Born and bred.
And, at this point, I can't in good faith say that I would blame you.
I think it's pretty safe to say that getting rid of a President is no longer enough. My sense is that the people who make these policies really are "Beyond Elections". They are constants in our government. And appear unassailable.
I doubt very much that we, the American People, could even IDENTIFY the people setting or implementing these policies, much less rid ourselves of them.
I think in the present environment, it wouldn't be imprudent for other nations to look to their own interests.
If he wants to claim he wasn't aware, OK. But he is now and it's his responsibility to fix it. Again, that's the nature of the job.
If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. It would require the exercise of political will, but it absolutely could be done.
The problem, actually, is right here, when people start making excuses for our leaders.
Stop.
Hold them responsible. Responsibility is why the job even exists.
My assertion is that trust has broken down. And therefore the ability to validate has broken down.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs...
How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?
How would I, in good faith, tell a foreign person, or even another citizen, that their communications are no longer being monitored?
I don't believe we could give such assurances.
So even in the BEST case where the President and the politicians eliminate the programs... we would not be able to assert in good faith that there is no longer any communications monitoring going on.
The flaw in your idea, is that it is predicated on trust in the system.
Obama is complicit with this system and quite happy for it continue.
How would you know? The answer is, essentially, "Trust".
You would trust the politicians when they say that the funding had been cut. The politicians, in their turn, would trust the functionaries when they say no funding was going into communications monitoring.
What if you don't trust the politicians or the functionaries... do you have any method of validating the elimination of the funding not based on "Trust"?
"...you can't redirect that level of funding from other projects without someone noticing..."
These are, at their core, intelligence agencies. "Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job. It's what they are trained to do, among other things. I think it's a little optimistic to believe that they would not use that skill to accomplish their mission if they found it necessary.
Gov accounts are prepared and audited by civil servants. At a certain point a conspiracy is too large to be controlled, and I'd suggest managing to divert hundreds of millions from other budgets is a conspiracy just too large to hide from an entire people when gov. accounts are public. I'm all for official oversight as well by politicians, but politicians could easily cut funding for this sort of activity if they wanted to.
Obama certainly doesn't want to, for whatever reason, as evidenced by the his disingenuous lies about this topic to the public (no one is reading your email) and the way he left Clapper in power after lying to congress and proposed fig-leaf reform, not real reform.
"Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job
No, it's not. Their job is spying on enemies of their country, nothing more, nothing less. In peacetime that should be a pretty simple job of spying on a few terrorist networks using targeted attacks.
> How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?
How would the President validate that?
Just like Guantanamo Bay, right?
If Obama believed these programs (and Guantanamo Bay) were "wrong" with the same conviction Snowden believes – he'd do what it takes to shut them down, with the same career/livelihood risks that Snowden accepted.
It's precisely the sort of moral compromises that Obama has made to allow Guantanamo Bay to stay operating, that have allowed the NSA to grab so much extraordinary power amd avoid any sort of reasonable oversight.
I understand that "just closing Guantanamo" isn't as simple as it sounds - but letting things like that slide because they're complicated, and doing so for 40 odd years, has allowed a situation where people like Clipper think lying to congress is his job. Where intelligent people somehow perform the sort of mental gymnastics that allow them to claim collecting and storing personal communication isn't "collection" unless a person listens to the collected information.
If the president wanted it to stop - he'd stop it. If he's not stopping it, it's because there's something he considers more important.
He _might_ even be right. There might be a real and provable public interest reason why Guantanamo and the NSA have to be the way they are. There's no obvious or easy explanation along those lines – and it's super easy to cynically attribute it all to personal(and corporate) wealth and power motives which _are_ pretty obvious.
Right now, it's continued operation relies entirely on state secrecy laws. If Obama or some future president realizes that it is that one provision that is protecting illegal actions, he can promise to pardon anyone of the laws they have to break to expose those illegal actions.
One of the biggest problems with our whistleblowing laws is that if you have to break laws to make things right, you may be seen as righteous, but you'll still be prosecuted for the laws you had to break to accomplish that. We're still a nation of laws and the only laws that can overturn that is the constitutional power to pardon. The only crime the president cannot pardon is impeachment. Any individual that isn't in an impeachable position could expose wrongdoing if the president had their back.
I mean you can be cynical or you can be realist. The cynical explanation would probably be that the president/congress don't really control a few organisations like the NSA.
The realist reason would be that the NSA can point to a couple dozen cases where their surveillance saved thousands of lives, American or otherwise. That they have very, very convincing arguments that these policies are worth it.
Also I am a bit fatalist about privacy expectations. Have you seen how "working class" people live in Hong Kong and how much privacy they effectively have ?
That's the future for the vast majority of humans on this planet, unless growth stops. If growth does stop, death and famine is the future for the majority of humans.
Enjoy it while it lasts, or collect enough money that you can realistically enjoy privacy and space until you die. For the next generation, it's a lost cause.
Government intrusion of privacy is (should be) the least of anyone's worries.
At the end of the day, the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them and be believed by all the non-believers. Alternatively, he could choose to promise exercise his pardon rights for people who want to expose wrongdoing but are afraid. He had the power to protect people from jail. That's the power to allow people to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation (unless we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that someone can make the whistleblower just disappear.)
If there were such hidden powers as to pull strings or coerce the president, I am not sure why we should believe that they didn't have a hand in his rise to power.
(1) the political work of defining the word "enemy". If you spend your time in your first 100 days of office trying to get the country to rally behind defining the "enemy" as actors within the US who are actively undermining the US Constitution and actors who are acting corruptly.
and
(2) the commander in chief work of defining the goals of the US military. The president is the commander in chief. If he decides that the primary goal of the US armed forces is to root out corruption and problems in the armed forces that are undermining the US Constitution in the interest of private interests.
By doing exactly both of those things and getting support for it, he has absolved himself of liability under the Espionage Act AFAICT. The reasoning here is that he's now defining the operation and success of the armed forces to be in line in a way that any information conveyed is no longer going to interfere with the armed forces of the United States. Furthermore, redefining the enemy means that he has also made sure that the information does not promote the success of the enemies of the US.
An American president with a moral backbone?
Give me a break.
That's like expecting it to rain candyfloss.
The presidency is a hollow man, a figurehead - it's all just a show to make you think you have a democracy. The tail wags the dog, and entrenched non-elected interests run the show, through corruption, lobbying (corruption), and special interests (corruption).
Just so we're clear - how exactly does the average citizen "hold them responsible", other than our legal right to simply not vote for them next time?
It's so easy to say we should "hold them responsible" - but so incredibly vague to do.
So when a President comes into office, they probably make it known that they have these N pieces of information, and well, they are going to do what they want unless said President wants those N pieces of information public.
Thats the really really scary realization here. Shadow government obtained through perfect intelligence with no checks and bounds.
Congress, perhaps.
Yes, these people are our fellow citizens. There is no conspiracy, merely functioning democracy.
That last phrase really spooks me. "Look to their own interests". Saddens me a bit, too.
Also, while I think this sort of spying is terrible I'm even more sickened by things like the fact that we keep killing innocent people with drones and such and justifying it as acceptable collateral damage when nobody will tell us who the real targets were, why they had to be killed, and why that was so important that accidentally killing a few hundreds or thousands of innocents while pursuing them is reasonable.
At this point we're so far down the slippery slope that the rest of you might as well cut us off if you can. I'm unconvinced we are going to right this ship anytime soon, we as the group of citizens whose net worth isn't in the billions have lost control of the bus.
The problem is when the medias, the public and politicians are reassuring and reassured by that "But it's only for non-citizens".
To a foreigner like me, what I see is that US citizens, medias and politicians are just fine with my fundamental rights being violated. That is as long as I'm not a US citizen... a clear statement that to those eyes, the problem is of less magnitude because I'm not as important a being as US citizens are.
Do I have less a right to privacy because I am not a US citizen? Is it more ethical or moral?
I'm not talking of my legal rights on a US soil; because legality has not much to do with morality. Really, in this argument I don't care about the NSA's goal, or all the spy agencies' goals. I care about how the public reacts; nobody cared as long as it was only about violating the privacy of those without US citizenship. Second class humans.
That's incredibly insulting. It makes me angry.
And worst of all, I feel like I can't even express myself on that topic without fearing repercussion. When one day at the airport, I'll cross the custom lanes and some automated filter will have flagged me as a national security threat because I once posted outrage about how they treat non-citizens.
Now two countries may enter into an agreement not to surveil each other or their citizens. That is completely a different issue. But if you are not a US citizen or don't have a visa than the Constitution affords you no protections.
Yeah right.
In general, these are laws against things like war crimes. The UK (Brit here) also extends some child protection, fraud and bribery laws to cover acts worldwide, the former intended to be used to prosecute sex tourists who are unlikely to be prosecuted where they committed the offences.
I'm unsure whether any of these laws have actually specifically protected you, but the reason for their introduction is to afford people in other countries similar protection from UK-based criminals to the protections people enjoy in the UK.
It seems that Universal Jurisdiction allows people to prosecute me, but doesn't specifically protect me.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) [1] contains privacy right in article 12 [3]. The UDHR is not legally binding but the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) [4] is and contains the privacy rights, too. The USA signed and ratified the ICCPR. Maybe someone should just sue all the spying nations.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643253
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...
[3] http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civil...
Do you really believe that this is the modus operandi only of the United States?
Since, say, France has _at least_ the same position with regard to the rest of the world vs. French citizens, are you angry at France too? Will you cut all french, german, russian, and bahranian cables as well, so as to maintain a consistent position?
Your fallacy is: Tu quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
But the US is doing something unique. No other country has the global reach and the sheer military budget that the US has. It's debatable that other countries are "above" it in moral terms, but the US certainly has taken it to a whole new level.
Edit: I also don't see where "But he's building his whole argument on ... US was deserving of special disdain". Despite the larger scope of the US's transgressions, you are saying "but they do it too". I think that the Tu Quoque fallacy absolutely applies. Nowhere is it said that other countries would not be worthy of equal disdain under equal circumstances. And if it were to be said, it would be wrong.
It's really not, since many of the releases of information about what the US is doing -- including the current one -- have other countries also neck deep in it. I mean, the actual spying in the article that this comment thread is attached to is done by the UK's GCHQ, NSA is just a consumer of the data.
Besides that the US are doing (almost) unique things among to most developed countries, for example I can not even imagine any EU country doing something like Guantanamo or having the death penalty. To make it clear again, I am not primarily angry because of the spying on its own but the sentiment as to human rights beyond it.
By the information that has publicly come out about the "black sites" operated by the US and its allies -- from which prisoners were later transferred to the not-secret facility at Guatanamo where at least a show of adhering to international humanitarian law was made, several EU countries were actively involved in the system, and the UK was not only involved but actually operated prisons in the system.
So, yeah, EU countries have, contemporarily with Guantanamo, done things as much like the worst aspects of the Guantanamo detention as is possible.
Skimming Wikipedia's most definitely totally truthy article on the subject [1] (actually, it has a lot of citations, so it should be easy to verify), the UK's only alleged black site was the US base on Diego Garcia, which is "UK", but not "basement in London".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_sit...
Edit (T+18 minutes): Wikipedia lists numerous other European countries as possibly being involved. Information is really sketchy -- they are called "black" sites. Another question is which officials in the lucky host countries even knew about it.
On the other hand, USA had earlier openly claimed in essence something like 'why we'd never, we don't spy on americans (Clapper), we don't record all communications, we're for the open net and transparency, we need to safeguard the internet from China and censorship, and we have 4th/1st amendment, so we're different'.
Everybody else who did that, didn't do it while hypocritically claiming that they're different - so I believe that US really did something unique in this particular instance and deserves special extra disdain for that.
The position of others is that doing all those things is okay, so they do it without moral problems. However, USA had claimed (and apparently still claims, at least for US-citizens) that it's not okay.... and do it anyway.
Some countries would love to spy on the U.S. It's true. But how many actually successfully do? And at what scale?
I have been to France once and while the overall experience was very good there was one bad experience. We had a problem with the motorway toll and stopped to ask a woman working at a toll station. She was obviously able to understand my English question but did not even try to answer in English and I did not understand a single word. This was not bad enough to make me angry but it was very impolite and I have no understanding for this, not even given the history of the relationship between France and Germany. I knew that I had to expect things like this, but it was a single exception and I am happy about this.
So no doubt that there are many people in many countries thinking of their own people as superior, but this is not acceptable in any case.
I think it's entirely justifiable to give the NSA more latitude abroad than domestically. To turn reverse the scenario, as an American, I would far rather have the French or the Germans conducting surveillance on the United States than the US government. People keep comparisons to the Stasi, too often they forget what the Stasi's purpose was: to suppress political opposition. Here in the US, surveillance was used for the same purpose, on a much smaller scale, during the J. Edgar Hoover era. Political opponents of the government were spied on with the intent of blackmail or embarassment.
That's the whole reason why government surveillance is so scary. It puts so much information in the hands of an organization with such far-reaching powers in law enforcement and otherwise that the combination is prone to abuse. When the US spies on foreign citizens or vice versa, the potential for abuse is much less. The NSA has neither the interest nor the ability to harass political opponents in Germany and France, and the same goes in the other direction.
That's however not how the Stasi thought of itself though, or how it was presented in propaganda.
http://andberlin.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/propaganda-in-t...
"For our security"
US intelligence agencies do keep tabs on stuff like Occupy, and of course it's officially "to prevent terrorism".. I for one don't buy it.
Omniscience without omnipotence is tolerable, as is omnipotence without omniscience. The real trouble happens when you've got both.
It would generally be a dereliction of duty for the NSA/CIA to not spy on non-Americans. The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Now, if you want to make the argument that national borders should dissolve and that spying on foreigners should become history - or something like that - that's up to you. But spy agency gonna spy.
You're on the public Internet, you're not "within national borders", and everybody can hear what you just said. Say it to my face. Tell me how you feel that it's just fine to violate my privacy, that it's apparently perfectly fine to pry into my life, hack my phone networks, to gather any possible information there is to know about me and all those around me, just because I'm not a US citizen, and you are. You are better and are entitled to these protections, I don't.
> The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Not every country believes that their citizens are somehow exceptional and non-citizens can be treated however they please.
For example, if I was doing important security research, I would fully expect to have the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc, looking into my work.
I don't believe the US is exceptional. I expect other countries to have interests in US citizens and to carry out their interests to advance their national interest.
This expectation is entirely separate from my opinion of the morality of said act.
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Otherwise, how would you define "liberty" or "security of person"? You're free to do what you want as long as it doesn't encroach on the freedom of others, and if being spied on makes you not want to do some things you ought to be able to do, then that's just tough luck, but not a restriction on liberty or your security? I'd say freedom of action is worthless without freedom of thought and speech, and that you can't pick and choose human rights, or rank them.
A person has liberty if he or she is free to do anything lawful within a just framework of laws that is fairly enforced. Everything you do has consequences, however. Your freedom is thus freedom from having government stopping you from doing things that are within the law, but not freedom from consequences. (Note that article 12, as written, is qualified by the term "arbitrary". According to the right as written, you or I can be interfered with if the reasons for doing so are non-arbitrary.) Absolute privacy rights increase freedom from non-legal consequences -- this is a good thing when your social context is horrible (shun him! he's smoking mj!), but more often than not, removing social consequences is a net loss.
Privacy has a nice "liberty narrative" which makes it easy to defend (as you are doing) in the abstract, because it bears a close relationship to freedom (you are, without a doubt, "more free" if you have more control over what you choose to disclose). In practice, people behave best (on balance) when transparency is maximized, and they behave worst when they have absolute privacy and anonymity (see Tor, 4chan, freenet, etc.). In many game-theoretic contexts, "private information" is what leads to sub-optimal overall outcomes that tend to strongly preference the already advantaged.
Privacy rights, therefore, have much to do with the tension between the goals of the many and the goals of the few. The real problems lie not with privacy per se, but with asymmetries in its distribution.
Certain rights certainly can. But not human rights. That's the whole point.
(btw "liberty to shoot GP" and "ability to buy guns" are not in fact human rights. GP's "right to life", however, is.)
No, the purpose of intelligence agencies is to gather and analyze information that might be of use to the nations leaders. Spying -- whether on citizens or foreigners, and whether on people located within the country or abroad -- is often a mechanism used to gather information (though collection from public sources is also a common mechanism.)
And there's nothing really special about the foreign vs. domestic (whether by location or citizenship) axis for "intelligence agencies", generally -- while sometimes the agencies that do domestic and foreign intelligence gathering are separate, that's not always the case, and certainly not a defining feature of "intelligence agencies."
First let me say that I agree with your sentiment -- it's hypocritical for people in the US to be upset about the US government's spying on its own citizens, but not upset when the people are in other countries.
Now for a dose of realism -- every single country out there that has a foreign policy and interests abroad behaves in this way to one extent or another. The question is not whether but how much. I'm receptive to ideas for something to replace this general approach to intelligence gathering. But let's not apply a double-standard in the opposite direction and say that only when the US does the spying is it a problem.
I'm German, and I can't remember ever having heard such a distinction - that some things are okay when done to foreigners, but not when done to Germans - apart from neo-nazis.
Sure, who knows what the BND is up to. But "behaving this way" also includes rhetoric that is not just considered acceptable in polite company, but even uttered by state officials... and as I said, I can't recall a single example, so maybe enlighten me? Or are you just assuming?
Just a reminder:
"In an interview with Der Spiegel , Snowden claimed that the NSA provided German intelligence, with analysis tools to help the organisation monitor data flowing through Germany. “The NSA people are in bed together with the Germans,"” he told the magazine.
He added that the NSA’s foreign affairs directorate, which is responsible for relations with other countries, had set up a system whereby political leaders “could be insulated” from the backlash if spying became public and helped to play down how grievously they were “violating global privacy.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nsa-in-bed-wi...
Also, scale still matters. Killing a person or slapping them in the face are both violence, but there is still a difference, otherwise we could just reduce all to "physical and chemical processess going on" and completely stop thinking. I don't believe for a second that Germany, or even France, Italy or Russia (which I consider rather right wing) have programs to scoop up traffic from Google's internal network in place. Maybe they would like to, but they can't pull it off. And while I wouldn't bet on it, I wouldn't be surprised if China doesn't either.
German soldiers abroad (say, in Afghanistan). Do they respect foreign law ? Of course not. Non-EU residents on German soil are subject to summary arrest and deportation (it's more complex than this, I know, but as summaries go you could do worse) German social security treats citizens, residents and illegal aliens vastly differently German domestic wiretapping laws are basically that the executive gets to spy on anyone on German soil without judicial oversight AND outside of Germany. While it's of course true that this is not a distinction, it's actually worse than US law. German wiretapping laws do not let companies evaluate the legality of a wiretapping order before complying, unlike US law. Telecom companies operating in Germany are forced to provide the government with an automated system that can wiretap anyone on their networks without even their technicians knowing about who/what is being wiretapped. Needless to say, these systems are in constant use, and have been expanded. Small detail : in the US, the government will at least pay companies appropriately (handsomely even) for costs related to wiretapping. In Germany (like most of the EU) companies have to comply, fund it themselves, and can't even look at the orders. Non-compliance with this is punishable under criminal law (meaning the CEO, techies, field techs, or anyone in the telco can be arrested if the company refuses to comply) The BND does not just have the right to spy on anyone, but it can summarily arrest anyone, intervene in any investigation without question (so they could, for example, kill someone, then take over the investigation, no questions asked). They can confiscate any goods, on German soil and outside of it, without so much as an explanation. They aren't even the only government department in Germany that has this power, the tax office has the same power.
As an EU citizen myself, I find the EU's "anger" at US spying somewhere between moronic and hypocritical. Especially France's is beyond all comparison, knowing that they just physically arrested someone for refusing to store all records of his customer's transmissions for a full year, entirely on his own dime. Furthermore, both France and Germany have used the information they force ISPs to spy for them to enforce copyrights. Neither country has any qualms about sending all citizen's internet traffic to a private organisation that is not answerable to the government at all, and is not even attempting to enforce criminal law (the NSA is at least doing this to prevent real crime, like 9/11. Germany and France are transmitting everyone's internet usage to an organisation so it could sue them for copyright infringement in an automated fashion. There's just no comparison)
Note that furthermore, in the EU, these practices have been voted in by a non-democratically elected government (the EU commission). So the EU can't even claim that parliament approved these measures, because they didn't (barring a few exceptions). This has been imposed by people negotiating "international treaties".
Can anyone please explain to me why, if there's outrage about the NSA, why isn't there 10x the outrage about EU practices ? The way it is makes absolutely no sense.
And where are the statements saying other countries shouldn't deport illegal aliens? My post asked about exceptionalism, openly stated, did it not?
> German domestic wiretapping laws are basically that the executive gets to spy on anyone on German soil without judicial oversight AND outside of Germany [..] The BND does not just have the right to spy on anyone, but it can summarily arrest anyone, intervene in any investigation without question (so they could, for example, kill someone, then take over the investigation, no questions asked). [..] Germany and France are transmitting everyone's internet usage to an organisation so it could sue them for copyright infringement in an automated fashion.
Uhhhh.... sources for all that please.
> Can anyone please explain to me why, if there's outrage about the NSA, why isn't there 10x the outrage about EU practices ?
Maybe the lack of abducting people and torturing them, or killing them with drones has something to do with it? And still, there isn't a month without demonstrations against some of the stuff you mentioned, like Vorratsdatenspeicherung. Other stuff is either flat out wrong or widely unknown, your posting of sources will decide that..
http://strasbourgobservers.com/2010/07/06/389/
Given this article, I think it's safe to say that people get tortured to varying degrees by the German police on a weekly basis at least. Like the US, in the vast majority of cases the police do this for very good reasons.
As for a basic introduction to German wiretapping law:
https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/germany/ii-surv...
Also you act surprised ? Why ? These laws are the "roughly" same across the EU. Generally a certain degree of violence, even what might be considered torture (but not outright "real" torture. Violence against an arrested person, ie. hitting them or so, even things like denying food/drink when it's not life threatening) is allowed in the EU to protect the institutions (parliament, government, ...) (but only for "existential" threats that threaten the institution itself, not just, say, the building), and to protect the lives of others.
- "the executive gets to spy on anyone on German soil without judicial oversight"
- "The BND does not just have the right to spy on anyone, but it can summarily arrest anyone, intervene in any investigation without question"
- "Germany and France are transmitting everyone's internet usage to an organisation so it could sue them for copyright infringement in an automated fashion"
?
from the link you posted, emphasis mine:
> "According to a 2003 survey, 75 percent of conducted telephone wiretapping actions violated the law. In most instances of wiretapping, law enforcement agencies did not inform the subjects after the eavesdropping took place, contrary to what is stipulated by the law. [..] In April 1998, Article 13 of the Constitution (Grundgesetz) that provides for the inviolability of private homes was amended in order to allow police authorities to place bugging devices in private homes (provided there is a court order)."
I wasn't "acting surprised", I was asking for sources, and now I kind of have to call bullshit on a lot of the stuff you said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Germany#Torture
Yup, bullshit. And at any rate nowhere near comparable to the US, where people are afraid to close Gitmo because the people were so badly mistreated they might turn on them. So why would I be "10 times more" outraged? Maybe because I, as a German/EU citizen, am more directly responsible for the stuff going on here - granted. But otherwise? Get real. Have you even READ the first article you posted?
> "The Court stated that “[t]orture, inhuman or degrading treatment cannot be inflicted even in circumstances where the life of an individual is at risk” and –under its assessment of the alleged violation of art. 6 – “[b]eing absolute, there can be no weighing of other interests against article 3."
How does this make you conclude that "people get tortured to varying degrees by the German police on a weekly basis at least"? That's just saying stuff, in the hope some of it will stick. Boo.
So you should only compare German police using torture Police, FBI or DEA or some department like that using torture inside America on American citizens. There I think it's much, much less clear that the rate of torture in Germany is higher or lower than the rate used by American law enforcement agencies. I'd guess the rate in Germany would be lower, but not that much, simply because America has many more regions where heavy violence against the police happens very often.
As for what the BND does, is it really so hard to find ? http://www.globalresearch.ca/germanys-intelligence-service-b... http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/04/german-... ...
(note that information they forwarded, they obviously collected first, so yes, it does in fact prove the BND spies on all German citizens as part of normal operations)
Simply not true. There may be a few large countries trying, but at nowhere near the global capability to lay bare all details of just about any person on the planet, like the US. And that's just comparing to the larger countries. The UK hacked Belgian telecoms, you're going to have to show me some proof that the reverse is also true. That's ridiculous.
The consequences of the Netherlands "behaving in this way to one extent or another" towards the US--yes, even a little bit--would not be very positive for the Netherlands. We do, however, "have a foreign policy and interests abroad".
The fact that the US believes it can get away with this sort of behaviour (and we'll have to see about that), doesn't somehow make it right or justify it in any way.
As for the US being allowed to get away with it, I do not have any simple prescriptions to offer the US government for replacing it with something better, although I too wish it did not engage in it.
I'm as appalled as the next guy about the NSA's actions, but let's keep this in perspective here: many countries have 2 intelligence agencies, one for external and one for internal. Do "MI-5" and "MI-6" ring a bell?
Plus, in this particular instance: the GCHQ (British version of NSA) is the one passing along the wiretapped stuff to the NSA.
> We are not spying at US citizens, only at this other guys across the ocean.
In this instance, it's the guys across the ocean who are spying, and passing on the results to us.
When a group puts a draws a line of Us and them, they are making enemies. With this approach the NSA is declaring the USA as the enemies of all those being spied upon. The more similar news spread the more this mentality that "The USA is the enemy" will spread and its only a matter of time that more countries turn a blind eye or even facilitate terrorist actions against the USA.
If this is really what you believe, then start pushing for legislation to include non-US citizens as first-class humans.
People like Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, that had the courage to cancel state visits and declaring outraged by the state-sponsored spying supported by the Obama Administration.
We need many more governments standing up and threatening to cut commercial ties with the US, until we can see some traction.
Sadly, I'm not very hopeful that this will happen, given the commercial interests involved. Mexico had a slow initial response, but it's starting to demonstrate some reaction. Germany and France are my hopes [1].
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/22/mexico-presiden...
And everybody else must be really pissed off with the latest documents. Here's the punch line:
> Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.
[1] http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/10/how-nsa-targeted-ch...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...
As both a US citizen and world citizen (how can we who've grown up in the Internet age not feel a little more worldly?) it feels violating to know this has been going on, and that it likely effects me.
On the other side, it has forever been, and continues to be, in a physical-boundary-defined nation's best interest to know things about every other nation, in order to compete within international relationships. I would be surprised to find a major international player that didn't have a clandestine agent group or groups like the CIA or NSA.
It's a very tough and frustrating topic. Spying always feels disrespectful and arrogant to the spied upon. But should we implicitly assert that this isn't done by the rest[0] of the intelligence agencies around the world?
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
I'm not defending the NSA, but let's not be naive here. One function of the government is to protect its people from all threats, foreign and domestic. So yes, citizens of other countries are second class, and well they should be from some perspectives. Again though, there are lines, and some have been crossed.
Whoah, there. Your grievances are well-placed. But keep in mind that it's a certain subset of agencies in the US government that are responsible for the problems you're upset about, not all US citizens. As for fixing things, the government has become literally unmanageable, and things are a mess right now.
That said, instituting similar sanctions against the US should absolutely be the number one thing the rest of the world responds with! It might not be every US citizen that is culpable, but they are your representative government, and your responsibility. (I assume you're from the US, but I use "your" as a collective for anyone from the US that may be reading this).
Do you think the people might take a legitimate stand if business dealings, travel, and exports were banned to the United States? Do you think US citizens would go absolutely fucking crazy?
> As for fixing things, the government has become literally unmanageable, and things are a mess right now
Well untangle yourselves and then we'll talk.
Unfortunately, the US has so much power around the world that most countries are literally unable to respond. They are the new Rome, using political and economic power rather than pure force (but use force where necessary) to control the world. It's disgusting.
Inconceivable!
you left out a big part of the statement quoted. The tactics you listed would be commendable in comparison to pure force if the end goal wasn't world domination.
Since the end goal IS world domination, however, then no means is suitable from a humanity perspective.
I do believe this is very true:
> All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing - Burke, Edmund
So, yes, I'd say most Americans are responsible for this yes, by doing nothing to stop it. So don't blame the rest of the world if they start "hating Americans" or "hating America". You are part of it, you are responsible to change the America you want the world to love, too.
Blaming only the government, that you probably voted in, too, does not cut it.
Hating a group of people is a completely irrational, unconstructive approach to solving a problem. If one has anger about something, they shouldn't lash out at group of people.
If people want Americans to change something on their behalf, for their benefit, it needs to be from a standpoint of respect. They can start by asking nicely.
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people that were oppressing them." -- Assata Shakur
Even though we could argue about wether this stuff consititutes "oppression", I think the point still applies, sadly.
I think there are one or two examples in recent history. The LGBT movement has made a great deal of ground recently by appealing to peoples' sensibilities.
Now, in more extreme cases you aren't going to talk the oppressors out of anything. I doubt anybody has ever stopped a genocide with rational argument and appeal to the murderers' sensibilities.
In theory, the American people are the only ones with the power to solve this problem. This responsibility is a burden. Before going to bat, I would rather encounter friendly encouragement than smug contempt.
> They can start by asking nicely.
"Can you please kindly, stop perpetuating your morally bankrupt spy-state?"
Gosh. That achieved a lot.
I'm talking about hating Americans. It's irrational, unconstructive, and not a novel thing to do. It's certainly not going to accomplish anything against NSA spycraft.
If anything is going to change about NSA spycraft, especially on behalf of the rights of foreign nationals, having the rest of the world consider all Americans enemies is going to be counterproductive.
That's b/c most Americans are caught up in an endless cycle of work-aholism to either support their consumer-addiction and/or to climb out of debt and just pay the bills.
Related to that, I know this is somewhat menial, but I have found the site http://popvox.com to be fairly useful in this regard. Create an account, and you can track all current legislation -- a couple clicks will fire a stock letter to your rep either supporting or protesting a bill -- or you can edit the letter with a custom message (better). It is certainly a step above doing nothing and makes the task much easier.
The vast majority of citizens support these initiatives. Given the winner-take-all approach we employ, it is not a stretch to say that yes, we all share blame.
From the very start the polls have generally been against mass NSA surveillance except when the wording of the poll was misleading[1]. As more and more information has come out the polls have become more and more clearly against it[2].
Try to keep the facts straight.
Not sure why you refer to winner-take-all and how that concept could make everyone responsible. Keep in mind almost know one knew about this until very recently and we learned more even today.
[1] http://www.policymic.com/articles/53767/nsa-surveillance-sca...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/polls-continue-show-ma...
That's how they view it, for better or worse.
Furthermore, the people who are to blame for our current political system are long dead. Everyone alive today was born into this framework and told to work within the framework to modify the framework. They have not had the opportunity to shape the framework free from the constraints of the framework. The facilities the framework provides to modify itself are clumsy, inadequate, and ineffective when everything is working smoothly.
This isn't a system we chose, this is a situation that we were born into, and find ourselves unable to change.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6fnfVJzZT4
"This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand." (...) "That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists."
This should be quoted much more often.
Regarding "work within the framework to modify the framework" Snowden decided not to work within it and we still don't know what will happen to him.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130726/01200123954/obama-...
What we do know is that he got shit done. His voice has been heard, people are talking now, he has had an impact.
Opting to work outside the framework is often not safe, particularly when the framework includes provisions for harming those who opt to work outside of it, but sometimes that is the only effective option.
What did you used to think foreign intelligence services did?
Very disappointed in the american citizens' reaction to the catastrophic political decisions their leaders have been making for decades.
Manipulating the defacto world currency -- that is leeching.
EDIT: Just to clarify it a bit more, I am not primarily angry because of the spying - read my mails if it makes you happy. What really pisses me of is this sentiment of thinking of non-US citizens as second class humans. We are not spying at US citizens, only at this other guys across the ocean. And sadly this sentiment is also present in part of the media coverage. Especially when the story broke there was a lot of outrage about (accidentally) spying at US citizens, but spying at non-US citizens and breaking foreign law in peacetime is deemed acceptable.