[translation mine] A group of activists has flown a drone over a US base.
Instead of bombs the aircraft dropped leaflets — with the appeal to the soldiers and spies to quit the Service. The paper-stuffed mini-drone was launched over the "Dagger Complex" at Darmstadt by the Berlin-based Peng Collective last Friday. It was the highest point so far in the "Intelexit" campaign, wherein the activists want to motivate spies to resign.
The huge military base in the Darmstadt suburb Griesheim was chosen because the "Dagger Complex" is the largest and most important branch of the US spy agency NSA in Europe. Among other things, the "European Cryptologic Center" is housed there. "Germany is watching these activities without doing anything and is avoiding responsibility," said Peng representative Sascha Fugel. "We know that some of the participants at the US base are wrestling with their consciences."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @08:30PM
did any of the leaflets actually end up in the complex? from the video it looked like they were way long on their "bombing run"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @08:58PM
Yeah, like "How much trouble would I get in if I used that thing for target practice?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 06 2015, @09:30PM
I'd worry about the effectiveness of the campaign itself. I'm sure the employees probably heard of the leaflets and some have looked up the campaign [intelexit.org] online. They were probably sent a memo telling them to stay away from anything that was dropped, due to legitimate (if amusing) security concerns. It was a publicity stunt, and it has achieved the goal of grabbing the attention of the employees in the facility as well as around the world through international press (BBC, NBC, Spiegel, etc.)
Rumors and reports have suggested that there are Snowden sympathizers within in the NSA. Some of these people disagree with the scope of surveillance and welcome the increased transparency but don't support Snowden's choice to leak and still believe in official internal channels. Other employees like Drake and Binney already took the step of quitting long before 2013. Who's left? People who lap up the official justifications for surveillance and believe they are doing "good", people who like earning a steady income, maybe a handful of people who are scared, even if it is "of course not illegal to quit your job" as Intelexit puts it, and even a couple of leakers. You can't get any more docs to leak if you quit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @09:11PM
See the NSA spies on EU countries citizens to do an end-run around EU privacy laws. This is give the EU gubments the info they want and let's the average EU citizen the smugness they desperately want that their somehow better off than those filthy Americans.
Everyone is in bed with everyone else to violate the last few laws that protect citizens from their governments. If the world were informed and sane at all we would have gutted every incumbent politician in every parliament or congress in every major capital of the world long ago.
But, please....keep dropping your leaflets.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @09:27PM
> and let's the average EU citizen the smugness they desperately want
you mad bro?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @04:12PM
> and let's the average EU citizen the smugness they desperately want
you mad bro?
Not speaking for GP, but considering that our (US's) idea of privacy is re-defining collecting and surveillance and then continuing to collect and surveil while having a secret court that r̶u̶b̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶m̶p̶s̶ passes 99.97% of all requests while Europe has actual personal information privacy laws and even tries to enforce some of them, Yeah, I'm mad!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday October 06 2015, @09:29PM
> This is give the EU gubments the info they want and let's the average EU citizen the smugness they desperately want that their somehow better off than those filthy Americans.
EU politicians are watching this carefully, and the EU court just invalidated a data sharing agreement with the US...
Because while armchair protestors in the US will feel like they are doing enough with a cute Twitter hashtag, Europeans have a bad habit of taking to the streets in mass when they get really pissed at something, and actually switching their votes (to the extremists, recently).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @10:15PM
Snowden did a little more than send a cute tweet.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday October 06 2015, @11:00PM
Ahh, taking a page from Hillary Clinton's playbook and labeling those who don't agree with you "extremists." What a good little bootlicker you are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday October 06 2015, @11:33PM
You can easily find hundreds of examples of either US party calling their opponents extremists, why would you single out one side? Not a great trolling effort, we expect better from you.
The EU has actual "extremists" parties, as part of the concept of having more than two. Wherever they place themselves on the political spectrum, they have been there for a while nibbling at the market share of the more mainstream ones. Especially since 200X, courtesy of immigrants, refugees, outsourcing, unemployment, ecological disasters, political corruption, and just plain "who should I blame for my problems", they are actually a significant presence that the moderates have to accommodate to govern (but as independent entities, not like the Tea Partiers).
Related: There's a saying that the extremes meet: The EU's very-far left and the very-far-right actually have a lot in common in their programs. Ownership of the monopolies is one of the few differences.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2015, @11:09PM
You see in the US, when people do this we get OWS and the likes of the Tea Party, respectively. Protesting organizations are systematically dismantled, teargassed, enticed, entrapped or simply false-flagged into a jail cell. Our voting options are for the blue koolaid or the red koolaid. Do Europeans get that reference, drinking the koolaid? Anyway, all other political options are downright worse or so pathetically outgunned that it will be a massacre.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @03:38AM
Really? How much does the United States have the Iraqis and the Taliban outgunned, with very little domestic political opposition to bombing and droning the crap out of them, and yet those guys are still ticking and creating problems? Imagine those situations times a million, with all kinds of messy morale and political issues like Air Force pilots refusing to drop ordinance on their home town because people are protesting or rioting? Can you really see American soldiers obeying an order to machine-gun crowds of men, women, and children or dropping napalm on suburban Boston? I have a hard time seeing that. Because those soldiers and cops and other government types have families who are not safe on bases and they'll very much want to not show up for duty so they can take care of their own. What that would look like is very like what happened in New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, the US military has its own citizens massively outgunned, but they also rely on those citizens to keep doing things like reporting to work at factories to build their weapons and ammo and grow their food and drive their shit around and keep running their communications networks instead of blowing up roads and bridges and planting IEDs everywhere and showing up and firing mortars into bases and all kinds of shenanigans that educated, armed, pissed-off citizenry can get up to. And eventually, trained military and retired military will say enough is enough and start fighting with the rebels.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:52AM
You underestimate the power of propaganda.
I suspect the establishment already is tracking who lives where and the location of their families and friends. Their computer models will assign people to bomb only those they cannot relate to and areas they have no relatives in. Employee profiles will show them who is capable of following orders to death and many will. They learn quickly from their mistakes and have near-infinite resources.
People are emotional creatures and love order. They love it when someone tells them what to do and the establishment knows this and will quickly neutralize any would-be leaders the citizens may have. They control media, so they control everything. I suggest destroy media first because it is a tool of the evil and is controlled by the enemy. Get to the people who work in media and when media goes silent, everything will fall back into the hands of the rightful owners: the people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @06:53AM
Do Europeans get that reference, drinking the koolaid?
While they may think they understand the reference, I would bet that a significant percentage of americans don't know the origins or fully understand the connotations.
Jonestown was nearly 37 years ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 07 2015, @12:31PM
OWS and the Tea Party were treated completely differently.
The Tea Party was almost immediately co-opted into a wing of the Republican Party with the help of Fox News. Basically, it turned into a rebranding the Republican Party because many Republicans were very very unhappy with George W Bush's presidency and the billionaires who like to own politicians feared that if they didn't do anything some of those angry Republicans would consider voting for Democrats. You might have noticed that as the memory of how much of an idiot George W was has faded, the term "Tea Party" has also faded from the political discussion - that wasn't an accident.
By contrast, Occupy Wall Street was immediately met with completely illegal police brutality. As in, the NYPD corralled protesters, pepper-sprayed them, and arrested them for the non-crime of walking down a sidewalk carrying signs and chanting. This was a constant feature [theatlantic.com] of OWS throughout its existence, and the protest ended with a coordinated attack by police at 3 AM against protest camps around the country in which citizens' property was seized and destroyed and many people were arrested and beaten without anything remotely resembling probably cause.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday October 06 2015, @10:46PM
I suppose they could just shake their fists in quiet desperation.