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by harkyns_castle 4410 days ago
I'd like to hope there are some governments out there without that kind of mentality. Even if not, most countries wouldn't or couldn't be pumping in this kind of cash [1] to broad-spectrum warrantless hoovering. I imagine it'd be a lot more than the below figures too if you take into account contractors and creative accounting.

To say its all about 'terrorism' is laughable, and I wonder just how many trade deals etc have fallen foul of this, or how many people manipulated into doing what the likes of George Bush wanted. How could you trust doing business with someone in the US after these revelations? Just blatant lies all over the place, from the top echelons down. They've made it to the point where if you wanted to develop something you don't want them to grab, it means an air-gapped workstation. That probably doesn't have much mileage either.

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
2 comments
mhurron 4410 days ago
It wouldn't matter if there were governments that wouldn't spy on you. That you don't put your data on a server in the US isn't going to stop the NSA, that you didn't put it in the UK isn't going to stop GCHQ, and so on.

This idea that you just put your data in Europe and it's safer is just laughable. The treat is pervasive, it is intelligence agencies working together all around the world. It doesn't stop at any national border.

> top echelons down

I can't tell if you're being humourous or not, but the Snowden releases weren't really new information, they were proof of what information that had leaked out over the past decades.

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harkyns_castle 4410 days ago
All fair points, yeah. No, there was no pun intended with echelon, I originally had it the way I wanted, but beer and a spellchecker overruled me.

Pretty poor situation.

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Spooky23 4409 days ago
Everyone does it. The US gov treats it own stuff the same way, air gapping sensitive information and operating a national scale private internet.

The issue in my mind is that we are literally at war with individuals, and we focus on the symptoms instead of root causes. We have been assassinating, subverting, bribing and observing individual enemies of the state for over a decade.

Has doing this done anything to make us safer, as in how we felt in the 80s before international terrorism?

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