If you remember the Snowden revelations, then you also remember that the NSA had been using their power for other then "legal" purposes, such as for economic espionage, and for a long time already.
The US intelligence apparatus exists to protect the interests of the citizens of the United States. A foreigner who violates millions of dollars of intellectual property belonging to American citizens and companies is a threat to our interests, and also of the interests of the nearly 200 nations that participate in the global copyright regime, whose copyrights he was also violating. Foreigners on foreign soil have no rights as far as US law is concerned.
You are right, or something resembling right, as regards Kim Dotcom in relation to the US.
But there is still something troubling here for Americans, because it means that there is an existing mechanism (and/or set of social relations) in place by which American copyright interests can turn the intelligence agencies into their servants. Once such machinery exists, it is at least as dangerous to Americans as it is to foreigners.
I am not usually in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but this isn't some kid in Minnesota who downloaded a Metallica album. This is someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law. This is someone who pulled in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from this business. For a time this business was the single biggest source of pirated content in the world. All of this was done basically in the open. If this guy was an American citizen I doubt there would have been any resistance to getting warrants for this information. The slope would have to be very slippery for it to get to the level that the average American citizen would be the target of this type of investigation.
Uber isn’t stealing the property of others. There isn’t a federal law that you must have a taxi medallion.
Owning a taxi medallion of declining value is a consequence of the market.
Having songs you have recorded, spent money marketing on be stolen? That causes financial harm to the artists.
Imagine spending 40 million to make a movie. Now have your work given away for free to anyone that wants it. That is theft.
An unlicensed “taxi” service isn’t harming the rights of innocent people. It isn’t stealing. Who are the actual victims of Uber (besides women employees?) Really nobody. If you own a taxi, nothing is stopping by you from driving with Uber. Uber isn’t stealing your car.
If you truly wanted to dig through my comment history, you would find numerous posts criticizing Uber and AirBnb for basically establishing businesses on ignoring the law. However there is still a difference between feigning ignorance of the law and turning your middle finger up at it like Kim Dotcom did.
That are a vast number of laws that are designed to enrich one party at the expense of another. They are nearly always portrayed by the captured regulators as being for the safety of the citizenry when actually they are primarily for the purpose of enriching themselves and their cronies. One could argue that it is every citizen's duty to circumvent or directly violate those laws in the interest of fairness to all citizens. One could go further and assert that supporting such laws is immoral since as a result many people lose freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom to associate or move about, have reduced access to knowledge and opportunities, and the list goes on.
So what happens when a US citizen starts publishing stuff China (or Russia, or the UAE, or England, or any other state that doesn't protect free speech as we do) doesn't like?
What happens in 40 years, when the US is on much less-firm footing as de facto World Cop?
> So what happens when a US citizen starts publishing stuff China (or Russia, or the UAE, or England, or any other state that doesn't protect free speech as we do) doesn't like?
It is up to a government to protect its own citizens. There is a reason why Kit Dotcom is fighting the government of New Zealand currently and not the US government.
I think it is unrealistic to expect the US government to willingly give up one of their citizens to China or Russia over an issue of free speech anytime soon. And frankly I think it would be irrational for the average citizen to fear they would be involved in such an exchange.
Of course, acting with moral authority extends the lifespan of leaders, because such leaders get more support than the nakedly self-interested. And thus tying your hands today does in fact put off the day when you're weak.
And it is indeed incorrect because the constitution and the bill of rights do apply to foreign citizens who are visiting the us. Of course there are laws which are designed to protect citizens but don't protect foreigners but they are not actually part of the constitution
(Un)Fortunately they have the tools that others want to use, so other agencies request info & access. Very similar to how the FBI manages a database of faces for facial recognition [1] and your local LEO can query w/o a warrant or probable cause [2].
>(Un)Fortunately they have the tools that others want to use, so other agencies request info & access.
The bigger thing there is the fact that a kind of well orchestrated "operation" took place is now proven, disclosed, and fully admitted by NZ officials. The info disclosed gives a lot of background on how US NSA solicits "favors" from other states and on what pretexts
You phrase it as if this is a daily occurrence, "other agencies request info & access". In Germany, when intelligence agencies merge with ordinary law enforcement, we call it Gestapo.
There should be by definition very little overlap between the two. Law enforcement works nationally, where law applies; intelligence agencies can not work where law applies, because they would be in flagrant violation of it.
> "In Germany, when intelligence agencies merge with ordinary law enforcement, we call it Gestapo."
Who is "we" in this context? At least in the Germany I know most people actually call this "Gefahrenabwehr" (literally: danger prevention) or "Staatsschutz" and can't remember any historic event which has shown that this is a bad idea.
If right-wing terrorist join the party people call it "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" (National Socialist Underground) [0]
I'm more interested in how much corporate espionage and counter-espionage they do. If a foreign company steals/hacks domestic IP and that hurts the US economy, I wouldn't be surprised if they took action. So, if we can agree that this type of action is reasonable by the NSA, then I could see them justifying the surveillance of Kim Dotcom under industrial counter-surveillance.
It's not just protective. Snowden indicated that part of what they consider national security involves economic security. In their interpretation, their mandate includes corporate and economic espionage, and ensuring that the US maintains its economic edge.
And there are a number of cases where the NSA spied on payment processing companies. I haven't included those because you could argue that those may be related to tracking terrorism funding.
Economic security is national security. You can't really separate them once you're thinking past the immediate short term. A richer enemy will have better weapons, better technology, better surveillance, and better leverage.
> Economic security is national security. You can't really separate them once you're thinking past the immediate short term. A richer enemy will have better weapons, better technology, better surveillance, and better leverage.
Economic security for the well-connected comes at the expense of economic security for the average citizen.
It gave economic security to Ford Motor Company when a law imposing 30% tariffs on all foreign trucks was passed. Did that give economic security to the average citizen though? They must now pay a massive tax every time they buy a foreign truck.
It gives economic security to about 12,000 Ford employees and their families in Dearborn, MI and Kansas City, and probably another 50,000-100,000 people in supplier and supporting roles.
The agency's existence is politically feasible because people see it as protecting them from terrorists and foreign governments. Peforming spy-work to marginally improve the bottom line of American companies doesn't really stack up on that scale; even if you beleive the beggar-thy-neighbour economics that it implies.
And even if we naively assume some economic gain to the US, isn't that outweighed by the cost of their own war on encryption and instence on backdoors and other meddling in the ordinary functiong of the US tech industry?
>The agency's existence is politically feasible because people see it as protecting them from terrorists and foreign governments.
I don't think the US public really cares about the privacy of foreigners against US intelligence agencies. Further, it's not just some marginal benefit. If piracy became user friendly (think Netflix or better) and easy to do with impunity, it would be a massive threat to the entire American creative industry. No one is under the fantasy that we can root out piracy altogether.
> Peforming spy-work to marginally improve the bottom line of American companies doesn't really stack up on that scale
That's laughable. The Russians and Chinese have made a gold mine out of ripping off America's military and commercial technology. The cold war would have been very different if the Russians/Soviets hadn't stolen the US (and allied) technology on the atomic bomb.
It's neither naive nor some economic gain to be had. It's blatantly obvious and it's vast. If - as one example - China is really going to be a serious long-term competitor to the US economy (and its technology interests) over time, and it certainly appears they are, then the US needs to be capable of advanced economic espionage, exactly the same as China has been doing to the US on their way up. If they come up with some new marvel of technology (it's bound to happen given their economic scale at this point), the US should plunder it exactly the same as China and Russia would happily do to the US.
Something surely went on between the NZ Key government who were negotiating for the filming of the Hobbit. The studio seemingly found that massive tax breaks weren't enough, and it's been suggested that the curtailing of Dotcom's efforts was part of it.