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posted by
mattie_p
on Tuesday February 25 2014, @02:00AM
from the I'm-not-directly-spying-on-you dept.
from the I'm-not-directly-spying-on-you dept.
Angry Jesus writes:
"German language magazine 'Bild am Sonntag' reports that, in response to Obama's recent order to stop spying on Angela Merkel and other heads of 'friendly' states, the NSA has instead ramped up spying on everybody Merkel communicates with. Cory Doctorow points out that this action demonstrates that the NSA is out of control and deliberately disobeying a presidential order with a level of duplicity worthy of a four year-old."
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NSA Secretly Continues Merkel Surveillance
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:55AM
Applying such surveillance to someone like Kim Jong-un or Ali Khamenei is one thing. Those people are heads of state of countries openly hostile to the United States, and spying upon people like them is both constitutional and reasonable. However, doing the same thing to the heads of state of countries ostensibly allied to the United States and with supposedly friendly relations, while still perfectly constitutional, is a bit of a stretch to call reasonable. Is it a smart thing to treat Angela Merkel the same way as Kim Jong-un?
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday February 25 2014, @05:36AM
The constitution is a red herring. It doesn't prevent the US from using intelligence agencies to gain diplomatic advantages. The important question is whether the NSA is doing this in contradiction to the President's orders. When the revelations came out, it became clear that the diplomatic gains from NSA surveillance were outweighed by the diplomatic losses from being publicly known to spy on allies. So now there are two possible explanations:
In the first case, the US has just burned a bit more of its political capital, by being publicly caught lying and will likely have to make some more diplomatic concessions to make up for it. Whoever at the NSA was supposed to stop them getting caught again should be in trouble.
In the latter case, the NSA is completely out of control of governmental oversight and needs some immediate intervention (i.e. fire everyone at the top 3 ranks and bring in completely new management).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Tuesday February 25 2014, @08:39AM
More over North Korea actively tries to spy on the US and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do to stop it, but fortunately their resources are limited. If the US wants to get into a spying war with Germany though things could turn ugly really fast, not least because Germany is a powerful voice in the EU. As we have already seen it looks like US companies will eventually be locked out of the EU market.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 1) by unimatrix on Tuesday February 25 2014, @01:08PM
Germany, France, and other EU countries actively try to spy on the United States and US Businesses as well. Hell France dedicates about a quarter of their foreign intelligence budget towards "economic espionage" which is mainly Spying on US and British businesses and giving that info to French companies. And they've done so for decades. It's an open secret and anyone inside the beltway, this isn't exactly new news.