Fine Line Seen in U.S. Spying on Companies

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/business/us-snooping-on-companies-cited-by-china.html

by petethomas • 12 years ago

51 34 12 years ago

nytimes.com

puppetmaster3• 12 years ago

You can see how NSA is affecting our jobs, as in they reduce exports due to 'add ons'.

That is so patriotic of them. /s

dan_bk• 12 years ago

And I fail to see how that damage can ever be undone. This sort of trust is lost only once.

mythealias• 12 years ago

Time fixes everything. We have a short term memory. But what I feel the problem here is that there is no government will to stop what is being done. Which means that such acts will keep repeating. They are being sold as securing national interests which is a bit vague term in itself.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

And I fail to see how that damage can ever be undone.

The only way forward for the US tech industry is to enable end-to-end encryption, web-of-trust, and make it simple enough for mom.

If it's not the NSA it's the Chinese or Russians. Everyone needs security. The next center of gravity of the tech industry will be the place where people can get security. Silicon Valley could do it, but are they too mobbed-up with the Military Industrial Complex to actually get it done?

zipfle• 12 years ago

I wonder if there's an analog to "parallel construction" that uses intelligence contractors and competitive intelligence firms to move NSA data to the private sector.

MatthiasP• 12 years ago

It is not hard to imagine a company like Microsoft wanting something in exchange for all the zero day exploits they report to the NSA in advance.

walls2• 12 years ago

Microsoft reports these zero days to every company with a MAPP subscription.

sharpneli4• 12 years ago

"The N.S.A. says it observes American law around the globe, but admits that local laws are no obstacle to its operations."

As an non American this annoys me immensely. US law basically states that non citizens have no right to privacy nor fair trials whatsoever (A foreiginer is not a person as defined in the constitution, this was the justification for why those in Guantanamo did not get a fair trial). So N.S.A basically admits that it's basically treating everyone else as fair game.

What can we, those not from the US, do to fight this? Naturally we cannot affect this by voting so how can we get Americans to change things? Add "Only for non US use" to any OpenSource projects we release?

But on a more serious note. Would you think it would be totally ok if other countries take similar stance towards US companies and persons? Perhaps most importantly for Americans all of this can potentially weaken the US negotiation position in copyright enforcement, and for a country that depends extremely heavily on IP it could be disastrous.

diafygi• 12 years ago

The NSA has largely accomplished this level of foreign surveillance with the consent of foreign governments. Perhaps if foreign citizens pushed their own government to resist, the NSA would have a harder time getting access to data streams.

sharpneli4• 12 years ago

This as a great example: http://rt.com/usa/160024-nsa-intercept-bahamas-phone/

I wouldn't exactly call that consent. Sure they got access. But it was not supposed to be that wide nor used for everything. The mistake seemed to be that they accidentally trusted an allied country.

But it indeed seems that any collaboration right now with US government is going to mean full NSA access beyond what was originally negotiated.

In case of my country the desire not to collaborate with NSA indeed will affect my voting behaviour.

mratzloff• 12 years ago

Would you think it would be totally ok if other countries take similar stance towards US companies and persons?

I would be surprised if other countries don't take a similar stance. Not that that justifies it.

sharpneli4• 12 years ago

Some countries do.

As an example Sweden passed a law that allows them to record all the traffic that crosses their borders. The problem is that practically all of the connections from Finland to central Europe goes trough Sweden. And Sweden absolutely certainly gives all of that data directly to NSA willingly.

They are now planning a direct cable from Finland to Germany mostly due to that change in Swedish law. Thankfully Germany seems to be rather annoyed by constant spying, perhaps partly due to East Germany's history with massive domestic spying.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

There is a big difference between having that attitude or desire and having $70 Billion Every. Single. Year. to implement that desire.

Most places don't have 1% of that budget. Some places have no surveillance budget at all.

Or, look at it this way: If you took away 99% of the NSA's budget, how much intrusion into privacy would we be talking about.

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

Virtually all Western nations cooperate with the NSA. Good luck getting your country to cut off their nose despite their face. "The West works together for intelligence gathering" doesn't work as a narrative, at all, everyone wants to pretend that their country is not complicit.

krapp2• 12 years ago

A foreiginer is not a person as defined in the constitution, this was the justification for why those in Guantanamo did not get a fair trial

Do you have a cite for this? I don't recall reading that in the constitution anywhere.

Also, who was doing the 'justifying'? Certainly not the government, since they would never argue from the premise that Guantanamo wasn't fair to begin with (rather, IIRC, they argued that since Guantanamo Bay wasn't in the US, US laws didn't apply -- which is complete bullshit but still not nearly the same as stating that the US doesn't consider foreigners to be persons as a matter of law.)

sharpneli4• 12 years ago

It seems that wisdom prevailed and at 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush it was ruled to be unconstitutional. However not surprisingly it did not appear widely in media.

But we still have Fourth Amendment. Basically it doesn't apply to normal people outside US simply because we are not US citizens. Therefore the term people on the constitution cannot mean "people" in general.

Or your Government is breaking it's own laws. I don't know. They are not my laws nor have we been educated on them. You probably know better.

spot• 12 years ago

it is a common error. when the constitution means citizens they say "citizens" and when it means people it says "people".

http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

says

"foreign nationals are generally entitled to the equal protection of the laws, to political freedoms of speech and association, and to due process requirements of fair procedure where their lives, liberty, or property are at stake"

madaxe_again• 12 years ago

As a non-American you are fundamentally unimportant to America, and are fair game for whatever they see fit. If they want your communications, your wealth, your life, they will have it. Wiretaps, asset freezes, drone-strikes.

The only thing that non-Americans can try to do is not engage with American businesses, but this doesn't really work either, as from the jingoistic perspective taken by US leadership and media this would be the "unfree world" "ganging up" because "they hate our freedom", and would only lead to yet more of the same, deeper isolation, and the vicious cycle continues.

It's very much worth noting that this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. The Chinese are at it, the Brits are at it in league with the Americans and the rest of their gang, and you can be sure anyone else with a capability is using it.

The same pattern applies elsewhere, and any external effort to apply pressure is propagandised into an attack, justifying the further reduction of liberties and increase of surveillance activities.

So what to do? The only thing I can perceive is the amputation of the power wielded by our senile and demented states by simply rendering them irrelevant through citizen-led governance. This is already happening, slowly, and the collapse of less entrenched governments which is ongoing all over the planet is reflective of exactly what happens when the populace just stop believing in the elite's power, and instead their own. The wheel turns, and gathers momentum.

aasarava• 12 years ago

Curious: what are some examples of citizen-led governance beginning to render states irrelevant? Likewise, where are you seeing a collapse of less entrenched governments all over the planet?

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

Snowden doesn't hate America he wants it to be better. A lot of his fans just want to see it destroyed, he is not that dumb.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

But on a more serious note. Would you think it would be totally ok if other countries take similar stance towards US companies and persons?

They do. The world is interconnected, and countries do things to give themselves an advantage.

Back the ye olden times, the methods for this kind of stuff were often less subtle. Countries would visit your nation with big battleships. Or they would slap big tariffs on imports, etc. The British and Russian Empires engaged in "the Great Game" throughout the 19th century for dominance of central asia.

Thrymr• 12 years ago

A foreiginer is not a person as defined in the constitution

That is not correct, foreigners are indeed persons under and are subject to the equal protection clause [1] under the 14th amendment of the Constitution, which explicitly refers to "persons" and not only to "citizens".

The whole reason for Guantanamo is that it is outside of US jurisdiction, and it was argued that the constitutional protections do not apply there. It's pretty clear that suspects would have full Constitutional rights on US soil; whether they do in Guantanamo is still being contested (the US gov't holds that they do not).

IANAL, nor a Constitutional scholar, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause

malandrew2• 12 years ago

Exactly whose jurisdiction does Guantanamo fall under if not America?

And why are the laws of that jurisdiction not applied to those people?

Fine Line Seen in U.S. Spying on Companies

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