R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former Director of Central Intelligence.
http://cryptome.org/echelon-cia2.htm?utm_medium=referral&utm...
Look, use your spy satellites to publically shame bribery - that's fine by me. Claim the UK is bribing every government it can find - sure, Cameron and Blair were hardly discreet. But claim that after you have done this service to the world, you then "quietly have a word". Come on. If you are doing this for the greater good, make it public.
I swear, if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.
Your comment illuminates things somewhat - at the top end of the international business food-chain there is no real free-market. We can talk about free-markets when discussing small, medium and even large domestic sized businesses. But when we think about integrated circuits, aircraft, shipping, consulting engineering, infrastructure etc, it's about discretion when lobbying to get the winning the bid, discretion in stealing key technologies, and discretion in manipulating the market.
My first instinct was to suggest that encryption is the magic bullet for having a real free market at the top end - but that doesn't stop bribery. In the one hand, we need to protect innovative businesses from having their intellectual property stolen and handed to the incumbent, in the other we need to shine a light on the corruption that pervades everything from soccer to software contracts.
I'm not sure what can be done beyond what you suggest at the end of your post: if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.
Time for the spies to become Wikileaks? The reason they won't do this is because every side has nasty secrets to hide.
Bribery is generally not sophisticated. Especially at the levels the CIA could give a shit about, bribery is an open secret and part of what the ruling classes expect, or at least condone.
Embezzlement- yeah that's hidden. Which is why congress pays whistleblowers. I mean the U.S. Is ridiculously out in front for these sort of things (well officially, I am sure bribery and corruption is still common)
Occam's razor: The person who worked in intelligence, and is/was a Washington lawyer lied. Even without data, that surely must have crossed people's minds, no?!
> Occam's razor: The person who worked in intelligence, and is/was a Washington lawyer lied. Even without data, that surely must have crossed people's minds, no?! > [0] https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results
Perception != reality
He was referring to bribery of foreign countries (such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in his examples) that U.S. and European countries compete to win contracts.
Even according to the PERCEPTION index, they're of tiny European countries not named France. Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. A combined population that's about 9 million fewer than that of Italy.
> He was referring to bribery of foreign countries (such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in his examples) that U.S. and European countries compete to win contracts.
From the first line of the cryptome.org article: 'What is the recent flap regarding Echelon and U.S. spying on European industries all about?'
> Perception != reality
Sorry, they don't have the actual corruption statistics available!
Feel free to investigate their methods, and report back! I take them as being somewhat credible. As do you by your own admission.
What a bizarrely horrid thing to say.
He must be confusing Europe with the US where bribing is called "lobbying" and is usually not tax deductible: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/ch11.html#en_US_2014_pu...
While we also have corruption at all levels of government in Europe, we still consider bribing illegal. Doing creative accounting to hide the bribes is also illegal.
Once they find evidence of corruption they confront the government that is buying, not the one that could punish the company. Clearly the crime of corruption is not of importance to the CIA (why would it, they use it to recruit, and they aren't a police anyway).
So by finding evidence of corruption, they can leverage that to potentially get the contract to the american corporation, increasing US wealth.
With bribing, the power balance is in favor of the person being bribed. With blackmail, the one in charge is the one doing the blackmail.
No. It's a result of nuclear deterrance (ie. doctrine of M.A.D.)
> The job of the NSA is to keep the USA in a position of power economically and politically to help stabilize the world.
I think you mean just to keep the US in power. The US destabilizes most countries in which it 'intervenes'. That's the point though, the more countries are broken up, the less likely anyone will challenge the US.
That we have not gone to war with other major powers is a debatable point as well. Though not as apparent as WW2, the proxy wars have been draining on our nations and peoples.
One thing to remember about nukes is not that they are so damaging, but that the damage is so fast and long lasting. The old maxim of 'war is good for business' is not true with a-bombs. Not due to the blast and damage, but due to the radiation. We still have no idea what it does and how to contain it and make a profit, it's just too toxic (like gasses)
to help stabilize the world
Unfortunately this part of your statement is the one that couldn't be more tragically and more demonstrably wrong.
>facing genocide
Either Israel is attempting to annihilate the Palestinians, or they aren't. The Palestinians are still here. Israel has strong military means. They are capable, and they are competent. If they are trying, they are failing, and thus incompetent. I do not think they are incompetent. Many generals, commentators, and experts believe they are amongst the most capable nations and praise their abilities and precision. I think it's clear they aren't trying to annihilate any group of people other than people that launch rockets, attacks, or support those activities. It ain't genocide, so why call it that?
Sorry, you can't get away with saying things like that. This is a blatant lie.
This doesn't mean we stop trying; it just means that we don't have to lose hope because it feels like an impossible task. Conversely, it also means we need to really need to push to keep from losing ground. We can't go back to what the world was like in the time around WWI and WWII.
Maybe you feel that NSA and similar organizations are responsible for keeping another world war from errupting by making smaller conflicts happen, or by helping unexpected regime changes occur... That still doesn't explain all the mass surveillance of it's own people, or this economic espionage of supposed allies.
https://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic...
No, it's a direct result of nuclear proliferation and Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.
(emphasis mine)
Why do you think so?
Now define the change in stability between t0 and t1 as something like inversely proportional to the weighted average of changes in relative power rankings among countries.
By definition, maintaining stability will tend to keep Hegemonistan in its power positions. And vice versa.
So, stabilization is roughly identical to helping Hegemonistan.
Yes, you are.
I may not be a fan of what the NSA is doing, but at the end of the day, I'm happy to hold an American passport.
And prior to WWII. And, to a great extent, during WWII.
DHS and/or NIST cover commercial and non-DoD government. But even then it is a voluntary and/or advisory capacity too - there is no authority to make a company fix a software product (unlike say a car defect, which gets into liability issues nobody wants to open for software).
As for discovering and preventing bugs, I think that would be a waste of time/effort in the current towards NSA and software in general. Nobody is going to take a binary patch from them, nobody is going to submit their source code for review, any help given to a company would draw complaints from their competitors, and fundamentally as long as companies aren't actually liable for damages due to bugs or security issues, they aren't going to care much about spending money to improve the situation. A corporation would just rather add another clause to a EULA to disclaim more and more responsibility.
It's a free market failure since bottom line profits aren't affected so there is no incentive to improve. That leaves the question of whether the government should be subsidizing the business world's failure to meaningfully invest in bug fixes and security improvements.
> That leaves the question of whether the government should be subsidizing the business world's failure to meaningfully invest in bug fixes and security improvements.
One good way to sum up what government is good for is "things the market can't or won't do on its own." So I'd say yes.
This is one of those situations - be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
Apple and Microsoft between them make $35 billion in profit a quarter (not picking on them, just examples) - corporations don't need government handouts for this, they need proper motivation which is absent because security issues don't cost them anything except PR.
Actual monetary damages would alter that however. Fines, penalties, liability assumption, etc. You really want to see that?
Otherwise, how would it work exactly?
Existing models of the FDA (and its drug approval process) or the DoT (and its ability to force auto recalls) would introduce monetary damages, legal liability, government authority to pull products, and regulatory approval as ways to the free market ignoring costs related to security/defects - you really want to see that for the software market?
How would you REQUIRE corporations to have their code vetted by the "future software security agency" (FSSA)? Or say FSSA provides reference implementations or reviews open-source code only? That's only part of the software universe, is it enough?
If participation is voluntary/optional, corporations still aren't going to care; they will need to be compelled to participate.
The world isn't neatly divided into things that people care about (and do) and don't care about and therefore will never do). It's a continuum.
For example, many people in companies care about security but never have time to do enough. If you make it so that they can do more per unit of time, they'll do more.
In that fashion, ISIS could argue that their torture is ok and necessary because the USA is also doing it to obtain information.
Edit: I'm referring to spying, not torture.
The only justification for it is "they did it first," which is both childish and irresponsible. Just because everyone else does it, doesn't mean it is correct, necessary, or justified.
It's both an out of band communications channel but also provides a feedback loop. If your enemy or your competitor is engaging in something you all agreed to is out of bounds, you can respond to it with the information you have gained.
EDS and Boeing will know if the other is underselling, bribing, receiving subsidies, etc. and be able to respond accordingly, for example.
See how so many countries are rushing to resolve territorial disputes at the International Court of justice? Only the plaintiffs.
Which is the polar opposite of what some governments want[0].
It's almost as if governments are playing the terrorist card to push through laws which benefit them—the political class.
Oh, but that's OK: everyone does it!
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[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/cameron...
Maybe take it as an appeal to logic: if nations are to grapple with the issues raised by the NSA and her sister orgs in the five eye countries, the best approach to raising the issue and proposing solutions (in my opinion) is to appeal to the logic of each individual and demonstrate how they are best served by dismantling these espionage operations.
So what does he do? Opened a shop one block down and drove the fist guy out of business.
Business is ruthless.
I know. If we ever hoped to get to that point, I think we'd need some esoteric unicorn shit like "checks and balances" built into our government.
- Most people a few hundred years ago, probably.
It took revolts, revolutions and changes in mores for things to advance to where they are today. Yes, some day, we may all enter a new world order where everything is placid. We're not there yet and thinking we can wish ourselves there in the near future, let's say, extremely optimistic, to the point if being wishful thinking.
Perhaps most importantly is that servitude and slavery became economically untenable.
Up to now we have paid tens of billions to get surveillance, and tens of millions to preserve confidentiality.
It could be the other way around.
>A second economic espionage order called “France: Economic Developments” shows that information was then shared with other U.S. agencies and secretaries, including the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Commerce, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasury. Eventually, this data could have been used to help sign export deals.
Nothing in this report directly shows that the US did or did not share this intelligence with US companies. I have not read the French articles yet.
I wonder how the US handles sharing economic intelligence with allies that have a very public record of state sponsored industrial espionage.
Let's not pretend that US spying on foreign companies is something new at all. It's been widely spread by other means for decades if not more. I would even say it's an integral part of doing business for larger companies, and they call it "intelligence" and they get it by whatever means they can. The NSA is just one of their tools.
Not sure what his argument is going to be now....
Because now you have a 'special access' class of the economy that can subvert this innovation/value mechanism with stolen data. Add corrupt politicians, easily exploited loopholes, biased media channels, and a docile public - and it's easy to see how this special access class can twist, distort (and ultimately destroy) the system.
One can only imagine what humanity could achieve without these parasites infecting our lives and businesses.