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posted by
mattie_p
on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:00AM
from the I'm-not-directly-spying-on-you dept.
from the I'm-not-directly-spying-on-you dept.
Angry Jesus writes:
"German language magazine 'Bild am Sonntag' reports that, in response to Obama's recent order to stop spying on Angela Merkel and other heads of 'friendly' states, the NSA has instead ramped up spying on everybody Merkel communicates with. Cory Doctorow points out that this action demonstrates that the NSA is out of control and deliberately disobeying a presidential order with a level of duplicity worthy of a four year-old."
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NSA Secretly Continues Merkel Surveillance
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(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday February 25 2014, @09:36AM
The constitution is a red herring. It doesn't prevent the US from using intelligence agencies to gain diplomatic advantages. The important question is whether the NSA is doing this in contradiction to the President's orders. When the revelations came out, it became clear that the diplomatic gains from NSA surveillance were outweighed by the diplomatic losses from being publicly known to spy on allies. So now there are two possible explanations:
In the first case, the US has just burned a bit more of its political capital, by being publicly caught lying and will likely have to make some more diplomatic concessions to make up for it. Whoever at the NSA was supposed to stop them getting caught again should be in trouble.
In the latter case, the NSA is completely out of control of governmental oversight and needs some immediate intervention (i.e. fire everyone at the top 3 ranks and bring in completely new management).
sudo mod me up