Every government might have control freaks in it who WANT to implement pervasive surveillance. But most places don't have the budget for it.
So I would love to hear an explanation from the people who put that clause in the contract. Maybe it's some kind of protest, but if it is meant seriously, it would be the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a long time.
Unless terrorism is actually just a cover for the NSA's true purpose of doing industrial espionage on behalf of US corporations. But if the meaning of the word "conspiracy theory" hadn't changed so dramatically recently, I could swear this is one ;-)
There where many other accusations brought in the same documentary, some of which I'm sceptical about, but this particular one seemed plausible. I can't find anything about it online, but the documentary presented it rather matter-of-factly with lots of interviews etc. So for the ambitious it might be an opportunity to document a concrete case of A3.
For me, it boils down to a simple question: If the NSA doesn't intend to use my data or data about me for some malicious purpose, then why do they need it?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-l...
"... a Washington Post report based on Snowden documents that the NSA had intercepted a “large number” of calls from the Washington DC area code due to a “programming error.”"
The United States is, of course, not a totalitarian regime, because the NSA was not interested in the content of these communications, but merely the metadata.
> The United States is, of course, not a totalitarian regime, because the NSA was not interested in the content of these communications, but merely the metadata.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-fla...
Only to the extent that intelligence has been outsourced to the US, at least in the West.
http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
Outsourcing some defense and intelligence makes sense because the West is united and why waste money on redundant systems. The real problem is that America is not a superpower it is a hyper power. As Bill Gates said recently:
"Nation-state competition is not zero-sum competition. It was not good for the world for the United States to be so far ahead, for 5 percent of the global population to generate 30 percent of the economic activity and 60 percent of the scientific R&D."
But we don't want the world to catch up by the US slowing down but by the world speeding up, that way progress is more rapid.
Is it? Really?
I can't help thinking that many of the less welcome trends in recent years, security-related or otherwise, could be explained by (a) the US no longer being a superpower in one sense or another, or not likely to remain so beyond the near future, and (b) senior US political and business figures finally noticing this.
From the outside, the modern United States of America looks a lot like some of its long-standing tech giants: some wise/lucky moves in the past brought success and created a vast amount of resources to use today, but if you keep squandering those resources on little things that aren't done properly and then add occasional big misses, sooner or later your fortunes will inevitably change.
US culture has long been obsessed with military matters and more recently with security, and clearly the US is still the world's leading military power in numerical terms. But at some point, you have enough firepower to level the planet a few times over, and adding another 0 doesn't really make any meaningful difference.
Meanwhile, among other things, a substantial part of the US population does not have access to effective healthcare, a noticeable proportion of US children appear to be learning more in school about religion than science (and their parents are OK with that), some of the big businesses generating all that economic activity Gates mentioned also managed to trigger the biggest global economic crisis in living memory, US workers have some of the worst conditions of any first world country (including so little paid time off in a year that sometimes even doubled it would still be illegal in many places), a cavalier attitude to energy consumption and damaging the environment is pervasive in both political and business leadership, and childish squabbling at the highest levels of federal government recently brought huge parts of that government to a standstill with adverse consequences for millions of ordinary people.
I'm not sure more rapid progress toward the US approach to these kinds of things is something any of us should aspire to. If anything, public sentiment and media commentary in other first world countries seems to be turning more to the attitude that the US is toxic and the best thing to do is distance yourself as much as possible, in security-related matters and otherwise. This article is interesting because it's the first obvious, practical embodiment of that sentiment I've seen, but I'll be very surprised if it's the last.
If you are handling any data of significant value, storing it outside of the regulatory jurisdiction of your company and/or customers will increase risk and cost. Compliance requirements have already made it impossible for EU individual customer information to be stored in the US. Vice versa compliance has made it difficult for most healthcare or local US government data in Europe.
A1: Stories about this kind of thing are posted by people who want to take business away from the U.S..
This is possible, but there are a lot of people who value privacy too, and I suspect they are in the majority. Want to prove me wrong? Get polling.
A2: Everybody else is doing it, but only the NSA got caught.
First, this doesn't make it acceptable. Second, it's entirely possible not everybody else is doing it. Third, even if everybody is doing it, the U.S. has more money to pour into black-op projects than any other nation on Earth, so it's a safe bet that the NSA is, by far, the worst offender.
A3: Countries like China spy for corporate gain, but the U.S. would never do such a thing.
Right, the U.S. has never staged a coup or conducted a war that benefited U.S. corporations, and certainly wouldn't need intelligence to help with that sort of thing in the future...
-----
If you're okay with what the NSA has been doing, here's something to consider. Several years ago Sony got a lot of bad press for putting rootkits onto audio CD's. They wanted to stop piracy. Honest customers had nothing to fear from Sony! However, honest customers did have something to fear from viruses, malware, etc. that were subsequently written to exploit the security holes created by the root-kit.
The NSA is collecting data on you. You trust the NSA and your nation, so you're not worried about how they'll use that data. Fine. Do you trust everyone who works for them? You probably shouldn't. They certainly don't trust their own employees and they still got burned by Snowden! The NSA might not be looking at your data until you do something terroristy, but who else could have access to the NSA's data-stores? Would anyone know Snowden had stolen all those files if he kept quiet about them? Probably not. Odds are you're pretty boring and nobody is interested in what the NSA has on you. What if you were actually really interesting, and your enemies had a lot of money? Do you plan on becoming interesting at some point in the future, or are you firmly committed to being a bore until you die?