NSA spying is big news in the US, but huge news in Europe, too. This week, the cover story of German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel is all about the “Top secret documents that detail the mass scope of efforts by the United States to spy on Germany and Europe.” "Each month, the NSA monitors a… READ THE REST
If the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia believe they’re not under the same massive surveillance as Germany, France, the U.S. itself, and the rest of the world I have a bridge in Brooklyn that’s for sale.
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I wonder why half today’s topics have comments closed - it seems almost all the posts about the NSA and Snowden and related topics do.
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I wondered that and figured benefit of the doubt, it’s some kind of default setting.
But if not - veeery intriguing!
Stranger than that, some topics were open a couple days ago and disappeared from BBS when the comments closed. What the heck is up with that?
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I’m out of words. This is horrible, horrible, horrible! I don’t want to live in a country or world like this.
Our nightmares are coming true and we better do something about this before it gets worse.
We can start by addressing the focal point of the machine’s anger by supporting Manning, Snowden, and Assange. These are the good guys. They have sacrificed their lives so that we might know what the machine is doing to us.
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Are you for real? Nightmares are coming true? This has been going on in one form or another for decades upon decades.
Oh good then I guess we have nothing to worry about.
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Non sequitur.
Non sum qualis eram.
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More like quis custodiet ipsos custodes, AMIRITE?
Seriously though. I’m German. Up until a few weeks ago, despite all my misgivings - or not to mention my severely left-wing politics - I was highly critical of Anti-Americanism, and very much defensive of the US.
Right now, though? The United States Of America can go and fuck themselves.
We are supposed to be fucking allies. This is not what you do to your friends. This is not what you do to your brothers in arms.
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Am I missing something? Don’t Germany, Australia, Britain, France (and really every country) have their own state sponsored spy programs? They must have known all along that we spy on everybody just like they do…I am not saying it’s right or legal, just saying they don’t have much room to protest. Big Brother is here…and there, too!
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It’s called “feigned shock”… I suspect Merkelbot and Co. are quite happy to milk this issue. It’s a nice vacation from selling austerity.
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Hey now, don’t give America all of your love. Spread it around. Among your allies, all of the 5 Eyes nations (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) are spying on your country. This shouldn’t come as a shock. Russia is spying on you, as is China. I guarantee that most if not all of your EU neighbours conduct some sort of intelligence gathering operations against Germany and German citizens on a long-term basis.
That I expect. Russia and China are not “our” (there was a time when I wrote that without the parentheses) enemies, but they’re not allies either.
Our EU neighbors, though? Hell fucking no, The UK did, sure - but they’re pretty much a Police State directly subservient to almighty America, and want to leave the EU, anyway - so good fucking riddance to them.
But - for example - France Spying on Germany? Are you fucking kidding me?
That being said: What’s the appropriate reaction when you find that one nation is not merely just spying on you, but is in fact actively monitoring your embassy?
And spare me the conspiracy theorist bullshit. What would the United States do if they found out their embassy in Moscow was bugged? What should they do?
Bugging is so retro it just might work. Seriously, I tend to agree with AaronGilliland: welcome to the 21st century, and the 20th, and the 19th, etc. If you expect honor from the world’s power players I’m afraid you will be sorely disappointed. Of course it isn’t right. And I’m sure Moscow knows everything that goes on in the US embassy. The most egregious betrayal IMHO is the collection of data from the ordinary citizens worldwide. We’re (citizens of the world) all guilty until proven innocent in this “New World Order” (a term first spoken by G. Bush Sr.)
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The American embassy in Moscow was heavily bugged by the USSR for many decades. The Soviet contractors building it were co-opted by the KGB and built bugs right into the walls and decorations. That is not “conspiracy theorist bullshit”, and you can read a little history to see what we did do about it. Short story…politically not much.
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“Spying” can mean lots of different things. At its most benign, it could be passive signals intelligence - using hardware on French soil to record any data that crosses the border. You don’t need to tap anything in order to intercept wireless transmissions, although an encrypted transmission might only give you incidental data rather than content.
This isn’t conspiracy theorist bullshit, I might add. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one government is going all Cold War on another; just that there are degrees of intelligence collection and what one calls “spying” is rather subjective.
Of course France spies on us. Has spied on us and will spy on us again. Mostly for industrial espionage, though. There are a still a lot of fields where Germany and France are direct competitors.
However, as far as we know, they used traditional methods - intelligence gathering, some bribery, perhaps a bugged fax machone once in a while - but not even close to the extent of the current surveillance by the Orwellian alliance.
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You mean the Orwellian Alliance. at least that’s the term I’m going to use from now on.
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