1: http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstro...

2: http://falkvinge.net/2012/04/02/sweden-paradise-lost-part-1-...

3: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/09/fran-s09.html

Consider just a lot of US surveillance laws: we non-US citizens might as well be animals for the rights we have. Significantly different than what our own local/EU privacy laws award us.

Also it is significantly easier to take legal action againsy my own government agencies than US ones.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

CN? When did China join 5 eyes?

Where are the results? Better yet, public scrutiny? Everything's a fucking national secret.

There is also familiarity with the government carrying out the surveillance to be taken into account. For most European countries, particularly the one that have been members of the EU for some time there is quite good rule of law and so the consequences of being monitored are potentially less severe. Looking at governments with lots of resources to spare or ones without a good rule of law then surveillance is likely to make people more nervous - which is exactly the intent.

The vast majority of them don't have even 1% of the NSA's budget for spying.

The likely reality is that the U.S. has a lesser desire than most other governments to suppress liberty, privacy, and free expression, but their capability is so much greater in magnitude than the others that they end up being the worst offender in the world anyway.

So you can't just say that "every government is bad." Some have worse motives than others, and some are more competent than others. As a result, citizens of governments who are only in it for the bribes and mistresses and are otherwise somewhat bumbling incompetents (and I'm not naming names here), are likely safer than citizens of governments who believe they have a mission from God to be the sword and shield of the righteous, and hire thousands of the smartest people in the world to carry that mission out.

The point being that yes, all governments are a nonzero threat to all people, but severity equals risk multiplied by impact. You really have to address the shit that the U.S., Russia, and China are doing to the global network first.

Yes bumbling Europeans are less dangerous but only because they have outsourced their intelligence to the US. China and Russia are more dangerous but only to their own population.

In particular I find the constant harking back to "Well, we don't spy on US citizens, only everyone else." particularly annoying.

Like that's OK.

I'm arguing that broad, warrantless surveillance is a horrible, chilling thing to be doing. The fact that everyone is doing it doesn't make me feel better.

- we are a spy agency

- we cannot spy on citizens

- we cannot spy on non-citizens

Best spy agency ever.

It is annoying, but there is a reason why it is being said. Laws (are supposed to) prohibit (more or less) the US spying on its own citizens without cause. It is written into the constitution (more or less). Foreigners don't have that protection under law. Whether that should be changed or not is a different question than are these programs legal under current laws.

Sorry to nitpick and slightly OT, but more people voted in the elections in India these past weeks than the US has citizens. A staggering half billion plus.

http://qz.com/210222/6-takeaways-from-record-turnout-in-the-...

To say its all about 'terrorism' is laughable, and I wonder just how many trade deals etc have fallen foul of this, or how many people manipulated into doing what the likes of George Bush wanted. How could you trust doing business with someone in the US after these revelations? Just blatant lies all over the place, from the top echelons down. They've made it to the point where if you wanted to develop something you don't want them to grab, it means an air-gapped workstation. That probably doesn't have much mileage either.

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...

This idea that you just put your data in Europe and it's safer is just laughable. The treat is pervasive, it is intelligence agencies working together all around the world. It doesn't stop at any national border.

> top echelons down

I can't tell if you're being humourous or not, but the Snowden releases weren't really new information, they were proof of what information that had leaked out over the past decades.

Pretty poor situation.

The issue in my mind is that we are literally at war with individuals, and we focus on the symptoms instead of root causes. We have been assassinating, subverting, bribing and observing individual enemies of the state for over a decade.

Has doing this done anything to make us safer, as in how we felt in the 80s before international terrorism?

Non-citizens, presumably, can set up their own governments to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity -- but they aren't the people for whom the people of the United States ordained and established the Constitution of the United States to secure the blessings of liberty.

> What happened to "All [people] are created equal?"

All may be created equal, but the United States government wasn't created to serve all.

That's not to say there aren't limitations on the powers that the US government should apply against non-citizens, but from the very beginning citizens and non-citizens have been by design situated differently with respect to the US government.

Yeah, because the US was a paragon of virtue throughout, say, the Cold War.