In U.S. media the discussion centers around Americans being spied and if that is illegal. As a non-American, I see U.S. UK and other mass surveillance countries as constantly attacking me personally. As more and more people feel the same way, it will eventually have real consequences to U.S. interests. It might take generation or two, but it will happen. Why would U.S. want to make new enemies?

First world countries are very interdependent on each other and this kind of attacking harms us all. Even in the cynical machtpolitik world view this can be seen as shortsighted strategy.

As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.

(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)

You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.

An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).

1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.

2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.

3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.

You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.

Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.

EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.

If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.

Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).

It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.

Worse now, perhaps. But remember that Snowden's original point, immediately after the leaks became public but before he became so outspoken against the USG, was that he wasn't worried about controls on NSA per se. He was worried that the controls on NSA were mostly policy instead of law; mostly internal and non-transparent instead of external and public.

In his words, NSA was only a single Administration away from being a "turnkey tyranny". Isn't that true for Germany too, if parliamentary control is laughable? Just because Germany inherited a lousy foreign intelligence service doesn't mean anything about what they can do in the future. Honda and Hyundai both used to make some of the worst cars on the world market.

And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.

My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:

Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.

It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.

And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?

Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.

This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.

Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.

That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.

First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.

It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.

Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.

Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.

And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.

Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.

You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.

But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.

Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.

So that giant data center in Utah isn't being turned against the American people? Maybe it could be demolished before it is used that way, and we could swap the NSA's budget for the BND's.

Taking away the NSA's money is the only way to trust that it's operations against Americans are curtailed.

No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.

IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.

Most European countries don't do mass surveillance. In my country there are two spy agencies, civilian and military one, and they both have less than 200 people working for them. their budgets are just too small for large scale spying.

> a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.

There is nothing wrong with cooperation and SIGINT. Spy agencies should spy and exchange information. It's the mass surveillance that is the most problematic aspect.

The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.

I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.

London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.

People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)

There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.

This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)

Of course they do not have the resources, the means or the opportunities to enact such global pervasive surveillance as the NSA is doing. Almost none of the other secret services even come close.

Some of them would love to if they could, but only the NSA is in that position (mostly due to so much bits of Internet traffic routing in some way or another through US servers).

Only the NSA is actually doing it to this extremely insane extent.

Think about that next time you're frustrated.

Of course I care about my own government spying on me. I care a hell of a load more about some other government (one that shouldn't have any business with my life) spying on the whole fucking planet. Is that so hard to understand??

It is not clear to me why the fact of foreign surveillance alone should have greater consequences for the US than for France, Germany, etc. To me it appears the NSA revelations have been exploited by certain political factors, especially in Europe, to strengthen their own mass surveillance efforts; for example, it strains credulity for me to believe European efforts to get more services located in Europe because of the NSA revelations are really for your protection and not so the BND and other European surveillance organizations can access the servers directly without having to negotiate for them with the NSA in a tit-for-tat. That would contradict everything we know about mass surveillance programs in European countries.

"I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will support & defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign & domestic...that I will bear true faith & allegiance to... same [constitution]; that I take this obligation freely, without any... purpose of evasion..."

4th Amendment to said U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, & effects, ... against unreasonable searches & seizures, shall not be violated, & no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, & ... particularly describing the place to be searched, & the persons or things to be seized." ---

Who's committing the treason...?

I'm not impressed by tech's leadership on this. Their fear today will mean a new generation will see secret pervasive surveillance as a feature to be added to; and perhaps that generation already does.

If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.

However, when you spy domestically, the US citizen can't exactly defend himself and can get railroaded under National Security...then tossed in jail.

There is a very, very big difference between what domestic security forces can do to you vs. foreign ones.

Patently false. See, among numerous other incidents and legal cases, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). The US can and does arrest foreign citizens in foreign countries for offenses committed in foreign countries without the consent of any foreign country, and has done so overtly for quite a long time.

That's what parallel construction is for, which is rather orthogonal to the issue of whether the target is a foreign citizen located in a foreign country at the time of the arrest or a US citizen in the US at that time.

And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.

Parallel construction relies on having other law enforcement agencies available with which to conduct the parallel evidence (re-)gathering.

How would that work in a foreign country? It seems at the very least we'd have to have FBI or similar in their country (which limits the possibilities to nations with agreements that permit this).

The U.S. LE agent abroad would then still need to be able to detain and search for the evidence to re-locate, all while maintaining U.S. rules of evidence, and all while not getting arrested by the host nation in the process. The latter sounds like a guarantee to me if you should even whisper a hint that "parallel construction" is taking place over there.

A counter-argument is that Constitutional protections are not all considered to apply on foreign soil by U.S. courts, but given that these actions would be taken by an agent of the USG I'm still not sure how such a case doesn't get thrown out immediately.

> And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.

But nor are the options literally infinite.

The fact that the person was in a foreign country doesn't mean that there isn't evidence available to domestic law enforcement agencies.

> But nor are the options literally infinite.

Sure, but while arrest and criminal prosecution may be more problematic (though not impossible) with a foreign citizen in a foreign country, extrajudicial killing is generally less problematic there, largely for political reasons (and, in large part, as a consequence of the perception that arrest and criminal prosecution is more difficult.)

So, I wouldn't agree that being outside of the USA makes you safer from any consequences imposed by the US government as a result of surveillance information gathered by the NSA.

Yes, that's a good point. Even with some form of executive due process it will never be likely that foreigners abroad have more or equal Constitutional protections than citizens on U.S. soil, and the NSA could tie back into that.

That is very, very different than them saying "We can kidnap someone from county X for reason Y without an extradition treaty in place."

It was them basically saying "Mexico agreed to the unspoken terms that we'd use our legal precedents that preceded the treaty unless expressly forbidden to do so."

So, Mexico consented by way of treaty and by not excluding forcible abduction (which was considered legal at the time the treaty was signed). That isn't the same as "did not consent". That is the Mexican government saying "Oops, we consented 60 years ago but we want to take it back now. We just forgot to mention it."

https://www.aclu.org/safe-free/united-states-v-alvarez-macha... https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/504/655/case.htm... "(b) Neither the Treaty's language nor the history of negotiations and practice under it supports the proposition that it prohibits abductions outside of its terms. The Treaty says nothing about either country refraining from forcibly abducting people from the other's territory or the consequences if an abduction occurs. In addition, although the Mexican Government was made aware of the Ker doctrine as early as 1906, and language to curtail Ker was drafted as early as 1935, the Treaty's current version contains no such clause. Pp. 663-666."

The NSA is a military agency. The Military is not afforded police powers. The NSA is restricted in its ability to cooperate with the FBI. Furthermore, any illegally gathered evidence is tossed out before it is told to the jury.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

The US is allowed to spy on its citizens, as appropriate under the 4th amendment. IE: With warrants, due process, and all that good stuff. When the DoJ / FBI fails to comply with the rules, illegal evidence is tossed out before trials even begin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

NSA hands it over to the DEA who arrests you based on an investigation based on that information.

They've been doing it and getting away with it so I think your believe that the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree will protect you is false.

On the books, legally and in front of a judge, the NSA and DEA are not allowed to work with each other. Parallel Construction is a (probably illegal) technique that DEA agents are using right now to get around the legal authorities.

But it involves DEA agents lying under oath towards judges. IE: I don't think the practice of parallel construction is going to hold up in courts in the long term.

What isn't true anymore (replace Germany with Pakistan for an extreme example) and don't really matter anymore, because it looks like all the mafias that own governments are supporting each other nowadays.

why arrest when we can blackmail them. (evil laugh)

Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.

Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.

Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.

Ptacek's razor?

Of course it's weird. In one breath he says Snowden gave US national security secrets out to "everybody on the planet" and then proceeds to claim what came out shouldn't be surprising because everyone could have known already.

Either it's public knowledge or it's secret.

And that's not even counting the public knowledge and suspicions that, a year ago, simply weren't taken seriously because they was too far into tinfoil hat territory.

Now we know for sure that shit is going on, and people can form a real opinion about it and speak up about those opinions without immediately being labelled a paranoid schizophrenic, because we can't deny it any more either.

Read that again maybe, if you don't see how that's a huge deal, even if his revelations were merely things we already sort-of knew and suspected.

If that's not weird, it's at least stupid and disingenuous.

BTW there was no reason (at all) to insinuate the idea of Snowden working together with the FSB in the first sentence of that post of yours, similarly as there's no evidence at all that you're hired as part of one of those psyops campaigns to downplay all things related to Snowden/NSA here on HN, none at all. You know I feel really dirty for just writing this and planting that idea? Why didn't you?

I don't mean to nitpick, but why would you want to be dispassionate about your rights?

If anything, being dispassionate has caused the steady erosion of our rights. Americans are asleep at the wheel and not looking out for the greater world (& their own) interests.

Instead, Americans dispassionately accept being told what to think and what to dream of.

Now detachment, I can get behind. But feel what you feel. It's good for you.

These are people that I would describe:

1) are in favor of establishment of totalitarian power 2) favor blaming the messenger over blaming the NSA's dogmatic and psychopathic overreach

The first is that many of NSA's activities are unconstitutional and/or illegal, and as such represent a grave threat to the very ideals that the U.S. was founded on.

The second is the "world citizen" narrative, which asserts that mass surveillance is inherently immoral and an affront to the rights of people everywhere.

Many of the stories we've seen so far, substance included, tend to be of the latter narrative. A prime example of this would be the network hardware implants story. The implanted hardware in question was modified en route to foreign destinations, and it's probably a safe bet that no "Five Eyes" countries were on the receiving end. Another would be where it was mentioned that U.S. intelligence operatives use geolocation data derived from intercepts as a tool to help them shake tails in the field. Items like these have no relevance in context of the first narrative, clearly live up to NSA's mandate of foreign intelligence collection, and arguably impact national security in an adverse manner.

In my opinion, there's a compelling argument that Snowden's actions have indeed satisfied the technical definition of treason. However, that is not to say he wasn't well intentioned, or that he failed to disclose a good deal of information directly relevant to illegal domestic surveillance activities. On the contrary, I'm sure his intentions were good, and he has in fact contributed a fair bit to the domestic surveillance fight.

---

EDIT: I've moved this post from the duplicate thread; tptacek's reply can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853468

In response, I think there is an argument for framing his intent as being ill towards the United States, at least in a willfully negligent sense. One could argue he allowed his world citizen narrative to override concerns regarding U.S. interests.

Hypotheticals aside, I agree with you that treason really is not an appropriate charge in this case, and that in general throwing the term around tends to detract from the discussion. Moreover, even with lesser charges, I don't think that the standard life-in-solitarily-confinement sentence would be appropriate.

As well, there is the notion that USG inhibited his ability to assert editorial control over the leaked content in the first place, perhaps making the severity of the leaks worse in the process. Repeatedly calling him a coward probably didn't help either.