[liberationtech] Defund Domestic Spying

[Caspar Bowden (lists)]

On 07/24/13 00:28, Kyle Maxwell wrote:
> NB: please do not interpret any of the following as a personal
> endorsement of the status quo.

OK

> See, here's the thing. You have to recognize political realities here,
> and the realities are such that the political will does not exist
> right now to re-examine how intelligence services perform their
> function in foreign countries. That is, after all, why they exist.

True that acquisition of intelligence outside territorial borders has 
always been literally lawless for every state, but the issue of 
PRISM/702 is that this is data which has been sent to the US (or 
technically anything in range of its extraterritorial jurisdiction also 
- but the practical risk is less). And EU policymakers have allowed 
themselves to be deceived that this was somehow "protected" - and it's not

> General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, said recently:
>
> "You’ve got a bunch of countries in Europe hyperventilating about
> America’s foreign intelligence operations. But the truth is that all
> nations conduct espionage. Nobody has claimed that America’s Bill of
> Rights, which protects the individual privacy of our citizens, was a
> global treaty.

The funny thing is that at past interntatiuonal conferences of privacy 
commisisoners, US give representatives used to make speeches which were 
paeans in praise of the Fourth Amendment with the clear implication that 
these are somehow relevant to the rest-of-the-world, up until 2011 anyhow

> No one can claim that these nations aren’t doing
> similar things against America and many others.

Doing what exactly? Spying on Americans' data _for purely political_ 
purposes is totally illegal under European human rights law. The 
converse is not true. How much US data is sitting on EU servers anyhow?

> If some countries do
> have a legitimate compliant about our espionage activities, it’s
> frankly because we are just better at it than they are."

..or maybe the US just doesn't recognize foreigners have any privacy 
rights, and has more opportunity...

> (ref: http://www.afr.com/p/national/transcript_interview_with_former_KnS7JDIrw73GWlljxA7vdK)
>
> This is the political reality in the US right now: the scandal is not
> that the NSA is fulfilling its chartered mission of collecting SIGINT
> on national security threats. At the risk of oversimplifying, the
> scandal is that the *Foreign* Intelligence Surveillance Act is being
> used for *domestic* surveillance.

Yup. That is the agenda.

> Europeans and other "foreign persons" who are concerned that the
> United States government spies on them will likely need to look for
> remedies other than US law.

Agreed. Or exert sufficient diplomatic and economic pressure (i.e. 
embargoes on US companies) until that law changes

CB


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