06.30.13
We reserve the right to overdo things
The world is not a bag of nails for which the US national security megaplex is the hammer.
It is difficult to know when, if ever, that reality will be perceived in this country where it counts enough to make a difference.
From Der Spiegel, by way of the Guardian:
The German publication Der Spiegel reported that it had seen documents and slides from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicating that US agencies bugged the offices of the EU in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. They are also accused of directing an operation from Nato headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate the telephone and email networks at the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European council.
Without citing sources, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the building that were traced to NSA offices within the Nato compound in Brussels.
The impact of the Der Spiegel allegations may be felt more keenly in Germany than in Brussels. The magazine said Germany was the foremost target for the US surveillance programmes, categorising Washington’s key European ally alongside China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia in the intensity of the electronic snooping.
The US cannot and will not now ever be able to live down its exhausting campaign to make everyone believe that we were being spied on and probed in cyberspace, unfairly, by others.
Keys: Edward Snowden.
Christoph Hechl said,
July 1, 2013 at 2:48 am
About 5 years ago i had heard about a special Interface and API for government agencies to enter and analyse facebook. Aparently those reports, that never had any kind of reaction in the big media outlets, where accurate.
I am by now pretty sure, that facebook was helped to grow into the data moloch it is now only in the interest of creating a crowdsourced SOCMINT tool (social media intelligence).
All the “customers” have done nothing but help spying on everyone. Everyone who has at least a minor interest in civil liberties and the minimum of moral standards must see this and get the hell out of there.
Those who stay with said “service” make another statement of course and had it not already been that way stigmatises them as fools.
George Smith said,
July 1, 2013 at 9:31 am
Ouch. I have ‘friends’ acquired there who just won’t read a blog or anything outside if it’s not outlinked from FB. It became a defacto web reader, a tracking browser riding whatever os browser people must use. The only thing to say in my circumstance, and I’ve thought of closing the account many times, is I don’t let many ‘friends’ in and don’t post FB useful material other than what’s already on file here. It’s the Cliff Notes version of here.