US surveillance revelations deepen European fears

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillance-prism-idUSL5N0EJ31S20130607

by youngerdryas • 13 years ago

184 72 13 years ago

reuters.com

rb2k_• 13 years ago

He's not the German Justice Minister.

He's "the justice minister for the German state of Hesse".

pgeorgi• 13 years ago

While Mr. Hahn isn't directly involved in last week's Blockupy incidents in Frankfurt, one of his colleagues (the state's Minister of Interior) is and certainly benefits if public outrage is targetted on someone else for a while.

BjoernKW• 13 years ago

While I appreciate this statement I doubt that Germany and the EU is fundamentally different from the US in that matter.

Sure, in Germany recently we've been quite successful in fending off planned legislation that would've allowed massive privacy intrusions but in general the political establishment over here isn't exactly a champion of civil liberties either.

Besides, I'm certain both German and EU administrative bodies closely cooperate with the US on intelligence matters and would more than gladly accept sharing those findings.

Ihmahr• 13 years ago

Yes, they closely cooperate. But EU agencies (except for UK) don't have a record of torture, abduction and overly use of secrecy. Comparing the budgets of the various secret services should be informative. US agencies are WAY bigger and I think much too big. UK is the exception - being in line with US.

ims• 13 years ago

Well that's a facile statement, since the EU is only 20 years old. Individual countries in Europe absolutely do have a record of torture, abduction, and secrecy in varying degrees. Are you completely forgetting the 20th century?

youngerdryas2• 13 years ago

The title was "German State Justice Minister Calls for Boycott of US companies".

I think the only way to roll this back, if it even can be rolled back, is to attack from the states using state power. If CA, NY, TX, UT, VT, every state, starts making their own privacy laws to hamstring the Feds they may have to change their tune for practicality.

akiselev• 13 years ago

Federal laws will overrule state laws every time in this case. The gov't will just claim national security/intelligence laws aren't covered by the 10th Amendment.

The only thing the states could do is pass a Constitutional amendment but that has never been done through state assemblies before.

smhinsey• 13 years ago

I'm not sure that the states have any power here. If there's a federal law legalizing it, it doesn't matter what the state laws are. It's basically the reverse of the medical/legal marijuana scenario.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

It seems to be working there, though. Also for gay marriage which has become an inevitability.

youngerdryas2• 13 years ago

There are federal laws against marijuana but the Feds don't bust people in MA for smoking weed, though apparently technically they could.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

The EU commission is a bunch of hypocrites. I am an European and I am appalled by the lack of integrity of our politicians: they hand over data on flights, credit cards, SWIFT transactions to other countries and keep trying to pass ACTA in its various forms despite strong opposition of the EU population, they created their own mass-surveillance laws (active in many european countries) and then they pretend to be outraged at the mass-surveillance of the US they themselves have helped facilitate in its full breadth. Cretins!

doe88• 13 years ago

Indeed! I think the only reason Britain or France still don't have the same mass-surveillance systems in place is their lack of budgets. Otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't be better protected than the americans in the US. Although, the irony being that certainly the US knows more on us (europeans) than our own countries.

EliRivers• 13 years ago

Also the phenomenal incompetency of our (British) gubbermint when it comes to buying any item of IT more elaborate than ordering an iPod from Amazon. One of the greatest defences we have against the encroachment of the state in the UK is the amiable ineptness of it at every stage.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

The US secret services are also convenient scapegoats, our own government agencies can simply ask them for information on EU citizens that would be illegal to collect in the EU and they probably do so frequently.

omd• 13 years ago

We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.

I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.

natrius• 13 years ago

Britain has access to PRISM. I wouldn't be surprised if other European governments do as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/07/uk-gatherin...

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Oh hell. Looks like the anti European thing has just hit poor HN. :(

skrebbel2• 13 years ago

One interesting thing about Euroscepsis is, to my unscientific observations, that it is pretty well represented in all layers of society. There's plenty anti-EU people of all levels of educations, family backgrounds and vocations. Their reasons wildly vary, though, and those might coincide more with particular groups.

This is not to say that all these people also vote for the populist anti-EU parties, which typically have a broader populist agenda (e.g. EU bad and muslims bad)

Nevertheless, this makes it obvious that there's also plenty of anti-EU folk on HN, simply because there's plenty Europeans here. Especially in a thread with the word 'Europe' in the title, I'm not surprised.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

I am not anti-european, on the contrary. I am just against EU agendas that are pushed against the will of the majority of the EU population and clearly against their interests. The EU is a great idea and project, but the EU commission is a bunch of crooks.

1morepassword• 13 years ago

It's bullshit blaming the EU, given that it's countries like the UK, Ireland e.a. that are pushing for all of this on order to serve their great friends the US.

It's the EU that stands between us and corrupt national governments handing over our civil rights to US intelligence and business interest. If the EU didn't block this kind of crap half the time we would be way worse of.

znowi2• 13 years ago

I may partly agree with your assessment. There's always room for improvement. But in comparison to the US, the EU is the privacy heaven :)

flexie3• 13 years ago

Whereas we in the EU have our own dubious surveillance programmes, at least they are made by governments we can overthrow ourselves.

Also, European governments mostly grant us basic human rights, have no secret overseas prisons, no death penalty for "treason", no decade long imprisonments for whistle blowing or hacking, no secret military tribunals, no recent record of torture, almost no drones, small military, tiny intelligence budgets etc.

notatoad• 13 years ago

from my very basic understanding of EU privacy laws, the big win is that they treat everybody equally - the rules say what data you can retain, what data you can't, and that's it. What really scares me about all this FISA and PRISM stuff is that they treat foreigners as essentially non-persons. They at least make some effort at pretending there's a due process for american citizens, but if you're a foreigner with your data on a system owned by a US company, you literally have no rights at all.

aswanson• 13 years ago

Yeah, that attitude in the u.s. scares me; the labels we put on noncitizens. Those labels, I believe enabled our compliant media to sell that idiotic Iraq war to the public. I don't recall them tracking the Iraqi civilian deaths at all. I mean, after all, they weren't born in the u.s. so who cares, right?

flexie3• 13 years ago

That's a very good point - in the last months the world listened in on Americans debating whether drones can be used against Americans or just against us foreigners, as if we are worth less. Now we learn that the American government speculates that maybe foreigners don't deserve the same degree of privacy.

Silhouette2• 13 years ago

What really scares me about all this FISA and PRISM stuff is that they treat foreigners as essentially non-persons.

Something that struck me a while ago is that while most of the modern world talks about protecting "human rights", the ruling classes in the US always seem to talk about protecting things like "Constitutional rights" or "citizens' rights". I'm not sure what that says about their underlying attitude, but it can't be good.

The trouble is, a lot of places have at least tendencies in the same direction, it's just hard to see them if you're a native and get to go in the "EU citizen" queue at customs or whatever it might be, so you don't see how others visiting your country are treated even from the moment they arrive. And since typically those outsiders have no direct influence on policy in places they visit, there is no natural political incentive for each country's government to treat them as much more than a source of revenue for the tourism/education/commercial sector.

With the rise in modern times of ubiquitous international communications networks and relatively quick and easy physical travel between countries, unfortunately this seems to be a race to the bottom, with a lower bound determined only by the point at which people actually stop visiting/communicating with your country, which as a practical matter is going to be difficult for many people to do.

7952• 13 years ago

And the irony is that foreigners are increasingly being considered as targets fo prosecution without having set foot in the county.

pfortuny• 13 years ago

IANAL but (Spain): there is NO way to get an order from the Government which you cannot legally make public. You cannot be forced to keep a secret you did not seek to know (unless you are a Gvt employee, which includes that explicitly).

weinzierl• 13 years ago

That's interesting, does anyone know how this is in Germany?

philwelch2• 13 years ago

It's interesting. There are few European countries where I can unconditionally refuse to speak to police or refuse them to search my home or person without a warrant. We don't have CCTV cameras like they do in the UK. And when it comes to being able to overthrow your government yourselves, much of Europe has the same sham democracy we do. (Berlusconi? Seriously? Twice?) We have guns, but the parts of Western Europe who really wanted to overthrow their governments within recent history were able to get all the guns and explosives they wanted too. So it's hard to really say one is any better than the other.

davidw• 13 years ago

So it's hard to really say one is any better than the other.

Smart people look at both and try and learn, rather than getting on a high horse about "better", when "better" is awfully difficult to define anyway.

Berlusconi? Seriously? Twice?

Sadly, no: three times, the first being in 1994.

flexie3• 13 years ago

The European Court of Human Rights has established that the right to remain silent under police questioning and the privilege against self-incrimination applies.

All over Europe elections are held at least every 4th or 5th year and governments are regularly overthrown, in Italy more often than anywhere else, I think.

dnautics6• 13 years ago

not only that, the EU president is unelected - it rotates between the premiership of different states. That would be (somewhat) like Louisiana voting for its governor and having that governor be president of the US for some number of years. So much for 'overthrowing' governments.

rmc3• 13 years ago

Bush? Twice?

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

There are few European countries where I can unconditionally refuse to speak to police or refuse them to search my home or person without a warrant.

these rights in the USA are lost when "national security letter" provisions involved

dnautics6• 13 years ago

"European governments mostly grant us basic human rights"

In the US the traditional (but fading) attitude is that "The US government protects basic human rights". See, the problem is if government 'grants' you human rights, there's a potential for conflict of interest where the government could decide to no longer grant you that right if it becomes inconvenient.

At least with the US attitude, you can wag your finger and say, "you're failing to protect right X". And yes, that attitude means that the US is not obligated to protect the privacy of foreigners. BUT that is different from the question of whether or not the US should actively violate the privacy of foreigners.

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

Right. There's a difference between "respect" and "protect" - I think US policy should be to respect the rights of everyone, and protect the rights of citizens; it should protect the rights of others when it can do so conveniently and without stomping on too much else, but it should really commit to those first two.

rmc3• 13 years ago

Many EU countries have a legal concept that people have the rights by virtue of their birth, and that the government can't take them away.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

small military

It does simplify the issue for EU nations, but it doesn't mean this is the answer for the US. To my knowledge, EU nations get away with very small militaries in part due to the "umbrella" of the friendly US military.

Not to say the US needs a super-mega-ultra-huge military, but this is like when people compare country X to Norway. "Look at how successful Norway is! Look at how wealthy everyone is!" Yeah, I'm sure that has nothing to do with the tremendous quantities of natural resources in Norway. Point being, we need to compare apples to apples.

have no secret overseas prisons

How exactly would you know if the EU nations had secret overseas prisons? Aren't they secret? :)

stackedmidgets2• 13 years ago

To be fair, your governments lack the military strength to withstand the US. Germany is still under American occupation. To really throw off the yoke (which I support), you'll need to re-militarize.

znowi2• 13 years ago

And therein lies the problem. The US thinks in terms of military nouns. The EU doesn't :)

danmaz74• 13 years ago

"Statements from the U.S. government that the monitoring was not aimed at U.S. citizens but only against persons outside the United States do not reassure me at all." I couldn't agree more. It's no fun when they state in such a clear way that we're second-class users, whose rights aren't so important after all.

lambtron• 13 years ago

I wonder how China is thinking as it actively pushes its own web titans and forbids the entrance of Facebook and Google and the like within its national borders.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Phew?

skrebbel2• 13 years ago

Makes the Huawei boycott feel a bit... special, too, don't you think?

kriro• 13 years ago

Germany already exports a lot of data to the US. That includes banking data, flight plans and so forth. So that fear is mostly fake.

Hopefully the current developments provide a small chance of revoking those laws but I highly doubt it.

I agree on the cloud stuff though. Some companies even use it in advertising (your data stays here and is covered by our data protection laws)

transfire• 13 years ago

"designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning"

Assuredly the U.K. and Israel say the same thing to their people.

Of course, never mind that all three countries swap information. Total surveillance is easily achieved. And it's all perfectly legal.

eaxbin• 13 years ago

On the 14th of September 2007, Denmark initiated our Anti-Terroism Surveillance act, wherein ALL phonecalls, texts & internet traffic is saved for at least 2 years.

Welcome to Denmark.

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

Have you got many terrorists in Denmark?

malandrew• 13 years ago

I think the biggest worry I would have if I were in Europe is the same worry I would have as an Amazon Marketplace Seller. An Amazon marketplace seller is essentially sharing all their sales performance data with Amazon. This pretty much guarantees that the best way to make money is to see lots of low volume items. Anything that sells in any considerable quantity will not go unnoticed by Amazon and they will start carrying the product themselves.

Anyone in the EU (or any other country) that frequently discusses valuable information via any US service is vulnerable to exploitation. This includes politicians, beaurocrats with gatekeeper positions, banks and other financial services firms, etc. all have information that in the hands of the right person in the US government can be used against them, their firm or their country.

What if the US government deems it appropriate to watch what people in a certain country is saying about the US dollar? That information can be used to manipulate currency markets in favor of the US and we'd be none the wiser.

Every single congressional subcommittee dealing with any foreign affair has an interest in asking the NSA to find out information on and private communication of their counterparts in other countries.

If you want to exercise soft control over all other countries, what better way than to get important people in all those other countries to centralize much of their communications via US Cloud services that the NSA can conveniently eavesdrop on. You get instant access to the words any thoughts of any person you may interact with geopolitically.

I think the worst part is that anyemember of congress could already be using illegitimately gained data and be none the wiser. At the end of the day they make an innocent request like "Get me all the information you have on XXX so I can make an informed decision." Next thing you know, this request is passed along like a game of telephone until a report is drafted up. Nothing stops those requests from making it to the NSA, where a rank an file employee deems it appropriate to spy on the personal communications of foreign nationals because they believe that it is in the best interest of the United States and its position in the World. That data is intercepted and distilled into a report and now that member of congress is operating with insider information, ill-gotten via PRISM, and he is none the wiser and can go on with his life thinking that its only being used for fighting terrorism.

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

"If you want to exercise soft control over all other countries, what better way than to get important people in all those other countries to centralize much of their communications via US Cloud services that the NSA can conveniently eavesdrop on."

They actually did exactly that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%...

Torn• 13 years ago

Europe, which lacks internet giants of its own, has long yearned to contain the power of the U.S. titans that dominate the Web,

Rubbish. The EU has quite strong notions of privacy and personal freedom, which the US doesn't have. It's not about 'containing' US internet companies it's about protecting the rights of EU citizens and fighting against the societal harms that come with the erosion of privacy.

US surveillance revelations deepen European fears

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