It's pretty absurd to suggest we would kill people just because we caught a spy agency snooping on us. We've caught and rebuked foreign spy agencies all the time. The usual punishment is covert retaliation (escalating malware attacks, etc.), and the times when it isn't covert (like with the Russia revelations), responses usually involve sanctions and condemnation.

NSA would be doing the American people a disservice if they weren't competing with the rest of the spy agencies out there. It's just a fact of life. We just want them to do it without warrantless mass surveillance of US citizens.

>It was proven that the CIA had knowledge about the attack before it happened...

They didn't. To suggest they did is to allege a massive conspiracy. They received hints it might happen, but intelligence agencies receive tens of thousands to millions of pieces of new information per week, 99.99% of which turns out to be nothing. You can apply this argument to almost every war or attack in history (including Pearl Harbor). Sieving the signal out of the noise isn't easy.

I'm an American but neither a nationalist nor a patriot. I just realize they're doing their job. I also realize and acknowledge Russia wouldn't be doing its job properly if they didn't try to influence the Presidential election.

If you look at "Interview #07 (Washington, DC) by FF4Films on Youtube, Richard Clarke makes this allegation. It's pretty clear the situation is quite different than just saying the warnings were too non-specific to notice.

-/edit- here: https://cpj.org/2007/12/french-journalist-investigated-over-... -edit/-

Then again 9/11 is not a valid excuse as the US has been orders of magnitude worse for decades, had been preparing for such an event but did nothing and even the contrary when it actually happened and then used it to go to war to unrelated countries for unrelated reason (access to oil). So please just stop brandishing 9/11 as a justification for doing more of what the US have been doing all along.

I agree with you. That isn't what I was arguing at all.

Seems like mass suveillance by western agencies is jut a way to cover for their own incompetence. How many terrorist attacks in how many countries over the last few years have we heard that 'the suspect was known to intelligence agencies' and yet they still couldn't stop jack shit.

The whole intelligence apparatus in NATO countries needs reforming.

>They didn't. To suggest they did is to allege a massive conspiracy.

Please be smarter than that, claims of conspiracy to discredit something is just making you look like an uneducated fool.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_intelligence_befo...

> It's pretty absurd to suggest we would kill people just because we caught a spy agency snooping on us.

The US kidnaps, imprison, tortures and kills innocent people. I will not say all the time, but it happens often enough to not be a rogue agent or an isolated case, more like orders and policy.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_by_the...

I'd be terrible shocked if this is not just Hollywood-level paranoia, the kind most people around the world merely laugh at. This idea that countries are at some kind of equal footing with regard to those things, "doing the same" with the 10.000ft gorilla that spends more than 3 times for its military what the next player (China) does -- more than the next 7 players combined.

There are maybe 4-5 countries that even remotely do anything like that on a global scale. Most countries merely track their neighbours's and traditional (regional) enemies.

I'd say just the US, the UK and France (ex big colonial powers that have fucked half the world over), Israel (because it has people everywhere, who, due to the terrible persecutions Jews faced in WWII can be very loyal to the cause of the "homeland" even if its not their actual country of citizenship), and China (because of sheer size and economic/global rise) have any such capacity, intent and power. USSR back in the day too, modern Russia, not so much. France a little, as an ex-colonial power. Germany has its secret service too, but not much to write home about either.

And even of those few, even fewer have the history, military and diplomatic means to pressure and reach of using those things to mess with other countries the world over.

I sincerely doubt that a country could pull out a stuxnet with a couple $100,000 0day and a hundreds of people with computer science diplomas. There's a reason stuxnet was almost instantly pinned on the US and that reason is that apart from maybe China and Russia (who seem to have fun hacking the US and not getting caught or exposed) no other country can match the US.

No one is making that case

This is bizarre to witness.

It's amost like as an American you need to be safe in the perception that the US is #1 always, even in truly terrible things.

No, but doing anything with the data, and being able to get away with doing it, is.

https://qz.com/954265/russian-hacker-pyotr-levashov-arrested...

It's not about being extradited. It's about your country being bombed, economically pressured, embargoed, messed with diplomatically, through your neighbors given preferential treatment and arms, etc.

The kind of not getting away with it I mean involves the impact of the world's #1 military and economy fucking your country over in retribution.

It's not like the US would even feel a pinch if some middle eastern country embargoes its products. Now reverse that, or add even more extreme measures to it (doing to Iraq level measures) and you get the point.

This is trivially incorrect (unless you employ a circular definition).

They are doing this, and yet, no war. So what does that do to your claim?

> If it was Palestine who was spying on US banking systems the US military would be killing left and right until nothing but corpses would remain,

Oh please, you must know nothing about geopolitics to think this is true. I'm 100% certain Palestine spies on Israel as much as they possibly can, and Israel does the same to them.

I doubt Palestine spies on the US, but only because it's not in their interests, not because they are worried about being killed.

> Gathering this information seem to have much more to do with controlling foreign goverments than with preventing terrorism.

And? Is that bad or something? That's what countries do - if they can.

You might wish you lived in a utopia where everyone was super nice to everyone else, and no one took anything not theirs.

But in the real world if people can take power, they will. It would be stupid for any country not to do anything they can to stop or manage that.

> there are lots of countries which have suffered many more terrorist attacks in the last 5 years and don't use it ad an excuse to fuck with everyone else in the planet.

You really believe that the US is the only country that spies?

Allow to offer a single correction

> That's what countries do - if they can.

It's not countries but spying agencies that need to justify their existence now that the cold war is over. Or governments.

But I sincerely doubt that worldwide a national referendum about "should we use our resources and power to spy on other countries and try to control foreign government" would get close to a majority of yes in most countries around the world apart maybe in the US and north korea and maybe a few others. And even for the US I'm not so sure.

I think you're really underestimating how much counties spy on each other. Russia stole nuclear secrets from the US and China was recently implicated trying to get plans for US fighter jets. I think stealing military tech is much closer to an act of war than watching people's finances? How about assassinating people you don't like on a foreign countries soil? Because places like North Korea do that stuff regularly.

I'm just saying that this isn't even close to the worst stuff that's come out and I think your outrage is a bit much

It's also practically less attractive to countries that are not superpower aligned: they have much less experience and resources, and diplomatically have more to lose if things go wrong.

> How about assassinating people you don't like on a foreign countries soil?

The US is famous for being a champion in this category, France under its current president also competes for appearing in the high score table, Israel is known for this too. But the US still wins because on top of the secret assassination programs and drones, contraction mercenaries to do the killing, financing local dissident to do the killings, it also invades countries and makes war which it's pretty much the only one doing, even north korea doesn't do that, maybe because they cannot afford the multi trillions of military spending the US does.

You don't get to call someone out for being better than you at the game. I mean really this is your argument? Everyone does it, but the NSA is so much better only they are somehow immoral but everyone else is ok?

I just cannot wrap my head around that argument. If a spy agency exists, it's job is to spy. Why would anyone be surprised or upset to find out... they did their job?

In addition being orders of magnitude better resourced than other countries' spy agencies, the US intelligence machine don't seem to be politically restrained by the traditional spook moderators of popular support or respect for other countries' sovereignity.

You can think that German spooks don't listen to Trump's phone calls because they have less resources and possibly competence, but that's because the politicians and voters choose to rein them in.

This is a great point. I think it actually says what I meant far better.

The US created and funded these organizations. As a US citizen them doing their jobs (foreign intelligence gathering) is exactly what I expect of them.

I also am vehemently opposed to their vast budgets and power. It would be nice to "reign them in" by vastly reducing their resources, but there doesn't seem to be much political willpower for that. I firmly think that in your example, it's simple resource starvation - not due to lack of willpower or competence to do so.

I think the data sharing (and other similar things) agreements the CIA/NSA uses is absolutely problematic, as it's an obvious end-around the constitution and should have been slapped down hard. Once these details came out the agency should have been shut down.

We're obviously on different ends of the political sphere but I try not to be too judgemental about it because I'm well aware that there's propaganda on all sides.

That said, a lot of US citizens, especially the flavor you find on HN are not big fans of the NSA either.

I continue to find it odd that folks in the EU have some reality distortion mechanism when it comes to what's going on in thier home countires..and yes it's not all that are wired into the 5-Eye's thing, but its most.

Then again cyberspying and cyberwarfare is not the same as traditional spying. In this domain France is a newcomer and has only recently entered the game and is struggling to catch up.

In matter of more traditional spying to me that historically the UK was on top though it is true that France has quite a history of internal political spying and intrusion in other countries but it's mostly in Africa and colonies.

Usually France lags behinds the US, for example it's only a few years after the CIA through in-Q-tel took control and brought back the chip card technology to the US that France played catch-up and created the french equivalent to in-Q-tel (1999), the "Fonds stratégique d'investissement"(2008) and by the time it got created and bought back gemplus in-q-tel had long finished its mission and was selling its shares.

Moreover there's a notion of scale at play, the US is a few steps further if not a couple order of magnitude more into it. And this may have something to do with Eisenhower 1961's warning: we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military– industrial complex.

At the times France was still in the process of rebuilding itself from WW2 and dealing with the 1958 coup d'etat, which may or may not explain why France has been lagging behind the US.

It's not just you. But it's a very select few apparently that understand this.

If the NSA exists, the entire point of it existing is to spy on foreign countries - allied or not.

The only legitimate argument if you're against this is if you feel the NSA and CIA should not exist at all. I will say you are incredibly naive if you say no, but will allow for reasonable people to differ in opinion.

Anything else is simply someone not spending 5 seconds thinking geopolitics and logic through. The point of a spy agency is to spy. Don't pretend to be outraged when they do their damn jobs.

To me as a living being on this planet I strongly think no intelligence agency should exist at all for the simple reason that borders and countries should be abolished so we could all be earthlings sharing a planet. Buuuuut it seems the ones in position of domination such as US and old colonial Europe tend to disagree with this view.

But this personal view does not prevent me from using my brains and senses to observe and having a certain understanding of how a minority of humans in position of power defend their own interest and push their own agenda and try to get every edge they can by whatever mean is available.

The point of a spy agency is not to spy, it is to spy and not get caught, because when caught now it's a whole different game. So given the accumulation of recent leaks I would say that NSA and CIA do not so such a good job. And given the nature of the revelations and what is exposed it seems they go too far past what is acceptable. Compared to how China or Russia hack into the US without getting caught or exposed with a fraction of the US budget this paints a picture of an overspending of budget for arguably poor results for those agencies that not only get exposed but also fail at their mission of protection.

Europe includes 51 independent states. Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are the transcontinental countries, partially located in both Europe and Asia. Armenia and Cyprus politically are considered European countries, though geographically they are located in the West Asia territory.

Also, there are 28 member states in the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden ...

Granted, five eyes is more like fifteen these days, but still, doesn't make it right or just because everyone is doing it we should just tow the line, doff our caps and cry for more. Some of us have been fans of Dickens and Kafka far too long to know that.

[Edit] - Going to try and update this post here because I'm not allowed by HN to post very often currently...

--- snip ---

First of all I don't see any comments here that say that the US are the only country that spies. I mention this since it seems to be a straw man that is stuck on repeat.

Secondly, surveillance done right takes a heck of a lot of resources and infrastructure; and even though all countries and humans partake, some have rather more resources and connections to accomplish these goals than others.

It's kind of like the 1% - there's nothing wrong "technically" with 1% having half the cash (given that it is ultimately reinvested), the problem is abuse of power that comes with it and lack of oversight.

Ultimately, we have seen stories repeatedly regarding US and Western technologies for surveillance, not Palestinian, Iranian or Luxembourgian... and this is another one.

How many is that this week/month/year/decade?

My family has been in and around SIGINT/COMINT for decades so I'm hardly surprised, although it is a bit surprising how comedic it is seeing people comparing the capabilities of the NSA to that of nations with less GDP than Luxembourg.

I think it is good to "Have the conversation", whether it be right or wrong to infiltrate SWIFT et al.

Spying gets a bad rap. When it works correctly everyone is a little better off for it, because it prevents surprises on the part of the people whose mistakes can be most costly.

Although many of NSA's programs rely on "passive" electronic collection, the agency is authorized to accomplish its mission through active clandestine means,among which are physically bugging electronic systems and allegedly engaging in sabotage through subversive software.

Though I cannot pinpoint it on NSA, I would say stuxnet is a good example of sabotage and probably involves the NSA.

As a European citizen how did you feel about Europe seizing any deposits over €100k from Cyprus' second largest bank when it decided it had debts that needed collecting? And then suggesting that this should be a 'model for future bailouts?'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/25/cyprus-bailout...

see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financ...

But now let's provide some context here, the EU had to bailout Cyprus as a consequence of the US subprime mortgage crisis. So the EU had to clean up the mess made by the US.

Though I do agree there are some rotten things on the financial side of the EU, mainly the IMF and the ECB but also that countries have to pay for the private debt of banks. But this is not so different from the rest of the world and other central banks. Though quite scaled down it's not so far from the 700 billion bailout of banks in the US and the ECB and other central banks and federal reserve buying 2.5 trillion of government debt and bank asset the largest such move ever while EU and US government were injecting 1.5 trillion in their major banks.

Whether you call it a "one-time levy" or the assets being seized is splitting hairs. The result is the same. Given that the money had already been taken, it would be hard to apply the levy more than once.

> Most of this money belonged to foreigner using cyprus as a tax haven.

This is just a smear against depositors. They had their money in a Cypriot bank account and had a reasonable expectation that it would stay there. Their intent for moving the money into Cyprus is irrelevant and certainly doesn't give anyone the right to arbitrarily seize assets.

> Those who lost 3 Millions in the process were given a 7 millions discount on buying the Cypriot citizenship.

How generous. This is like buying a faulty good and being given store credit for the same store as compensation.

So in one way the customers outcome did not really change from a real bankruptcy, while reducing the risk of crashing the entire bank system in Cyprus, possibly EU and in that case the world.

The sum is not extraordinarily high though so I suspect that quite a few rather ordinary people saw their retirement savings evaporate.

I also suspect that the bank have been paying dividends to it's shareholders for many years, so it would have been nice to let them bail the bank in one way or another instead of ordinary people - but I doubt that it's possible to do that legally after the fact. The best you can do is to step in and buy the bank for nothing - but that won't remove the debts.

I suppose that it would be possible to write laws that make the banks shareholders be responsible for any debts somehow, just like some other types of incorporations - and why not? Owning a bank seems to be pretty risk-free if you can just use your customers money to bail yourself out...

maybe not as the bank ceo later admitted that the bank had probably been insolvent as early as 2008, even before cyprus entered the eurozone.

From the perspective of most Americans, the IC are loyal soldiers who brought nearly the whole globe under American control at a price below that of our latest fighter plane. Total information warfare superiority. The new nuclear dominance.

Now, you (and I) might find that unsavory, but for people who are fans of real politik, it wasn't even a question. If anything, the IC should've done more to neutralize Chinese and Russian capabilities.

I would argue the real politik view is simplistic, but yours is also naive. You're simply wrong about the US going to war if others did the same -- they do and we don't. We retaliate in cyberspace, dissident funding, etc. That state of continuous covert warfare is normal, everyone does it, and there are many reasons the US wants to dominate at it.

The only criticism I have of the IC is failing to advance our defensive capabilities, not for keeping us at the forefront of the cyber battlefield.

Nations have always jockeyed for economic advantage, harmed the cohesion of rival nations (eg, psyops and funding dissidents), and advanced groups in those nations ideologically sympathetic to themselves. Sometimes it spills in to small scale conflicts or actual revolutions or wars.

"Why do you bribe? It's not because your companies are inherently more corrupt. Nor is it because you are inherently less talented at technology. It is because your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith. In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances. You'd rather not go through the hassle of moving toward less dirigisme. It's so much easier to keep paying bribes."

Boy, have I got disappointing news for you. I mean, I don't know what to tell you other than what you'd like and how the world works are very much disconnected. IOW, "they all do that, sir." If we pitched bombs at each other every time we caught a spy in our home country, we'd do nothing else.

Espionage is an organizational reality. To pretend you don't have to care about such things is like being a tourist that wanders into the bad part of town flashing money everywhere and then expresses astonishment if their pocket is picked or they are otherwise taken advantage of.

I mean come on, U.S. decries chemical weapons use in Syria, the official spokesperson makes a Godwin statement about how even a certain bad guy in history didn't drop them out of airplanes on civilian population, and yet umm hello?? Napalm?? Courtesy of Dow Chemical company...

And as for bad things going on in the world, it's approximately a genocide (that it's in the not so gray area, means we've hit the "never again" line in my view) what's going on in Yemen. We looked the other way from genocides in Sudan, and Congo, and Timor. Only so many resources for things like that when there are only so many resources available to recoup the cost. That's the reality.

It's to a great degree U.S.A. Inc. and about the best you can hope for is to not repeat the vicious events of the past. The last Korean war, where no one was really ready for it, wanted it (except Kim), and weren't fighting with today's Weapons Inc. let alone nukes, yet it still got more than a million people killed.

So yes there's a lot about the U.S. to be irritated at, but the world is complex and you have to judge each case.

What about Europol?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europol-says-data-sharing-on-po...

Iran hacked a US drone in 2011 and we didn't go to war with them over it.

But to oppose the idea of meddling in the international banking system is to oppose the very idea of an intelligence service.

Such meddling is the core mandate of organized intelligence. It's exactly what all intelligence services have done since time immemorial. Following the money is the oldest trick in the book.

But don't think it's only the US, this is a trend we can notice in Europe too.

As if the conditions of life were evolving towards possible uprising due to say growing poverty, diminishing buying power, increase in food insecurity, increasing gap between the rich and poor, unsustainable economy closing on its limits, etc. and the governments taking precautionary measures to protect themselves.

Spying on merkels phone annoyed me, but this is not the same. Also it was proven the CIA had knowledge of 911. Do you have a source of that?