In normal world this should be equal to declaring a war, right?
The real risk is that the UK needs Belgium's approval for any Brexit deal ...
> The information is contained in a confidential report produced by the federal prosecutor for Belgium’s National Security Council, a copy of which was leaked to De Standaard.
"Leaked". That provides an excellent pretext for arguing that e.g. British telecoms and IT providers should be excluded from the EU market as they're potentially fronts for British intelligence (a variation on the argument that people make about China all the time)
For example many embassies routinely batch collect all cell phone conversations within range[0], which is quite useful since they're often located in another country's capital city.
There's a reason why high level government officials have what are essentially VPN-ed cellphones now.
[0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...
It's thanks to that kind of complacent commentary that we're shrugging off intelligence agencies hacking into the computers of senators investigating said agencies. What a time to be alive.
This stuff is going to happen regardless of how upset people get, nation states have too much to gain by having more information and very little to lose when they're caught by an allie.
And it isn't like this is new to the information revolution either. Countries were spying on each other using the postal service and telegrams, or even eyeballs and fast horses.
As an aside your example isn't relevant, the CIA spied on their own government in that example, that is what makes it especially egregious and dangerous, since it impacts the state's own sovereignty. The actual topic at hand was nation-states spying on one another, apples and oranges.
Your original comment is certainly not naive, with the current state of affairs being undeniably ripe for spying operations.
> This stuff is going to happen regardless of how upset people get
Statists will only go as far as their people allow them to.
> The actual topic at hand was nation-states spying on one another, apples and oranges.
Believing there is any effective distinction, on the other hand, is not merely complacent but incredibly naive indeed.
We're talking about inter-governmental spying, a state's own political system has nothing to do with the topic. So your point about Statists isn't relevant here.
> Believing there is any effective distinction, on the other hand, is not merely complacent but incredibly naive indeed.
You think it is "naive" to believe there's a distinction between two states spying on each other and a state's own security services spying on their own oversight organisation? What?
that sounds very contradictory. unless you are implicitly admitting that intelligence agencies are above government oversight. in which case you might have a point.
naive to believe this theoretical distinction holds in practice. how many more whistleblowers' careers need to be destroyed for you to realize this? the highly sophisticated machinery developed for "international spying" in light of all evidence appears to be a convenient justification for domestic spying, sometimes outsourced to your own allies to keep it legal [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-01-17/how-britain-tried-inf...
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fiel...
In English there's a tradition of talking about this area as Flanders, going back to at least Marlborough, if not the Hundred Years War
Anyway, as far as the original comment, something much worse would need to happen for it to trigger a war between these two countries. Western Europe has seen enough way the past centuries indeed ;)
There are very good reasons to differentiate the north and south part of the country on a lot of subjects since they are so different. This is not one of those reasons. Defense is a federal issue and there is no reasons to make it regional.
I think the intent here matters and it doesn't seem like it was intended to harm the Belgian government or their people. That probabbly matters a lot.