When France does it, it's bad. When the USA does it it is bad too.
If my country would do this - and it is very well possible they do - I'd be very much ashamed of this.
> This stuff is rampant between all the industrialized nations. You can find stories going back decades about Americans being evicted from embassies over industrial espionage.
Those stories are along the line of the article, not much of a counterargument there then.
> Technically --- modulo the "getting caught" part --- this is what NSA is supposed to be doing. That's a positive assertion, not a normative one!
This is true, but - and this will probably surprise you - the rest of the world (the people, not necessarily the governments / those in power) considers industrial spying to be a negative activity, and considers it a hostile act against those people.
The goodwill that a country builds up can easily be eradicated by activities such as these, especially when uncovered.
The only other countries that I'm aware of that use their intelligence services in such a blatantly offensive (both meanings of the word) manner are Israel and Russia.
And none of those - and definitely not France - have been caught spying on US politicians in their own offices.
'They do it too' is such a lame excuse anyway (especially when that is not objectively the case).
"The rest of the world" is an interesting way to frame a response to my comment, which you appear to be stipulating is correct. I'm saying that on the matter of economic spying, there is no rest of the world.
Please stop using words like "excuse" to respond to me, by the way. You put words in my mouth when you do that; I didn't make an excuse. There's a world of difference between "is" and "ought".
Virtually every major city in the US has a street named after MLK, but there are still cops here that single black people out for beatings.
But let's not assume that the Dutch government is therefore off the hook. I would not be surprised if Dutch diplomats extract trade information (through pacts, treaties and simple espionage) that gets passed on to Shell.
We might be low on the James Bond style intelligence signals, but as a country that's an order of magnitude richer than we should be by any sane measure you can bet we've got our trademark smiling men in suits wherever the money flows.
I think that this is a legitimate moral position to take, but I think you will find that it is less widely held than other legitimate moral positions you might take (for instance spy agencies spying on their own citizens is more broadly recognized as bad).
Further, it seems to be a moral position that doesn't have much basis in practice. Industrial activities are fundamentally linked with traditional espionage targets such as diplomacy, military technology and military operations. To deny an intelligence agency access to those things seems no different than to deny them the ability to operate at all. Which is another legitimate moral stand to take, but one that has even less broad acceptance.
An instance of the more general value of "personal privacy" which has nothing to do with such abstract constructions as "nations".
If we value personal privacy, then spying always involves intrinsic harm, and the question is whether we should tolerate that harm for some greater good.
... and whether we want to go down the path of seeing ourselves as the sort of people who will tolerate harm to innocents for the greater good.
That's definitely not a proven item, in fact you could easily argue the opposite. Faulty intelligence has led to quite a few wars, and is worse than no intelligence at all, also, what intelligence there is tends to be cherry picked to support foregone conclusions.
They would if they could (and I'd bet that one has at one point).
Probably any country that can devote resources to industrial espionage does it.
> I'd be very much ashamed of this
"Playing nice" puts you at an disadvantage against actors that are more uninhibited. There is a reasonable argument to be made about scale and proportion; eg, the use of overwhelming capabilities in extremely asymmetric situations. But that doesn't negate the utility of those capabilities.
The uncomfortable reality is that all things exist naturally in a state of conflict (or "competition", to put a nicer spin on it). Morality is perhaps the greatest of the human inventions, but being unnatural, it does not exist in a stable equilibrium, and is rather irrelevant (and sometimes damaging) from a survivalist game theoretic perspective. Like capitalism, the rise and fall of nations mirrors Darwinism on a macro scale, so with that in mind, what we're seeing here should not be surprising -- it is the struggle for survival playing out over decades and centuries. The morality of an action, on a national scale, is a secondary concern, although it is often invoked if the effect on the nation is at least neutral or positive.
So that's why the US won't launch an outright attack against French industrial interests -- the consequences would be too damaging, not to mention the moral aspects of War Is a Bad Thing -- but has no compunction about stealing industrial secrets or snooping on politicians, where the potential gains outweigh the risks. And vice versa, for every nation that does this.
The "rules of the game" are dictated only by self-interest. Is it fair? No. Probably the only way to solve that is to collectively attain (and sustain!) enlightenment.
> rest of the world (the people, not necessarily the governments / those in power) considers industrial spying to be a negative activity
That is only true when the people/government are not the beneficiaries of the information. In reality, states (and people) will (and arguably, should) take any advantage that's given to them. Again, the reasonable argument to be made here is one of scale and proportion, not an absolutist directive of This Should Never Be Done Because It's Bad.
> 'They do it too' is such a lame excuse anyway
Yes, "they do it too" is a poor justification for anything, but it's not really the argument here. The argument is that not doing it would be more damaging to national economic interests. (I hate having to say this, but I feel like it needs to be spelled out, especially on the Internet: this is not me agreeing with anything the US is doing here, only giving a rationale. Although I will admit I'm not quite as idealistic in my convictions as you are.)
I'm not saying this is wrong, but you should back up such a statement with some real sources.
> * This stuff is rampant between all the industrialized nations. You can find stories going back decades about Americans being evicted from embassies over industrial espionage. Somehow, we all seem to remain allies.
So what?
> * Technically --- modulo the "getting caught" part --- this is what NSA is supposed to be doing. That's a positive assertion, not a normative one!
How so? According to Bruce Schneier NSA's mission is twofold: protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies, where the enemies pretty much means Soviet, not other NATO countries. Are you saying this is not the twofold mission of NSA?
(Note that this doesn't mean there aren't "legitimate" reasons to spy on allies - but that's not what you are saying).
> Curious how we never seem to see Russia as the focus of Wikileaks releases. They must just be really respectful of the civil liberties of citizens of the world.
1) So what?
2) Maybe they just didn't get any leaks from them?
3) For everyone in the western world, the Russia is so obviously anti "civil liberties" there's not much to uncover. For people in the east, there's Radio Free Europe. You not seeing this makes me question the intention of your so called "truth-stating".
http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/robert-gates-most-countries-c... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/02/espionage-moi/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-france-leads-russia-ch...
You can't justify it via patriotism or service for country if the explicit purpose is to enrich a controlled, hand picked minority.
The contents of Wikileaks archive is not solely a function of civil liberties violations. Someone has to get the information and get it to Wikileaks. I don't know how much international news you follow, but many strange and curious deaths occur to Russians who seem to defy the state. Most probably don't want to risk it (if they even have any real information to begin with).
http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/entreprises/la-france-est-elle...
I kind of agree. At the same time, France is one of the few countries that put satellites in space, sells fighter jets, have semiconductor factories, aircraft engine factories (Snecma)
I know, from the outside it looks like they only care about Wine and stinky cheese.
I can't even comprehend what you're trying to imply here. Do you genuinely think that Wikileaks is friendly to Russia for some reason? If so, say it. Because that would be really bizarre and inexplicable.
I don't like the NSA, but, impolitic as it may be to admit it here: I like Belarus a lot less.
Yes, you did. You can find it with a simple web search. The accusation is pretty tenuous when you look at the facts.
Would you agree that funneling intelligence to the government of Belarus is a grave accusation?
http://wlcentral.org/node/1412 http://wlcentral.org/node/1186
I don't like the NSA. Am I required to like Wikileaks? I don't.
> Did I miss the part where Wikileaks refuted the allegation
that is, you asked specifically for Wikileaks response, which is contained in one of the links I posted.
I don't believe that wlcentral is Wikileaks itself, and in any case the evidence and arguments they present should stand on their own, regardless of whether one likes Wikileaks or not.
It doesn't bother you that cables that we probably haven't even seen were relayed from Chelsea Manning, through Assange and Wikileaks, through a noted holocaust denier, to the government of Belarus? Again: we don't get to see them. But the functionaries of one of the world's worst dictatorships, and one of Russia's closest satellite states, do get them. In fact: all the sources I've seen appear to stipulate that's true, disagreeing only on why that happened.
I don't like the NSA and have plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the official USG narratives on virtually any subject. But I find Wikileaks to be an incredibly sketchy organization.
Here's former WL staffer James Ball, writing for The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov...
So far as I can tell, the most powerful rebuttal WL has to Ball is to suggest that Ball is disgruntled and has an axe to grind. But Ball's allegations are specific, and in some cases corroborated!
As for Shamir, it seems pretty obvious that Wikileaks did not do a whole lot of background checking on the volunteers that they used to go through the source material. That's all. There isn't any evidence to suggest that Wikileaks partnered with Shamir in order to convey cables to Belarus, a feat which could have been done far more easily in other ways.
Not central to the point but I think it's only speculation that Shamir gave any cables to Belarus.
At some point, this "Ball had reason to make things up" stuff has to amount to us taking Assange's word for it. Ball signed his name to the allegations, and the Guardian found them credible enough to run. I don't love the Guardian (they are to the left what Murdoch is to the right) but it's not credible to say that the Guardian would simply make things up because they had a falling-out with Wikileaks.
Would your opinion of Wikileaks be impacted if more evidence was presented corroborating Ball's story? If Assange really did knowingly introduce a holocaust-denying agent of Belarus to Wikileaks? How much would that matter to you?
I think that's what happened. I think it's very relevant.
If you think it doesn't matter even if we stipulate that it happened, that's fine, and we can be done discussing that part of the story.
Does it bother you that whenever something comes up about Assange or Wikileaks --- the refusal to present himself to prosecutors in Sweden, the ties to allies of Lukashenko, the Russia Today show and the refusal to publish documents about Russians that he said he'd publish, the accidental doxxing of Afghani Taliban resistors --- there's always some elaborate story that exonerates Wikileaks?
Shamir: The most damning evidence is that he allegedly used a pseudonym. There isn't any reasonable evidence to suggest that Assange knew about his background, or had any reason to believe he would give documents to Belarus, if that did indeed happen.
Why doesn't he go to Sweden? Because he will certainly be extradited to the US (we know that the US wants him, we can debate how practical it would be to get him from Sweden for the umpteenth time).
Why does he have a show on RT? Because RT airs voices critical of the US, there is nothing special about Assange.
Accidental doxxing: I assume that was the result of the Guardian's publishing of the encryption keys. But in any case the standard of journalism isn't to guarantee that no one will ever get hurt, it's if the benefits outweigh the costs.
I'm not familiar with the Lukashenko and Russian documents issues but the rest of this supposedly damning evidence is pretty weak.
- Category:Russia - 57 pages total
- Cyprus - 54 pages
- Latvia - 50 pages
- Lithuania - 47 pages
- Estonia - 46 pages
-------
- Japan: 90 pages
- Italy: 99 pages
- France: 128 pages
- Canada: 153 pages
- Germany: 278 pages
- United Kingdom: 384 pages
- United States: 9729 pages
All of these are very effective deterrents against whistleblowers stepping forward.
That we don't have much information on Russia however should definitely not be read as 'wikileaks is slacking in Russia' or 'the Russian government is not doing much that can't stand the light of day', rather the opposite.
That's not a baseless concern. Wikileaks has an agenda, and it is not simply "transparency".
Their agenda is irrelevant, as is the personality of the people involved, their political affiliations, their haircolour and their dietary and or sexual habits.
And let's hope that others with other agendas and goals will do their bit and release as much or more information as well.
If you only accept facts from sources that are 100% neutral then you end up having to make up your mind without any facts at all, no news outlet, no journalist, no TV station and no editor is able to say that they have 'no agenda', in fact it is entirely safe to assume that anybody that sends facts out into the world has an agenda and wishes to further that agenda by the selective release of the facts that support their cause best.
Wikileaks has been slammed in the past for 'uncontrolled releases', which I thought were actually far more balanced than any kind of editorial control and or selective release.
In that sense they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Now the US has a lot of idealism going on, so much so that many people grow up idolizing institutions like the CIA and the NSA. They join these institutions as believers, but day after day they are exposed to more details on the inside that bursts that idealism and one day cognitive dissonance gets the better of them and they choose to collect information to become a whistleblower.
Compare this with other countries where there isn't as much blind reverence cultivated for such institutions. The same talented kids that would grow up under circumstances where they would have a much more realistic view of the good and bad these institutions are capable of. This in and of itself is a major limiting factor in how high you would rise in such an institution, assuming you chose to join in the first place. You can't be a whistleblower if you don't have access to anything to whistleblow about.
Whistleblowing happens when values clash with reality. If values are never really part of the equation, and you have organizations where "the ends justify the means" is not only accepted, but rewarded, then you don't get whistleblowers.
With things like Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, and all these realizations from the Snowden docs, I fully expect that idolization bubble to be pretty much popped by now insofar as institutions like the NSA and CIA are concerned. For that reason more than any other I expect whistleblowing to become less frequent for these institutions. If and when whistleblowing drops for these institutions drops, it's will be explained by better security measures, but I would expect it having more to do with those who have the personality to be whistleblowers never joining or rising high enough to have that opportunity.
Movies and TV shows like to use corruption in Russia as a stereotypical movie plot, but that makes it less news worthy for news papers. If there isn't a large interest from readers then there is no ad revenues to be gained, and no interest for journalist to write about it.
Of course one could be conspiratorial and accuse all the large media companies to be pro-Russia or having a curios set of priorities, but I find the simple answer to be more likely. tptacek conspiracy theory need to eliminate those simple answers before I will consider it anything more than a political view.
I guess India is somewhat worse, but you get the idea.
If someone leaked that there is an absence of corruption then that would news worthy, but such false information doesn't seem to be the kind of articles Wikileaks would publish. Logically, if you can't publish about the existence of corruption because everyone knows about it and you can't publish about the absence of corruption because it would be false, then Russian coverage regarding corruption will be lackluster. Maybe they should just post a bunch of empty pages with the title "Russia corruption" to make statistics like the parent posted look better.
I may very well be able to do that, but it wouldn't do anything to disprove the notion that Wikileaks has a pro- Russian, anti-US bias.
I see two simple reasons for the lack of Russian coverage at Wikileaks: either Russians aren't providing material, or Assange isn't publishing it.
More baseless allegations. Isn't that one of the tactics the NSA uses? To attempt to destroy reputations of selected targets?
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
EDIT: Of course I'm aware that Russia has a different relationship with its media than the UK, Canada, etc. Just pointing out a thing.
It does certainly seem like Wikileaks is mainly focused on publishing anti-US material, but I can think of a million reasons for that which are more plausible than them being in Putin's pocket (which, in fairness, you've merely implied).
EDIT: No idea why you're being down-voted. I've up-voted in case it helps. To everyone else: I know it's become customary to down-vote for disagreement, but in situations like this it discourages dialogue.
RT is an organ of Russian government propaganda.
If the US had a meaningful state sponsored media presence, I'm sure it would be bad too. But nobody should kid themselves about what RT is.
I don't have any examples in mind but I feel like the BBC has never held back on criticizing the government/people in power, and doing reports on gov't scandals and the like.
As a rule of thumb you can use any news service as a source of information as long as you don't use it for information about the government of the country where it originates from and the major adversaries of that government or country.
That makes reading the news and staying current a lot harder and probably will require you to gain language proficiency beyond what you can get at through the English language press.
We can debate whether it's a meaningful or indicative tie. That seems like a live debate. But "the BBC was a mouthpiece for the Iraq War effort" isn't germane to this discussion. I agree that it was too. Believe it or not: it is possible to (a) oppose the Iraq War, (b) believe that it was disingenuously sold to the American and British people through media manipulation, (c) oppose the NSA, and (d) still think Wikileaks is suspicious and untrustworthy. I fall into that a-b-c-d bucket.
Making wild accusations with absolutely no proof would be my guess. Also the bogus moral equivalence he used to kick this thread off.
However, I do think there's a difference between remarks about Chinese hacking and NSA spying. Outrage about NSA spying seems always to be moral. Outrage over Chinese hacking seems more practical: it's taken as given that China is going to sponsor hackers and that they're really good at it.
Look at the recent OPM debacle. Virtually all the coverage I see about it is about how OPM (and the USG more broadly) fell down on the job, not about we should retaliate against the people who broke in.
But that's just my intuition; I'd love to see it more properly and systematically studied.
Personally I don't agree with their tack, but that is what I gather is their tack from their, assange's, statements.
And I might be naïve but think that Russia had, and lost after 1991, its networks and spying capabilities. It probably takes some time to rebuild them.
Say tomorrow the US intelligence agencies shut down any cyber capabilities would then China and Russia stop their hacking groups or increase their activities?
Interactions between states are struggles for power and the concept of fairness does not apply.
There were/are people that think the 9/11 attack was a good occurrence. There are people who think it was a bad occurrence. Same action, different perspectives.
I don't think anyone knows what the purpose of the NSA is. To have more secrets than everyone else?
(Push to shove on my opinion about NSA, which is pretty fuzzy: I think the NSA does important work, but that the organization is probably corrupt, and that it should be reorganized and much of its career leadership removed).
Does it benefit the average U.S. citizen? If not, then how can you say NSA does this for the benefit of the USA. And if it does, then how exactly does a U.S. citizen benefit from this? Making a bunch of rich people even richer doesn't seem all that beneficial to me.
>>> We will protect national security interests by adhering to the highest standards of behavior.
So by your own argument they're going beyond their own mission statement to fulfill a secret one in direct contradiction to the American public's wishes. i.e. Not doing what they are supposed to do
So we can all stop whining about Russia asserting influence over Ukraine and China hacking US government right?
The commenter upthread asked what NSA's goals were. When I offered up a mission statement for them, it wasn't what I want their mission to be. It's what I think it actually is.
It's really difficult to see any logic in your recent comment history, frankly.
Ditto for your comment. Flagged.
Maybe for the last snarky remark on russia ;)
I agree. I've also actually found Russian statesmen and politics to be incredibly transparent. Far beyond anything the US has. So it's totally logical that Wikileaks doesn't focus on them.
* France is one of the most notoriously brazen state sponsors of industrial espionage, especially within the EU.
* This stuff is rampant between all the industrialized nations. You can find stories going back decades about Americans being evicted from embassies over industrial espionage. Somehow, we all seem to remain allies.
* Technically --- modulo the "getting caught" part --- this is what NSA is supposed to be doing. That's a positive assertion, not a normative one!
Curious how we never seem to see Russia as the focus of Wikileaks releases. They must just be really respectful of the civil liberties of citizens of the world.