Over the last year, there's been a lot of writing about Edward Snowden. Most people have discussed either the question of (a) whether domestic NSA surveillance in the US is appropriate and whether it is breaking US law, or (b) the purely political consequences of international surveillance. There's been relatively little discussion of whether there is a problem in principle with international surveillance, and most of what there has been has concerned the question of whether or not privacy is a universal human right. But the recent Der Spiegel revelations combined with some earlier material points to a narrower but very troubling set of problems for liberal democracies.
Cross national cooperation between intelligence services has exploded post-September 11. This cooperation is not only outside the public space but, very often, isn't well known to politicians either. Such cooperation in turn means that intelligence services are in practice able to evade national controls on the things that they do or do not do, directly weakening democracy.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @09:50AM
9/11 succeeded beyond anyone's wildest evil plans. Mission Accomplished.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday June 26 2014, @10:22AM
If you want to know how the world would look like if "free market fairy" prevails, you only have to look at Yeltsin's Russia [wikipedia.org]
In both cases, there's quite little the plebs can do to influence their own destiny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by geb on Thursday June 26 2014, @10:56AM
The free market approach is a tool. It can be a powerful tool, and has its appropriate uses, but it is only one of many tools in the box.
Reforms in Russia were like somebody who had spent their entire life trying to cut down trees with a spoon suddenly being given a chainsaw. Now they see it is the best tool ever! It's a complete replacement for their spoon, so of course they'd want to try eating soup with it...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Thursday June 26 2014, @12:57PM
The foreign loophole is something that I've been aware of for a while, and my eyes were opened up to it a lot more at NetHui [youtube.com] in New Zealand last year [reddit.com].
I learnt then that the NZ spy agency (GCSB) was using contracting as an excuse to get around those fiddly laws about "no spying on NZ citizens". In summary, GCSB employees would be contracted out to other agencies (that didn't have this limitation), and therefore would not be working for the GCSB at the time they did the spying, so the rules didn't apply to them. They were "forbidden" from working at the GCSB building for the duration of their contract, but they still hat their memories, and other GCSB employees weren't necessarily that careful about watching who entered through the back door.
In other words, you sometimes don't even need foreign help to follow the letter of the law at the same time as going entirely against the spirit of it.
I commented on the more obvious version of this (i.e. international help) recently on slashdot [slashdot.org]:
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:37PM
So, who amongst these information sharing asshats will be/was the first to commit treason? And will it be a planned cooperative effort?