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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 22 2013 @ 05:22 AM EDT |
as the granparent poster, I do not agree with what the NSA is doing, and I think
that data gathering to this extent will be extremely tempting for the people
working on the data (and we have multiple examples of proof of this, just in the
whistleblowers, they are leaking information that they really should not have
been accessing in the first place)
and I do agree that if the NSA is doing industrial espionage and giving the
results to US companies, this is a problem (not because of the espionage, but
because this then puts the NSA in a position of explicitly favouring some US
companies over others). While I doubt that this never happens, if it happens as
a result of policy as opposed to some rare bad apples doing it for private gain,
then both the people in the government who set the policy, and the people in the
companies that agreed to this belong in jail. I will make exceptions for cold
war type spying where the NSA and CIA would spy on an outright enemy and try to
get the needed info to people who could evaluate and duplicate things. I will
make a similar exemption to the spying that the KGB did trying to get secrets
from US companies to that they could produce things domestically.
But those were targeted tasks with that as their primary and acknowledged
purpose. If they are gathering info for anti-terrorism purposes and then using
the results for industrial espionage purposes, that's operating under false
pretenses.
But the point I was trying to make is that if anyone thinks that the US is the
only country around that has a spy organization that is spying on
"foreigners" and "allies", they are sadly mistaken. Painting
this as "Evil America" carries the implicit assumption that no other
country would do this sort of spying.
I believe that every country in the world has their spy agencies busy spying on
foreigners and their allies, to the extent that their budget will allow it.
And most countries around the world are quite open about spying on their own
people (look at India requiring that Blackberry provide them with a back-door
into their encryption so that they can spy on their own businesses) Most places
this isn't even news.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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