[tuco86]

How does distrust create trust exactly? I give out trust freely (within reason) until it's broken. Gaining back trust is hard. When I find out you went through my mails to find out if I'm trustworthy, you loose my trust.

When I learned of the BND's Crypto AG involvement I felt a deep sense of shame. All the CIA's fuck ups in south america for example. Not only the CIA anymore, we where involved too. Which makes me loose some trust in my government to act on my/our behalf. There is a cost to it and the benefits are questionable at best.

[zip1234]

One very prominent example is the Open Skies Treaty. Basically, signatories permit reconnaissance aircraft to fly over for the purposes of enforcing arms control. It is legalized spying.

[ciarannolan]

>How does distrust create trust exactly?

I think the idea is that it forces allies to interact with genuine intentions, lest one tries to deceive the other and is caught because of some intelligence that's been gathered.

It's the backbone of a gentleman's agreement between allies to not act maliciously toward each other.

[dathinab]

Yup like the time when the BND basically helps the US to do industrial espionage against Germany.

And the when the government found out about it (through Snowden) and didn't really do anything.

I mean even if giving asyl to Snowden wasn't possible permanently they could have given it to him for a short time to at least allow him to sadly speak in front of the German government.

Or EU countries allowing extradition to countries which haven't signed the human rights charter (like the US, ironically Russia did sign it).

Through then if we consider how the BND was founded it would be supposing if it's not at least partially undermined by some US intelligence agencies...

[deathgrips]

>they could have given it to him for a short time to at least allow him to sadly speak in front of the German government

Do normal people in Germany actually care about privacy? Do they take basic steps to protect their privacy?

[101404]

No, not really.

But normal people have been sufficiently scared, so that they "care" about privacy.

For example "Facebook bad" -- but everybody uses WhatsApp.

When you mention that its the same company, people don't care. The important thing is that they can tell their friends that they don't use Facebook, because "Facebook bad".

[dathinab]

Yes many do, actually most I have met do.

The problem is most also don't understand the consequences and possibilities even much less inversive privacy problems allow. Once you explain to them they tend to first care a lot, then are helpless because it seems holes and then at some point give up just because they don't know how to go on with upholding privacy.

But more importantly the bomb if the Snowden revelations was less about privacy inversion but industries espionage. Worse the institution which main purpose include preventing that had helped in it.