US Government may have tapped Angela Merkel's Mobile Phone.

[energiewende]

My apologies for not specifically mentioning the context of recent history and the EU, I thought anyone informed would get that given that this was a EU discussion but apparently not. But then again, given that you are convinced that the UK fought for privacy at some point, please point out whenever that specific instance of international diplomacy happened.

I didn't say the UK fought for privacy, I said it fought for basic rights (and continues to be one of the best basic rights places in the world, along with Germany, the US, and others).

(and, worse, a part that apparently considered sufficiently unimportant to not have been included in the various international agreement the UK already joined).

Please educate yourself on the subject and then notice that it has only been proposed since the 1990s

The 1990s, and yet apparently not included in UDHR in the 40s or ECHR in the 50s, to which the UK is party. The problem with privacy rights is they're inherently ambiguous: past the more obvious warrantless searches, they also concern things that you say and do in public spaces, or in private spaces owned by someone else, or things that you pass "privately" to someone else voluntarily, who then may choose to pass those things voluntarily to third parties, etc.

as part of building a stronger and more united Europe.

Or weaker and less united, depending on one's view on that.

While I don't necessarily agree with the UK on this (nor am I sure exactly what their position is), I would point out that if relatively benign signals intelligence routes are blocked, invasive physical monitoring and searches is likely to replace it unless we first build a consensus on not trying to aggressively pre-empt terrorist acts.

This does not follow.

Morally maybe not, but politically it does. When there's another big attack people will want to Do Something and they will also want to know Why Didn't You Stop It? Currently "We're going to do nothing and we did not try to stop it." is not an acceptable answer. If US/UK want to stick with a purely common law, evidence-based, public justice system, then to a great extent that has to be an acceptable answer. I support that personally, but no such consensus has been achieved by proponents of privacy rights, to the extent the issue is engaged with at all.

[Gaidin]

The trouble here is that we're giving the NSA an immensely broad and indiscriminate mandate to collect information that... completely ignores and disrespects the idea that other countries have any right to draw boundaries.

This kind of thing makes sense if we see Europe as the subsidiary client states of the American Empire- of course we'd spy on the German prime minister then, just as the Soviets no doubt tapped all the Polish government phone lines back in the days of the Warsaw Pact.

It's actually not so two dimensional as that. It's more just that potential policy decisions of allies effects us as well. It effects our seat at the diplomatic table and it potentially effects our economy. The catch is while the policy the NSA was following was actually legitimate this time, it also seemed to be vaguely defined. 'Tap all the PM's phones' as a policy doesn't do you a lot of good when the particular phone you manage to tap, and you get caught doing it gets your country next to nothing but a crapton of political fallout. I'd say the policy needs fine tuning. And it's not the idea of an empire ruling over it's client states, unless you really think America isn't trying to do this to everyone to try and keep up with what's going on and have an advantage going into any room they walk into. This is just pure intelligence gathering that any country does. They(Germany among them) do it to us too. Legitimately so, to use the word somewhat amusingly.

It does NOT make sense if we adhere to the Westphalian standard of what "nation-state" means, where there really is supposed to be a firewall of sorts between states' dealings with each other, and states' internal politics. Just as it's a major faux pas for a foreign leader to comment on an American election, there's a serious argument that we should not direct our own spy agencies to routinely meddle in the political affairs of neutral or friendly countries.

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for but I'm pretty damn sure you can trust the NSA to not meddle in German politics unless their name is Edward Snowden as demonstrated by Siege with the timing of the release of this bit of information. If it was tapped long before his actual leak, the NSA certainly didn't interfere with their elections, nor did higher American executives. At least there's no evidence of actual meddling or interference. I'm remembering now the difference between observing the anthill and kicking the anthill. Get as righteous as you want, and I might agree without about certain things such as what's been said about the price to be paid about diplomatic fallout, but all that's been noted so far is the NSA has observed something they may not have authority to much longer. That policy may get a little more specific after the fallout is done. Or it may not. Who knows.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh.

Personally, I think that this kind of massive surveillance is very toxic on all levels, because it makes it so easy to subvert the idea of autonomy. The reason we even have a clearly defined concept of national sovereignty is because of this ideal that each nation is to some extent a 'black box' for others.

You don't get to fight a war because you're in a snit over the political system of your neighbor, you don't get to manipulate his politics, you don't get to intrusively monitor and watch his political system unfold when, realistically, the obvious use for that is to manipulate his politics or get into conflicts with people whose politics you don't like.

Now, I recognize that this principle is almost universally violated, but that still bothers me. And I think that if we want to have massive ELINT capability, and yet also have a workable system of alliances at the same time, we need to restrain ourselves. Which I guess means that our opinions have converged to a single, pretty close point.

Basically, the US is just utterly failing to show respect for the national sovereignty of friends and neutrals here, and I think that's what gives so much fuel to charges of "American Empire."

[K. A. Pital]

Basically, the US is just utterly failing to show respect for the national sovereignty of friends and neutrals here, and I think that's what gives so much fuel to charges of "American Empire."

But why should it? Realistically? Every time the US did something that European powers thought is wrong or some dissenting voices were there (Iraq?), Europe caved in anyway. "Do what you will, America". It logically follows that if your "ally" is nothing but a weakling who caves in every time the local schoolyard bully says "This day we hate JOHNSON. Cause he's GINGER", this "ally" is nothing but a sidekick of a bully. Bullies sidekicks don't get respect from the bully.

[Thanas]

My apologies for not specifically mentioning the context of recent history and the EU, I thought anyone informed would get that given that this was a EU discussion but apparently not. But then again, given that you are convinced that the UK fought for privacy at some point, please point out whenever that specific instance of international diplomacy happened.

I didn't say the UK fought for privacy, I said it fought for basic rights (and continues to be one of the best basic rights places in the world, along with Germany, the US, and others).

The UK scrapped the basic rights charter of the EU on their own. I don't know what the hell you are smoking.

Morally maybe not, but politically it does. When there's another big attack people will want to Do Something and they will also want to know Why Didn't You Stop It? Currently "We're going to do nothing and we did not try to stop it." is not an acceptable answer. If US/UK want to stick with a purely common law, evidence-based, public justice system, then to a great extent that has to be an acceptable answer. I support that personally, but no such consensus has been achieved by proponents of privacy rights, to the extent the issue is engaged with at all.

This also does not follow and only does if you have pre-conceived notions and assumptions.

[Siege]

Frankly I'm not sure the 'everybody knows everybody does it' mentality that presupposes all nations are in on it and it just hasn't come out that they are yet is even based in fact. To me feels awfully similar to the common misapplication of the term 'realpolitik' as thinly veiled apologetics for whatever shitty thing some country did: it's an easy cynical way to ignore the problem by assuming that everybody does it, so it's ok (or at least less bad) if 'our guys' do it too; misanthrophy dressed up as common sense.

Not only do I question whether that assumption is even true, but you're supposed to try and be better than this. When did 'well everybody does it' become a valid excuse to do something profoundly shitty?

[Gaidin]

I wouldn't even say 'realpolitik' is the word of the thread. More like 'real world'. Except for the countries that don't have intelligence agencies at all. These are people that literally break other countries laws in fashions determined by policy handed to them. If another country has such an agency or agencies, we can count on them to do it.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but Siege's criticism is that this entire practice is based on something we might very well want to get rid of if we aspire to build a higher form of world civilization. It's descended from the idea of global empire- that to preserve your power in every little isolated part of the world, you need agents and spies reporting and analyzing on every person in the world, and able to destroy any new power bloc that arises before it can mildly inconvenience your nation's commercial interests.

So there's something very negative about assuming that of course all countries with real economic force will have spy agencies with broad mandates that enable them to infiltrate and undermine all other countries.

[TheHammer]

Yes, but Siege's criticism is that this entire practice is based on something we might very well want to get rid of if we aspire to build a higher form of world civilization. It's descended from the idea of global empire- that to preserve your power in every little isolated part of the world, you need agents and spies reporting and analyzing on every person in the world, and able to destroy any new power bloc that arises before it can mildly inconvenience your nation's commercial interests.

So there's something very negative about assuming that of course all countries with real economic force will have spy agencies with broad mandates that enable them to infiltrate and undermine all other countries.

As for the presumption that "everyone else is doing it too". Maybe its not "everyone", but any nation of significance almost certainly is doing it. The idea that we should get rid of it as a step to aspire to build a higher form of world civilization is commendable, but unrealistic idealism.

It goes beyond tribalism, nationalism, or the idea of "old world empire". The major nations of the world are constantly competing for limited resources and thus they have a need to hold influence over the nations that control those resources. As long as that situation exists, there is going to be a need for those nations to do things idealists don't like, but are necessary. Like it or not, should the US "get rid of" the practice, this decision would absolutely be taken advantage of by other adversarial nations such as China, Iran, Russia et al. Your "higher form of civilization" may be achieved someday, but likely not in our lifetimes.

[Simon_Jester]

And my criticism is that I'm seeing the following process.

1) People dismiss the idealist reason to limit the powers and remit of spies.
2) Therefore, these oh-so-sophisticated people say, the spies should have freedom to act because they are WORKING ON OUR BEHALF or whatever.
3) Spies proceed to act freely, but it turns out they're a bunch of unreliable loonies whose paranoia and secrecy causes them to rapidly lose all sense of perspective and realism.
4) Spies act like loose cannons rolling back and forth across the deck of the ship of state, causing scandal after scandal, randomly alienating theoretically allied powers, and generally convincing the rest of the world that we're a pack of unreliable gits.
5) Someone complains that the spies' remit is too broad, that someone needs to rein them in and explain gently to them the meaning of the word "blowback", and how it can also apply to predictable regularly scheduled scandals that come from spy agencies behaving so scandalously that their own membership decides to blow the whistle.
6) Someone further complains that the spies are doing entirely the wrong things, have gotten far too large and arrogant for the scale of what they're actually accomplishing, that we need a lot less of them than we have, and that the whole thing is making the international order worse than it would be if we had less lunatic, unrestrained spying and covert operations.

This maps back to

1) Someone dismisses the idealistic argument... repeat previous cycle.

[Siege]

Firstly I reject that it is 'necessary' for nations to hold this kind of illicit 'influence' over each other. "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail" may be an oldfashioned sentiment but I don't buy the notion that international politics is a zero-sum game where an ill-defined set of 'rivals' will surpass us (resulting in an even more murky set of somehow-bad consequences) if we don't continue to let poorly supervised spooks run roughshod over civility and the rule of law. That's nothing but an untested axiom used to justify the status quo through pure unfiltered paranoia.

I should point out that not being a raging douchebag of a nation doesn't mean you can't protect yourself from the raging douchebag nations out there. But we're at a time now where our technological capabilities are starting to be capable of things that we should have a long hard think about implementing, because the way we handle them now is going to shape the future. And I firmly believe that poorly rationalized gut sentiments like "everybody does it" or "it's necessary" are leading us down a very undesirable road where we're allowing poorly supervised and essentially unaccountable people to run away with the keys to the kingdom. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Instead of being so scared of the Russians or the Chinese that you're throwing your citizens' rights under the bus (and those of all the worlds' citizens with it) you should be thinking about the kind of people you want and ought to be. Because I think you'll find your ideals and freedoms and rights are worth whatever price it is you pay for not sacrificing the future to an insane Orwellian security apparatus.

[bilateralrope]

Given the harm the NSA causes to the US when it's revealed what they are doing, and Simon_Jester's post showing the sanity of spy agencies to be very questionable, I have to ask this: What has the NSA done anything that actually helps the US ?

One thing I see from all the people defending the NSA, and from some people against it, is the assumption that the NSA is competent. But I've yet to see any proof of their competence.

[Rogue 9]

Given the harm the NSA causes to the US when it's revealed what they are doing, and Simon_Jester's post showing the sanity of spy agencies to be very questionable, I have to ask this: What has the NSA done anything that actually helps the US ?

One thing I see from all the people defending the NSA, and from some people against it, is the assumption that the NSA is competent. But I've yet to see any proof of their competence.

Paradoxically, proof of their competence would be you never finding out what they're up to.

[bilateralrope]

Given the harm the NSA causes to the US when it's revealed what they are doing, and Simon_Jester's post showing the sanity of spy agencies to be very questionable, I have to ask this: What has the NSA done anything that actually helps the US ?

One thing I see from all the people defending the NSA, and from some people against it, is the assumption that the NSA is competent. But I've yet to see any proof of their competence.

Paradoxically, proof of their competence would be you never finding out what they're up to.

Or me never finding out could mean that they aren't doing anything. Which is what I'll go with unless I see evidence to the contrary.

Surely they have a few cases that they could reveal to try and improve their public relations without harming anything ongoing.

[White Haven]

The NSA being good at keeping secrets may not entirely overlap with the NSA actually being good at doing something that is in any way useful. As it stands, we have evidence that they are bad at keeping secrets, and a lack of evidence that they are good at anything else.

Sounds to me like a good source to raid for funding to distribute to more worthy organizations.

[TimothyC]

Surely they have a few cases that they could reveal to try and improve their public relations without harming anything ongoing.

Letting anything out gives hints as to how they operate, which can be damaging to unrelated current operations.

[bilateralrope]

Surely they have a few cases that they could reveal to try and improve their public relations without harming anything ongoing.

Letting anything out gives hints as to how they operate, which can be damaging to unrelated current operations.

Given that the NSA doesn't know what Snowden took beyond the documents that he has released and one of the Guardian journalists is saying that they include documents that "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it" they would be better off assuming that their methods are already compromised. After all, if they don't know what he took, they can't know if anyone else took anything.

So at the very least they should be assuming that all methods on documents that Snowden might have taken are already known to their targets.

[Ace Pace]

Given the harm the NSA causes to the US when it's revealed what they are doing, and Simon_Jester's post showing the sanity of spy agencies to be very questionable, I have to ask this: What has the NSA done anything that actually helps the US ?

One thing I see from all the people defending the NSA, and from some people against it, is the assumption that the NSA is competent. But I've yet to see any proof of their competence.

Lets start with the following questions before writing a long explanation that may be wasted. Are you aware of the value of strategic intelligence? Of tactical intelligence? The difference between them, along with the different types of intelligence collection?

If not, then go read some wikipedia then return understanding that without a strong intel gathering capability, the ability of the United States to continue its current policies (leaving aside whether they are good decisions) would be impaired.

[bilateralrope]

I understand all that.
I understand how the NSA's data collection could provide that if it is processed competently.

I'm questioning if the NSA is that competent. Look at the links in that first link Simon_Jester provides to get plenty of examples of spies going off the rails. Is there any evidence that the NSA is any better ?

Then there is the guy in charge of the NSA:

When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed.

I wonder how much this cost, and what parts of the budget were reduced to allow for it.

When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in Afghanistan."

Those charts don't sound like they were useful information, even if the data used for them was reliable.

Yet the NSA still pursued a counterterrorism strategy that relies on ever-bigger data sets. Under Alexander's leadership, one of the agency's signature analysis tools was a digital graph that showed how hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, places, and events were connected to each other. They were displayed as a tangle of dots and lines. Critics called it the BAG -- for "big ass graph" -- and said it produced very few useful leads. CIA officials in charge of tracking overseas terrorist cells were particularly unimpressed by it. "I don't need this," a senior CIA officer working on the agency's drone program once told an NSA analyst who showed up with a big, nebulous graph. "I just need you to tell me whose ass to put a Hellfire missile on."

Here is an example of the CIA wanting specific information: A target for a missile. Not the graph the NSA provided.
Who should have been responsible for processing the NSA's raw data and outputting a target for the missile ?

But Alexander was never alone in his obsession. An obscure civilian engineer named James Heath has been a constant companion for a significant portion of Alexander's career. More than any one person, Heath influenced how the general went about building an information empire.

Several former intelligence officials who worked with Heath described him as Alexander's "mad scientist."...

Heath was at Alexander's side for the expansion of Internet surveillance under the PRISM program. Colleagues say it fell largely to him to design technologies that tried to make sense of all the new information the NSA was gobbling up. But Heath had developed a reputation for building expensive systems that never really work as promised and then leaving them half-baked in order to follow Alexander on to some new mission.

"He moved fairly fast and loose with money and spent a lot of it," the retired officer says. "He doubled the size of the Information Dominance Center and then built another facility right next door to it. They didn't need it. It's just what Heath and Alexander wanted to do." The Information Operations Center, as it was called, was underused and spent too much money, says the retired officer. "It's a center in search of a customer."

Building stuff not because they need it, but because they want it.

Blair put the NSA in charge of building this new capability, and the task eventually fell to Heath. "It was a complete disaster," says the former national security official, who was briefed on the project. "Heath's approach was all based on signals intelligence [the kind the NSA routinely collects] rather than taking into account all the other data coming in from the CIA and other sources. That's typical of Heath. He's got a very narrow viewpoint to solve a problem."

Like other projects of Heath's, the former official says, this one was never fully implemented. As a result, the intelligence community still didn't have a way to stitch together clues from different databases in time to stop the next would-be bomber. Heath -- and Alexander -- moved on to the next big project.

Narrow viewpoint when building a project, then moving on before it's finished.


What I'm looking for is evidence that the NSA is competent at what it does. Including examples of operations that were helped by information provided by the NSA.

[K. A. Pital]

Letting anything out gives hints as to how they operate, which can be damaging to unrelated current operations.

Creating a fully non-transparent structure will lead to this structure's degradation and self-obsession, which is exactly what happened to all intelligence agencies: CIA, KGB, etc. In the end the solution is not to create more non-transparent intelligence agencies, especially when the value of their intelligence is questionable, but re-think the whole approach.

[Metahive]

These arguments WRT spying agencies' effectiveness remind me so much of how religious apologists argue for God and the effectiveness of prayer. The NSA works in mysterious ways and us simple peons mustn't know or all those evil terrrrrrists win!

[Simon_Jester]

Paradoxically, proof of their competence would be you never finding out what they're up to.

That is proof only of their competence at concealing their activities. If that is their only objective, the easiest way to achieve it would be for them to do the minimum possible, so that there is as little as possible to hide.

In other words, for them to do nothing at all.

Surely they have a few cases that they could reveal to try and improve their public relations without harming anything ongoing.

Letting anything out gives hints as to how they operate, which can be damaging to unrelated current operations.

But in that case, how in heaven's name are we to judge whether or not they're worth keeping on? They have a proven track record of lying to Congress, let alone the public, about the scope and effect of their own programs.

And if the effectiveness of the NSA cannot be judged, then they are at best an organization in need of drastic restructuring. Just as the CIA had to accept reining in from the Church Commission when it became clear that their wild antics in foreign countries were destabilizing much of the Third World, the NSA will need to accept reining in now that it becomes clear that they are monitoring everyone, intrusively and irresponsibly. That is not what they were hired to do by the American public.

Lets start with the following questions before writing a long explanation that may be wasted. Are you aware of the value of strategic intelligence? Of tactical intelligence? The difference between them, along with the different types of intelligence collection?

If not, then go read some wikipedia then return understanding that without a strong intel gathering capability, the ability of the United States to continue its current policies (leaving aside whether they are good decisions) would be impaired.

If we are forced to rely upon such inherently unreliable and disobedient servants to "continue our policies," then sooner or later the contradictions in those policies are going to become painfully obvious to us when the servants make a big enough mistake, or exceed their remit in a big enough way. Better to deal with that problem now than later.

[Broomstick]

Wait, does the US government (and people in general) really expect to be spied on by European governments?

The government certainly expects it. A lot of the people are, as usual, clueless and blissfully ignorant, but those who think about the matter usually come to the same conclusion, that governments spy on other governments. Let me put it this way, I'd be shocked if European governments weren't engaged in some level of spying on the US. It is certainly within their self-interests to gain "insider" information.

If so, why does the US (government, media and people in general) typically react in such over-the-top fashion when someone is caught "spying"? To the point of sometimes executing people (granted it's usually "enemy states" that get caught).

Because no one wants their secrets to be revealed.

Enemy state spies evoke greater response because they are more of a threat. I expect that people caught spying for allies are dealt with much more quietly, probably by simply deporting them back to their home country.

During the entire Cold War the USSR did try to spy on the US. Government offices from embassies to the White House in Washington DC have had music and other sound piped in next to the windows in an attempt to foil listening devices that may or may not be focused on the windows from the outside. Governments pay informants to send them information all around the world, and throughout history. There have been a number of Russia Republic spies caught since the Cold War ended. I'm pretty sure there have been others as well but most of them time, like I said, it's dealt with by deportation or it comes to light after the person has left the country.

The question here as I see it is whether or not the NSA has been engaged in extraordinary levels of spying on allies. I don't feel I personally have enough information to pass judgement on that.

[K. A. Pital]

Just a minor note to what Broomstick said - the USSR was a prime adversary whose very existence had the goal of creating a totally new world order. European nations aren't.

[Simon_Jester]

The question here as I see it is whether or not the NSA has been engaged in extraordinary levels of spying on allies. I don't feel I personally have enough information to pass judgement on that.

Since it's become pretty clear that the NSA is trying to head toward a system whereby they observe everything anyone says using an electronic device, ever... Honestly, if they aren't already engaged in excessive levels of spying on allies, they will be sooner or later.