> they are extremely distrustful of foreigners. Not just westerners but even in africa they've been caught acting with malicious intentions(the last example I read was how they backdoored the African Union's IT systems). Very hard to trust someone who trusts no one.
You should checkout what the DHS, TSA and NSA have been up to...
>>> He spoke more about the erosion of international trust because of American surveillance activities.
The irony here is that the US is one of the most hacked countries on the planet. And where do you think those attacks originate? Yup, you guessed it. . . Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
One should not give trust when one has not earned it.
> distrusting your government appears to be really foreign to you.
That "U.S. Government" collecting, indexing and analyzing all data of any citizen must be an entirely different entity from the "United States Government" after all.
> My job is to worry about myself personally and I really do not care about what Timbuktu knows about me.
They can't do shit to me personally. My own government and corporations however can.
If “Timbuktu” has information about you and it's friendly with your government, it's likely to trade it; if it has it and it's unfriendly with your government, it's a target for your government’s espionage. In either case, it's a place where your information is that your government is likely to be trying to get it (unless you are a particular target, not in isolation, but along with other information), so if you are concerned about your government, you should be concerned about it.
The inherent bias and paranoia in your statement is staggering. Although, it's understandable if you come from a country with a particularly brutal and pervasive secret police.
In my country, the intelligence agencies have no powers of arrest and must defer to police enforcement.
"most notable attacks have been traced near-exclusively to foreign actors"
Most criminals are "foreign" because most of Earth's population is foreign.
"The attack surface is vast."
Because we made it vast. It could have been small.
"We're literally veering into cartoon territory here"
Yes we are, because spying on millions of people and then leaving that data unprotected is childishly irresponsible.
Ordinary citizens are the injured party, not companies. They have given up privacy and control over their devices. Even the software that runs on voting machines is copyrighted and secret, and when inspected, it turned out even the basics of security have not been followed.
Now that the chickens are coming home to roost, why are you so vehemently looking to absolve them of all responsebility?
> If I am paying so much money for our awesome military industrial complex, I would AT LEAST expect them to know how to stage the house to make it look like a robbery. Or copy the hard drive and then bug the machine & router to intercept all future communications.
You forget the fact that the majority of operative work abroad is done by minimum wage hired thugs who don't give a single fuck about the intricacies of the execution of the task at hand; they probably even like the fact that they can help make the US look like a bunch of morons.
>That's a rather odd thing to believe. As an American, I certainly never felt like I was immune to foreign governments spying on me.
That's mostly due to cold war propaganda, and the tons of movies and shitty shows like 24 that legitimize the notion that small nations (e.g Yugoslavia of yore, or some insignificant arab country) have spies everywhere and perform high-tech James-Bond like operations...
Foreign governments never cared/dared to spy on Americans like that. Most don't have the means, and even if they did, they have no power to do anything about what they find. And of course it they were caught they'd have to face the consequences from the 100000-pound global military, diplomatic and economic gorilla. Plus, most world governments are in cushy terms with the US.
The worst offender was USSR -- and then again it was insignificant to the level that is going on today, and USSR was a paper-tiger in lots of ways itself. Smaller countries, at worst, try to spy a little on delevelopments involving their country, e.g to spy on some diplomats, large businesses with interest in their area, etc. And that's talking about countries like France, Germany etc, not Belize or Albania or whatever.
Believing this is like believing the school bully is equally bullied himself from the other children.
>I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people
Seriously? While they have to plan for an inside threat, do you really think that they don't view their own citizens as being more reliable than foreign nationals?
You should checkout what the DHS, TSA and NSA have been up to...
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