He manages to twist it into a matter of defense against terrorism:
> Our collection of information regarding terrorist financing saves lives. Since 9/11, the Intelligence Community has found success in disrupting terror networks by following their money as it moves around the globe. International criminal organizations, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, illicit arms dealers, or nations that attempt to avoid international sanctions can also be targeted in an effort to aid America’s and our allies’ interests.
> As we have said previously, the United States collects foreign intelligence - just as many other governments do - to enhance the security of our citizens and protect our interests and those of our allies around the world. The intelligence Community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies and monitor anomalous economic activities is critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.
I like how Reuters shies away from acknowledging Greenwald is a journalist. Apparently reporting on the US government makes you an activist these days.
Whether he is a journalist or not, Greenwald is unquestionably an activist. Or is Reuters required to take sides with Greenwald on pains of becoming an Enemy Of the People?
But yes, I am in fact saying that by classifying Greenwald as less than a full journalist (an activist, a blogger - anything but a professional who earns his living as a credentialed journalist), Reuters is tacitly supporting the government in their surveillance state normalcy and is, as you so colorfully put it, an enemy of the people in a very literal and immediate sense.
I particularly like how you kind of strawman me and ad-hominem me in the same phrase there. Are you aware that the phrase "enemy of the people" is associated with Stalinist propaganda and therefore has overtones of Red Scare and McCarthyism, and in later years a certain dilettante unseriousness on the part of the acusee? Or is that just unconscious for you? Either way, thanks for contributing. I'm always happy to see people who are unclear about what I'm saying to ask for greater clarity.
Reuters isn't tacitly saying anything. Reuters is not required to take a particular, positive POV toward Greenwald in order to be objective. That isn't objectivity.
Really? By identifying Greenwald as an activist and a "blogger" (which is shorthand for "amateur") and not identifying him as a journalist, Reuters most definitely is making a tacit statement of his role in society, whether that makes you uncomfortable or not.
By identifying his role using words that indicate amateur status, they are supporting the government's desired point of view.
I honestly can't tell if you're just naive or if you disagree with me politically, but if it's naivete I encourage you to start thinking about these issues.
I just watched the TV report. It's interesting. The slides mention as targets: Petrobrás, French diplomacy, SWIFT and Google. Everything pointed towards MITM attacks against VPNs and SSL. There was no reference to what data was stolen.
The NSA actually called the program and said that none of their spying was used to give unfair advantages to American companies but they wouldn't comment further.
There were slides showing that they perform MITM against Google, as well as a slide that listed diplomatic and economic espionage as NSA goals.
"The NSA actually called the program and said that none of their spying was used to give unfair advantages to American companies but they wouldn't comment further."
Nobody goes to the NSA and submits an RFP for insider information. Such information flows through informal, undocumented channels, e.g. an agent moonlighting at a bank or speaking freely to a friend.
Given (a) the value of the information and (b) the level of integration between information industries and the NSA, I think it improbable that this information hasn't leaked. Presuming the prior, it would be expected to dis-proportionately benefit firms who are closer to the leaky source, i.e. U.S. firms, a benefit which increases proportional to how quickly said information goes "stale". One may argue that Brasilian firms similarly benefit by being closer to the ultimate source, the Brasilian government. But that, in turn, is similar to the old Deutsch logic that bribes paid to foreign governments should be tax deductible to German firms - it's fighting fire with fire.
Also of note there: claims that NSA does routine MITM attacks on SSL/TLS. The relevant programs are "Hush Puppy" and "Flying Pig", mentioned around the middle of the article; the description is a little garbled (I suspect translation artifacts), but the basics are clear enough.
They broke SWIFT ?! WTF!
That's every inter-bank transfer - I mean everything. If they have swift they have everything. I should have thought of it but really this is breathtaking.
Now imagine every IT purchase decision in Brazil from now on, "We need a few million dollars of network or computer systems, should we buy it from Cisco or HP or IBM or Microsoft? Hell no! It'll probably have an NSA bug in it."
Repeat for every other country and you have the beginning of the end for the dominance of the American computer industry.
Except that isn't happening in Brazil, let alone every other country. Instead we will have more hot air and stoking of jingoism from politicians. At the end of the day everyone including the US is always buying huge piles of electronics from China, which is also big and scary - and yet their industry does not magically go belly up. Usually meeting requirements at a decent price is a higher priority than whatever elicits extreme angst from Hacker News.
China has been documented engaging in state-sponsored industrial espionage on a number of occasions. To write off everything they do as "geopolitics" and not to do the same with the US is a non sequitur.
> Usually meeting requirements at a decent price is a higher priority than whatever elicits extreme angst from Hacker News.
Your comment would have been stronger without the quip against people at HN. As you can see from all the hot air from politicians this is not localized to HN.
Sounds good to me. That's what you get when you become a sleazy company willing to do anything for money (in the short term) without thinking of the consequences.
Plus, it's also quite ironic considering US started this whole trend of banning companies because of fear of bugs in their hardware. Reap what you sow.
Would any company from any country want the NSA to spy on them? If the NSA is passing data about foreign companies to us domestic companies, what says it would pass data on domestic companies to it's "favorites"? That data would be a big bargaining chip and the NSA is aiming for cooperation everywhere.
One would assume that any company anywhere that wasn't beholden to the intelligence community would be presently looking for a secure, open source, open-hardware-if-possible, end-to-end solution for networking their data.
It amazes me that many people still think the US are somehow the "good guys" or "the leader of the free world". Americans believe themselves to be the chosen few favored by God. Their manifest destiny leaves no place for the rights of other peoples. With such an ideology, it is not surprising that they hold foreigners in contempt and show a severe lack of interest for the fates of others.
Americans are far more dangerous than any bearded fanatic.
The government is put into place by the Americans. They elect their own masters. Most of what the U.S. government does is the result of the demands and constant pressure stemming from the electorate. The aggressive foreign policy is a direct consequence of the semi-religious jingoism and fundamentalism that affects the majority of citizens.
I'm met both online and offline a ton of Americans with aggrandizing and myopic views. Like you I used to think they were victims of the state that time is past. They share the blame.
It is in the NSA's mandate to engage in any espionage that will give the US an advantage. I just don't understand how us spying on a state-controlled Brazilian company is somehow a revelation. It would shock me if we didn't spy on every major foreign company in the world.
I wonder if commenters like Aloisius would complain if the army would go and start pillage while out and engaging war. It would surely give the US an economic advantage, which is surely in the mandate of the army. It has all the guns needed to do a armed robbery, to shake out some farmers, or to simply take slaves. The Roman Empire was partially gained through economical advantage of pillaging nearby countries, and surely that was within the mandate of their army.
It would however be News for the rest of the world. The army, the listeners and the spies do have some international Rules that are enforced through political channels. When that fails, the media takes over as a gap action before the army gets involved.
In this case, doing industrial espionage with your military intelligence force is not within the rules.
Obviously complaints about spying are questioning whether the agency's purpose itself is just. Fulfilling one's purpose is still unethical if that purpose is unethical. Nobody excuses murder when the story is "Murderer commits murder. News at 11."
The agency's purpose is espionage. Espionage, last I checked, was illegal everywhere. Yet every country has spies. Being just or unethical doesn't factor into it.
We know spying is unfair, but it is also something people have been doing since the dawn of civilization in order to get a leg up on the competition.
What the hell are you talking about, of course ethics factors into it!
We, as a society, tolerate espionage so long as it is a necessary evil. One of the terms in the assessment of "necessary evil" is the ethics of what they are doing, the other term is how necessary it is. If your evil:necessary ratio goes to high then it program stops being something that any reasonable person can support. As an extreme example to demonstrate the point, if the CIA were installing cameras in the showers of randomly chosen UK citizens, that would be wildly unethical and have next to no benefit, thus making it wildly unacceptable.
You can't just dismiss ethical criticism of a spy agency by saying "well they operate illegally anyway". Excluding the ethical term would be giving them a license to do anything they please.
Part of the problem is that "target" and "adversary" have been defined-down to "everyone" and "anyone who isn't naked to pervasive surveillance."
In this case the topic is economic espionage. So who gets the information? Oil companies? Hedge funds? That's a bit different than intelligence on actual military threats.
Just oil? Or can Embraer count on Boeing having their bid numbers? And, if so, is maintaining a friendly relationship with the US in Brazil's interests?
This sounds like Charles Stross's description of the future cold war in his novel Halting State. Instead of the "twentieth-century model, an electronic Pearl Harbor", the attacks are subtle. "Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we'd notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don't want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a sliding of your choice."
> ...is maintaining a friendly relationship with the US in Brazil's interests?
Honestly, what alternative do we have?
As a side note, I'd like to acknowledge the genial strategy of our leaders and voters when they removed any signal of intelligence from the higher positions in the government, and fouled the US plans of gaining any insight. I judged you badly, people, sorry.
As a Brazilian this smells as typical American arrogance.
The name of the game is trust. You probably wouldn't imagine so, but Brazil is a major IT costumer to the US. Now, how do you think your customers feel when they discover that the stuff they buy from you comes with unwanted surprises?
> Would you feel differently if the NSA were "they"?
Presumably not, at least in general, otherwise the outcry against persistent Chinese spying on the USA (e.g. the Aurora attack on Google) would probably be much much larger within the U.S.
Just like nobody in the US says "we have to make sure China has a strong military", and yet we somehow don't find it hypocritical that the US argues they should themselves maintain a strong force.
Or maybe you find that hypocritical, but the USA as a whole does not.
I assume other countries' currently spy on us. Maybe no individual country has quite the intelligence capability that we do, but the US is one giant target and I imagine the combined intelligence of every country that spies on us is fairly close to our own capability.
That doesn't make me feel any different that the NSA does it to others. If anything, it means that the NSA is necessary to even the odds.
“The Department of Defense does engage” in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. “The department does NOT engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”
Well, at least we can all understand the "war on terror". It was really about securing US dominance via a secret system of courts, government agencies and secret deals between US corporations.
All this due to the ending of the cold war.
Now, with the Arab Spring, the US has sought to twist events into a new war. Syria being just the beginning...
It's pretty clear at this point that the only thing propping the hollow US economy up is this massive spying apparatus. You can only front-run the market for so long, though, before the whole thing comes crashing down in a heap.
This isn't news. If anything, it's news that the NSA is doing something right: Looking into the large, nearly-state-run enterprises of not-so-friendly foreign powers.
That's funny, here I was thinking that the NSA's surveillance resources were supposed to be used to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Where do you see a threat from Brazil's oil enterprise?
Oh, wait, I forgot that the NSA's resources are, in practice, also used to conduct industrial espionage:
here I was thinking that the NSA's surveillance resources were supposed to be used to gather intelligence on foreign threats
I'm noticing a pattern of you being outraged about discovering your own misconceptions to be ill-founded. The NSA just gathers foreign intelligence. Military and terroristic threats are the most important source of foreign intelligence, but we have a vested interest in knowing What's Going On. As does everyone else, of course - it's a two way street.
I know full well that the NSA does more than gather intelligence on foreign threats. The link in my post is about the allegations of industrial espionage that surfaced in the 90s.
This is not just about the US wanting to know what's going on. This is about the US engaging in the sort of behavior that we have rebuked China over -- state-sponsored industrial espionage. It is an abuse of power, regardless of what "everyone else" is doing.
As for my own misconceptions, I assume you are referring to the notion that I and many others had that the NSA would not go as far as to actively sabotage civilian cryptography. I was not alone in believing that. It was common to dismiss such allegations as far-out conspiracy theories until the day the story broke. You can look at the archives of sci.crypt and the cryptography mailing list if you do not believe me. As I said before, nobody expected the NSA to share its cryptanalysis techniques. Nobody expected the NSA to alert us to weaknesses in publicly designed ciphers or cryptosystems. It was widely assumed that the NSA would watch us fumble about and try to find exploitable weaknesses in our systems, not that they would be part of a vast conspiracy to introduce such weaknesses. Plenty of people thought that the NSA was trying to balance its signals intelligence mission with its duty to protect our own communication from foreign interception. There is nothing wrong with being outraged to discover that there is no real attempt to strike such a balance and that the crypto wars are not over by any stretch.
> This is not just about the US wanting to know what's going on. This is about the US engaging in the sort of behavior that we have rebuked China over -- state-sponsored industrial espionage.
If the NSA were only focused on industrial espionage with these programs then I don't see why they felt the need to target Google (a U.S. corporation in the first place).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but oil is certainly a strategic resource and even if the U.S. never had a single plan to do anything with Brazil's oil, there are both military and national-interest reasons for knowing what Brazil knows about their own oil reserves, refinery capabilities, etc.
Likewise there are embargo-related reasons to know if Brazil has secret agreements to export oil to nations embargoed by the UN.
And the worst part about it all is that whether NSA is around or not, the U.S. does live in a cloak-and-dagger world, just like every other nation does. They can either somehow convince other nations to go about things "fairly" as well (possible with the EU and Brazil perhaps, not so much with Russia and China), or they can immerse themselves in that game as well.
Certainly the U.S. is familiar with the problems of industrial espionage and secret economic agreements (some would say "bribes"), as both have been deployed against the U.S. (yes, even by friends, even by allies).
> If the NSA were only focused on industrial espionage with these programs then I don't see why they felt the need to target Google (a U.S. corporation in the first place).
>here I was thinking that the NSA's surveillance resources were supposed to be used to gather intelligence on foreign threats.
Not necessarily.
From their mission statement:
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.
Uh, it's been happening to the US for decades, with nobody seriously talking about war. The most recent "famous" example that hit the news was Chinese cyberattacks into Google (the "Aurora" attacks), which didn't elict a drumbeat for war. In fact right before Snowden Chinese industrial espionage was one of the topics that President Obama discussed in a summit with the Chinese Premier (which, again, was reported in the media).
Brazil's a rising regional power, so the United States inherent interest is to reduce its influence.
Brazil's not so much an antagonist, but the ruling party under Lula da Silva is traditionally associated with workers parties in Cuba and Venezuela. Brazil has also moved toward increased cooperation with China and Russia in defense and industrial manufacturing, as well as considered aligning its considerable influence on the oil market with OPEC, and is under constant lobbying from Venezuela to do so.
Most importantly, the United States would very much prefer that no power centers of comparable strength arise in the Western Hemisphere, and Brazil's GDP is closing in on France.
Powers in relative decline are always suspicious of rising powers, especially if they could potentially one day exert significant influence in a nearby region.
Foreign policy's a zero-sum game in the IC and defense world.
That describes why Brazil could have been a threat, if it were not so friendly, not why it should be described not-so-friendly now. Unless you want to say that any government with even the remotest socialistic roots, that trades with China and Russia more than the USA is being classified as Not-So-Friendly. While I have my doubts that it might actually be how USA administration classifies things, I hope it isn't true.
"Potential adversary" means anyone that may not acquiesce to the requests of our government, and/or form military partnerships with rival major powers.
Every nation thinks about defense in the same semi-paranoid (or "neorealist") mindset. It's a consequence of a dangerous existence in an purely anarchic system.
Maybe because Brazil does not trust USA, after the WWII interference (long story, I won't explain now... I explained it in past comments), and what happened in cold war (US backed a military coup, sending aircraft carriers even, to ensure it would happen), and what it still do with our media (the biggest print company for example, has as backer the Ford Foundation, and the company was created when Ford Foundation was a sort of front for the CIA, their magazines still are greatly pro-US, and it is obvious they also help with US espionage)
Or you know, re-creating the south-american navy fleet right after Brazil officially announces it found massive amounts of oil on its coast!
Thus, since US do that, and Brazil does not trust US, Brazil closed ties with Russia and China, that actually help (specially Russia... For example, when US sent its newly reactivated fleet to our shores right after the oil news, Brazil invited Russia to do massive military drills, and yay! Russia did came, and ÚS ships started to stay very wide of brazillian waters)
Well, Brazil has pretty much been on bed with the US for the last decades. Sure, it might have cheated on the US on some occasions, but so has the US. That's as friendly as it gets.
After these leaks, however, I think there will be a transition to a "not-so-friendly" state soon, unless the US takes some serious corrective actions.
But ... They have spied on everyone. Every politician, every mistresses, every CXO looking to move, every VC talking to a new equity partner. Everyone.
This is not one scandal - this is the same scandal played out over a mlion times, but there are just not a million front pages of newspapers.
Many years ago Schneier said that our data trails were like the pollution of our age - and it seems we have just noticed the NSA are the Dark Satanic Mills. This is a fast turnaround - will we be as fast in creating an EPA or a Clean Air Act?
In fairness to the US intelligence agencies, this might have been a verification of their claims since they are looking fairly aggressively for oil sources outside of the middle east. The President or higher ups in the DoD would seek this information for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately people are distrustful because our country has taken so much unscrupulous action for energy in the past.
In 2012, the US imported 40% of their oil. Of that, 13% is from the middle east. The middle east hasn't had the lions share of US oil consumption for quite some time.
Yes that's actually the reason I mentioned this. When GWB was in office they started looking for other sources outside of the ME and we get most of our imported oil from Africa now AFAIK. Brazil could be part of that push.
He manages to twist it into a matter of defense against terrorism:
> Our collection of information regarding terrorist financing saves lives. Since 9/11, the Intelligence Community has found success in disrupting terror networks by following their money as it moves around the globe. International criminal organizations, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, illicit arms dealers, or nations that attempt to avoid international sanctions can also be targeted in an effort to aid America’s and our allies’ interests.
> As we have said previously, the United States collects foreign intelligence - just as many other governments do - to enhance the security of our citizens and protect our interests and those of our allies around the world. The intelligence Community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies and monitor anomalous economic activities is critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.