Since we are taking jabs at countries for 'liberty', most of the world is not running a spying machine that would make Soviet Union green with envy.
Back to the practical problems, conflating personal liberty and rights of giant corporations to spy on your and sell your private information is rather unhelpfull. I don't think anyone is buying it.
Simply put, people don't care enough. We haven't had the history some countries like Germany have had to realise the huge amount of problems spying on your citizens causes.
And they've put it through whilst most people are busy being annoyed over the Brexit and you've got a situation where people just have bigger (in their minds) things to worry about.
And the same goes for the rest of us and our respective governments as well, of course.
I think a big part of the problem here is the idea that not only are governments responsible for protecting their own citizens, they are also only required to respect the basic rights of their own citizens. That inevitably leads to one of two conclusions if governments then feel entitled to conduct mass surveillance of everyone else's citizens.
One possibility is that those other people's own governments consider the surveillance a hostile act. Now everyone's government starts a cold war of information with everyone else's, even if they claim to be allies.
The other possibility is that those other people's governments do not defend their own citizens from the mass surveillance, or even actively collaborate in it despite their apparent obligations to their own population. Now people don't just have cause to mistrust foreign governments, even supposedly allied ones, but they can't even trust their own government to protect them.
Obviously neither of these outcomes is exactly taking the political or ethical high ground. But no-one seems to want to take a lead on what to me is the obvious third alternative: everyone accepting that we are all part of a global community today, and that international trade and communications and transportation are in all our best interests, and that which country's flag was flying when you were born probably has very little to do with whether you are a good person (probably) or a real danger (in which case everyone has legitimate grounds to go after you and already has processes in place to do so), and that because of that same level of international infrastructure and modern technology it should be just as possible to recognise everyone's basic rights by default and collaborate to go after legitimate surveillance targets anywhere instead of drawing artificial borders that are mostly accidents of history and creating a them-and-us culture that serves no-one.
Modern politics reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, which seemed amusing at the time:
I really enjoy the fact that everyone gets very up in arms because a foreign nation tries to spy on Americans, but the fact that US corporations have to secretly divulge info to the govt regularly is joyously accepted. I'm sure the cognitive dissonance would be astonishing if most of those people were capable of critiquing their own ideology
To expect citizens to revolt against their own country and force their "secret services" to not endanger public security any more by using and buying such 0days is one thing - that's unrealistic.
But seriously, I wonder why other governments and their citizens are not demanding drastic actions, like trade suspensions, expulsion of diplomats or other sanctions, when other countries get caught in such ways of spying or otherwise just screwing all over human rights. This one would be a perfect example to take a stand on - UAE is far smaller in oil trading and political importance than e.g. Saudi-Arabia.
Or why there seems to be next to zero public funding for providing open source, auditable hardware and software that could prevent such spying in the first place? The European Union could easily fund the development of a truly FOSS Android-based phone, down to the processors. Instead everyone seems to rely on Chinese or American products, which are both subject to non-European influence (in the US via NSLs, in China due to the massive influence of the Party on any major company).
Yes, spying is practiced worldwide by just about everyone. I never claimed otherwise. But that doesn't mean it's tolerated. Every country wants to spy and not be spied on.
I don't think the majority of people are outraged that a spy organisation spies. The things that have got most people rattled are:
a) The breadth of the spying, including many, many innocent people.
b) The long-term storage of data, likewise.
c) Deliberate weakening of security standards we all rely upon.
d) The fact it's all happening without democratic debate.
If instead of the above, they threw innocent people's data away, targeted their intrusions, engaged with the democratic mechanisms, and used their expertise to improve internet security, a lot of people would be much happier.
If I remember correctly, Europe relies on US to spy on it's people so technically they are not spying on their own people.
Personally, I find it unrealistic to expect that such huge opportunity(almost by the second log of citizens activities and opinions as well as precise control of who sees and hears what) will arise and the people in power will not exploit it.
China is taking a more direct route but in general it looks like the political elite's dreams are about to come true on global scale.
edit: HN really hated that idea :) I could not find the source of the claim but it makes sense to me.
We are talking about governments spying on their own citizens and not on other countries.
And I find it incredible that opinions such as yours are so prevalent. Because yes, it should be surprising, as this happens with governments that we elected and that should serve us and our rights. And when this happens too often with no relief in sight, it usually means that we need a revolution.
The NSA revelations are actively hurting USA's economy. You may not see it, but European companies have started to actively avoid US-made and US-hosted products and services, because guess what, people do care about it, especially companies that are increasingly worried about industrial espionage from American companies.
Therefore I usually think of shilling when seeing such pieces of opinion, because it's easy to gather a bunch of trolls to try and shift the public opinion by posting such messages on public forums - I know that at least the Chinese and the Israelis are doing it. But then I think of Occam's Razor and remember that people are in essence just sheep wanting to be shepherd.
You don't actually think the U.S. is the only country spying on its citizens or the world right?
The only reason it's even a huge deal is because of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In countries without a similar constitutional guarantee your spy agencies probably aren't even breaking the law. They're probably watching everything you do with total impunity.
I'm not defending any state spying, but geopolitics is different from individual interactions. Not anticipating the moves of the other nations means risking millions of lives of people from you country. Wars, nuclear wars, economic depression, etc. It's sad but we haven't yet solved many problems to fully become a democratic Earth (e.g. distribution of knowledge, election of politics. which basically are the same problems we see in distributed computing systems).
I have partly to agree, nobody cares if you spy on their citizens. However, once you can prove industrial espionage it becomes a totally different discussion.
Yeah that's what has bothered me. Everyone is rattling on about spying on US citizens (which of course is justified) but hardly anybody seems to point out the blatant disregard for everyone else.
As a non-US citizen (UK) the NSA supposedly has all my communications stored. I have no say in that and it seems that people are treating that as a non-issue. 'Ahh foreigners won't mind.' But we do
Back to the practical problems, conflating personal liberty and rights of giant corporations to spy on your and sell your private information is rather unhelpfull. I don't think anyone is buying it.
reply