NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)

Re:NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden docum... by MichaelGG on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @06:43AM (#11992673)

Is there any reason to believe that no European countries do this kind of thing? Relative to national budgets, this kind of stuff can't cost that much. Dunno where the EU is on their EU-level army right now, but it'd stand to reason that a EU-security org would do exactly this kind of stuff. The UK certainly has no qualms about it.

Even the US's allies will try stunts as bad as false flag bombings[1]. So it's not like they can only monitor non-allies. So they can't shut down spying, and perhaps it just becomes a never-ending escalation of power then. Might as well grab all data. I don't like it, but I can understand how they might arrive at that position.

Probably the only hope is to outlaw this worldwide, perhaps in some human rights kind of thing, then actually apply punishment for those caught. That seems unlikely to really work though. Even now, we have countries that steal nuclear tech and don't get punished - few will view spying as worse than that.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

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Re:NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden docum... by Semiapies on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @11:13AM (#11994383)

Quite the opposite - GCHQ in the UK is just one agency that, from available evidence, is very probably doing the same things against its own people and those of the rest of Europe.

The American outage at the NSA is entirely correct. The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark.

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Re:NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden docum... by knz on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @01:55PM (#11995914)

> The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark

If I recall correctly, there was much in the media around the time of the Arab Spring about UK and German companies selling the tools of mass surveillance to governments that were less than friendly to their residents. It's easier to point a finger at the US than to acknowledge that the major European governments are usually deeply involved in the same activities and equally responsible for much of the conflict we see in the world today via the legacy of colonialism and actions such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

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Re:NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden docum... by Semiapies on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @02:03PM (#11996005)

Yep. Of course, the US government has been involved in helping friendly tyrannical regimes monitor their citizens. It's not that anyone's hands are clean, it's that castigating a scapegoat is the comfortable alternative to doing anything about these issues.

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