| > I'm OK with signals intelligence. I'm not OK with "mass surveillance" in the sense that you probably mean it --- a giant data warehouse in Utah storing and indexing everybody's email. They are to all intents and purposes equivalent, it is pointless to be 'for' signals intelligence but 'against' a giant datawarehouse in Utah storing and indexing everybody's email the one results in the other. Besides email being only a very small part of the picture 'metadata' in the form of who-calls-who, when and how frequently is gold and there is no amount of encryption that will protect you from that data being captured and stored. In many cases the difference between dragnet surveillance and signals intelligence is as small as whether or not someone (not something) has looked at the data stored. And that giant data warehouse with all that email exists, it's just that there are three of them right now, one run by Google, one run by Microsoft and another by Yahoo regardless of what intelligence agencies are trying to accomplish in less direct ways. Other email servers are probably so lightly protected in comparison to those you may as well consider them compromised. Finally, I can think of several simple ways in which even encryption isn't going to make much difference in collecting that data regardless of what is happening on the wire, and I'm sure you can too. On the whole, the trend seems to be to store more data for longer times on an increasingly larger slice of the world population, some call that 'signals intelligence' when it suits them, others call it dragnet surveillance because that is what it is. We're talking about: email, web surfing behavior, mobile text messages, location information and so on. Whether Merkel is ok with having someone else's phone tapped while probably disagreeing with whether or not her own phone is tapped I'm against phone taps without warrants by the country where people reside, foreign entities should simply respect the law of the land and go through the proper channels. That way we don't have to deal with another 'Belgacom' (oh, sorry, Proximus). It doesn't matter whether you call it signals intelligence or mass surveillance, the key is that it is warrantless surveillance, and that it is usually not your own country doing it. > Meanwhile, for those of us concerned about dragnet surveillance, the answer is to replace the janky 80s protocols we use to send and receive electronic communications with modern encrypted alternatives. That's going to make a relatively small impact, it will simply raise the bar for the various agencies to attack the network infrastructure and servers of the more interesting choke points as well as the originating endpoints (consumer computers) a little harder. The only thing that will really stop that is to make it illegal in some treaty. (Not that that will every happen, but it would be a nice change.) I'm not sure why you believe monitoring Werner Faymann's phone would prevent a war or why it prevented one. Wikipedia has him currently working at the United Nations, what are you getting at here?. |
You can have an intellectually coherent position against foreign spying entirely. I'll point out the downsides of that position, but I won't tell you your argument is invalid.
But don't pretend. Either be against spying, own the potential downsides, and/or argue that those downsides don't matter, or accept that spying is coercive --- coercion is built into the concept, which is why we have the special word "spying".
BTW: Merkel authorized and the German NBD participated in SIGINT surveillance of Austria, is why I pulled that particular name out of my hat. Austria is interesting exactly because nobody would expect that particular spying target inside of Europe.