to violate our privacy. But might doesn't make right, and what they don't have is the right to do it. Now, what is Canada going to do? What can they do? Sweet #^€¥ all. But I've lost respect for the US government, and will never concede that they have the right to pry into the lives of foreign citizens.

 

I find it hard to state where the line is concerning what the Gov should know about us and what they should keep their noses out of. We expect them to keep us safe, but don't want them to lurk around corners to keep us safe, finding the all the possible threats. Since we have enemies abroad that want our downfall, as 9/11 is the perfect example of, I would prefer to be safe with a bit of an obtrusive Gov around then have them have their blinders on and my children get blown up at a public event. The Gov is not an evil agency out to get the rest of us. WE elect them for crying out loud. I find this whole topic pararnoia 101.

 

While I mostly agree, it still doesn't tell us where to draw the line. You could just as easily argue that with the steps taken since 9/11, the possibility of something so dramatic as that happening again, with thousands of lives lost, that's it's paranoid to worry about that.

OTOH, as incidents in Newtown and Boston over the past few months have shown us, there's nut jobs everywhere, and you can't protect everybody all the time. Who would have thought the marathon - or a school for that matter - were places we had to worry about? (And yes, I understand that Adam Lanza had no ties to AQ or any other terrorist group, but it's the larger point of keeping our families as safe as we can.)

I mean, I know they aren't reading every e-mail and listening to every phone call. The manpower required to do such a thing would literally require millions of people. At the same time, since they aren't doing that, and the data set is so enormous that they're dealing with, do we have confidence that they'll catch all (or at least most) of the detectable threats?

I don't know - there's no good answer here. For a major event like 9/11, probabilistic forecasting does you no good because we have a sample size of 1. For lower scale attacks - given that it appears they can occur anywhere and everywhere - even if you assign odds to it happening X times per year (and you can definitely do that), I'm pretty confident that it won't lead to actionable intel.

As with any decision like this, it's one where you have to weigh the risks versus the intrusion. The only way to know where that line is if you had some way of knowing how big the risk is. And I don't think we do.

 

What risk? That the evil Government is out to get us? Please... the government is an ever-changing entity elected by the people. It is NOT an Elder Brain sending out it's Flayers to probe our minds in order to gain control of the entire planet. The government is here for the people. It is here to protect us, even from ourselves in the cases like Newtown, the Bos Marathon, etc.... Snowden "revelations" shouldn't be shocking to anyone and if it is shocking to someone, they need to take off their blinders to what is actually the reality. THE only worry we should is the government evolving into something that would no longer protect us. We control that from happening.

Was Snowden right in revelaing what he did? Possibly. It helps us keep an eye on the Government. Should it be as big of a scandal as what has been made of it so far? Not a chance.

We want the gov to stay out of our lives, but want full view of what the Gov is doing. I am good with that. But some of what the gov does is of a level that is beyond the ken of many of its citizens. Block Ops, Espionage, etc.. leave them to what they do best.

 

The risk I was speaking about was directly in relation to terror attacks and security of our nation - not the government reading my e-mail. What is the risk of being directly impacted by a terror attack? Either you, your family, or a friend? I'm confident it's a small, but non-zero number, and the lengths you go to in order to prevent it should be commensurate with the risk.

I mean, we take a risk every time we drive somewhere. We can be involved in a deadly car accident every day of our lives. Given the number of fatal car crashes every year in the US, it's a measurable statistic. It is different for each person because it changes based on how much you drive, but you're talking about odds of several hundred thousand to one that in a given you'll be involved in a fatal crash. It's a risk most of us are willing to take.

What's the odds of being involved in a terrorist attack? I have no clue. On one hand, there are far fewer terrorist attacks than there are fatal car crahses. On the other hand, the number of casualties associated with a terror attack typically greatly exceed the number from a car crash. Futrhermore, due to the low number of terrorist attacks on US soil, sampling error is a concern. Virtually every American in the US gets into a vehicle at some point in the course of a year, and given that thousands every year die in fatal accidents means we have a very robost sample size we're working with.

Quantifying the risk of a fatal car crash is possible. The risk is not only quantifiable, but objective. With a terrorist attack, we are necessarily making estimates, because there's no baseline to look at. What's a typical year look like for a terror attack? Is it like this year, where there's been 1 with 2 fatalities? Is it like 2011 when the only attempt was the foiled Time Square bomber? Or 2006 with the failed underwear bomber? Or is it 2001 when we had thousands die? I don't think we know what portions of our small sample size are representative of the true threat. So how do we know what level of protection and government intrusion in our lives is appropriate if we only have a crude estimation of the level of risk we're involved in? It's possible that what the government is doing is not enough for all we know. And it's also possible that it's too much. That's the larger point I'm trying to make.

 

We want our governments to be able to do what it takes to catch the "Bad Guys". We want the Mafia's phones bugged, as well as the Al Quaeda operatives phones. Trouble is, it takes some effort to determine who the bad guys are. So there's gonna be some times that they listen into someone who is innocent.

At points like that, a citizen has to ask himself -- do I trust others with this private yet legal data? The answer is likely "NO"! The government may use this data for reasons other than "public safety". Here in Canada, we are having an issue with gun control laws and overzealous police officers seizing the weapons of flood victims, in the nebulous name of "public safety" -- I'll post a thread on that one later.

Most people don't like the thought of Big Brother watching them, even if he is only interested in your welfare.

As for the international spying, I'm pretty sure international law prohibits one nation hacking into another country's phone services. Assuming they are doing it to Canada just as they are doing to European allies, the question is why? What possible threat does a country 1/10th the population of the U.S., with no nuclear arms, and nothing to gain from hostility pose to the Americans? The answer is none. Any spying is likely done for economic purposes and not security ones. The Americans would scream bloody murder is someone spied on their citizens like that, yet they cheerfully violate the sovereignty of other nations. The hypocrisy is staggering. Way to lose what little they had left of the moral high ground.

 

When our technologies advance far enough that computers are doing the work for us and people are no longer needed then I will start worrying about our governemnt evolving into Skynet or the Umbrella Corporation. (Personally I prefer Umbrella as I would love to kick some Zombie ass....) There are currently too many people from too many different factions operating in our government for it to be able to evolve into anything but the mess that it already is.

 

Yes, there is always the dichotomy of freedom vs. security. Whether we're talking kids on playgrounds or citizens of a country, valuing security usually involves a loss in freedom. Giving too much freedom, on the other hand, is considered reckless and negligent (at least with regard to children and animals). There's always a line to be drawn.

Personally, I value freedom over security. As heartless as it may sound, I'd rather have another 9/11 than a government that is overly secure/paranoid. Because at least you KNOW the terrorists are the enemy. When it's the government, they typically look like your friend and claim to have your best interests at heart . . . until they don't.

I don't like the idea that anyone in the US can be accused of a crime but not be given a fair trial, even if the crime is terrorism. That means that if the government wants to look like it's successful in stopping terrorism, they could accuse innocent people to boost the numbers. And if the accused people look scary enough, no one will care. That's not necessarily Big Brother, but it IS pragmatic and probably very attractive to those who are accused of not being hard enough on terrorism.

As for Snowden, I agree with LKD.

**Caveat: I've been plagued by nightmares that I'd be arrested for something I didn't do since reading a particular Nancy Drew book back when I was 9 years old, so I'm rather biased on this.

 

Are people being charged with crimes and not given trials?

Outside of gitmo-which should be closed-that doesn't seem to be happening.

It is pretty clear Snowden broke the law, but he claims to have done so out of a desire to do good so I have some sympathy. IF it turns out he was trying to cut a deal with Russian and Chinese spy agencies that may change but I don't object to someone being a whistleblower if that is what he or she really is doing.

If Snowden returns he probably will be given a trial.



To the other stuff, do we know what spying is being done or how it is used. There are reasons allies spy on allies (as well as enemies) in world politics.

Now if this is so economic gains can be had (as the Chinese likely do) then that is bad and should be stopped/punished.

If it is so crime can be furthered (people in positions of power blackmailed and who knows what) then that is also bad. And let me point out that I know, historically, this has happened. I believe with the Teapot Dome scandal people in the then presidential administration (if not the then president himself) had investigations done on members of Congress who were investigating the scandal. These were not done to clean up Congress but to see if anything blackmail worthy could be found.

Also in a mob case that was wrapped up recently it turned out that an FBI agent actually helped a mob boss find (so he could kill and thus silence) a potential informant to the police. Not as much a comment on government spying as that power can be abused (by both the government and those who betray it and its rules while using its power).

That said if that is one of the few ways to identify terrorists that "self-radicalize" then I can have some sympathies for the governments position.

The key to what my judgement on this would be relates to how is the spying & email snooping used?

If for benefiting US companies or blackmailing people (and other criminal acts) then very very bad.

If not then not as much.

But we don't know and this leaves us with the problem of "who watches the watchmen"?

 

The only thing I will say on the whole Snowden is a traitor issue, is that Swoden did not leak the info for the benefit of our enemies, but for the rest of us. Take that for its face value.....

 

I think it's sad. He's an idealist who overestimated the impact of his actions, and now he's running for his life.