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Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Quick and easy way to deal with this: disregard the daily news entirely unless it profits you.

Israel left listening devices around the White House? Big if true, but we have the Department of State, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to deal with this crap in approximately that order. If it turns into anything big or is part of something bigger, someday there will be a book about it.

News in all its forms is a product. Either the product has value to you, or it doesn’t. If a piece of news has value to you, you will find a way to verify the claims, either personally or getting someone else to do the grunt work for you.

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> Big if true, but we have the Department of State, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to deal with this crap in approximately that order.

The big news here is that nothing happened and nothing is gonna happen. People should start getting some clues from what should happen, and yet doesn't.

Edit: at the time of this edit, the news is already on the front page of the Guardian and the BBC. Completely absent from the NYTimes and Washington Post. Pay attention to what doesn't happen.

Spying is part of life. We do it, they do it, everybody foes it.

When was the last time that British or German spies were caught spying on the US president? And even in that case, the relationship between the US and Israel is a unique one: as one swears to be the best friend ever of the other, while enjoying lavish funding and unwavering political protection. While the president of the US can accuse people who vote for the opposition to be disloyal to Israel. That is, disloyal to a foreign country.

The UK is part of the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance and as such has no real need to spy on the US president. I would assume that Germany is spying on the US but just hasn't been caught (at least not publicly).

> The UK is part of the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance and as such has no real need to spy on the US president.

Because belonging to the "five eyes" means they get to hear the official and private conversations of Trump for free?

And since the answer is "no, of course not" your argument is completely irrelevant.

You missed the point. If the UK gets caught spying on the US president then they're out of Five Eyes. That would be a much greater loss than anything they could gain through such spying.

Germany has much less to lose.

And Israel has nothing to lose from the US?

(Apart from the fact that you're obviously trying to change what you said here, as you wrote "the UK has no need to spy".)

> "And Israel has nothing to lose from the US?"

Honestly? Probably not. Obviously they get a lot from the US, but given past outcomes what are the chances they lose that support no matter what they get caught doing? A huge proportion of Americans have an unflinching fondness for Israel. For some evangelicals, support for Israel is even seen as a religious imperative.

That is where one issue where you'll see some agreement between the two parties...unending commitment and funding for Israel...it seems like Israel is making out like bandits from this one-way "relationship"

How about the other way around? The US got caught spying on Germany a while back

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-usa-spying-idUSKC...

You know what can happen? We can vote the current President out for being too buddy buddy with a foreign power, if we politically determine that to be in the best interest of our country. That’s the political process.

Your Edit reinforces my point: news is a product. If a publisher calls attention to or does not call attention to an issue, that means it wasn’t in the interests of the publisher. They’re market participants, not public servants.

That's not how democracy is supposed to work.

That is exactly how a functioning democracy works: you protect your interests, including your collective interests (in Defense, Intelligence, Diplomacy, Trade).

The innovation with democracy is it gives members of the citizenry the chance to have a say and shape our civil institutions. News is what you use to figure out what you should be investing in or divesting from, and to keep tabs on how well your own interests are being served. Anything more than that is noise without value, an intellectual poison.

Where it fails is when individual interests win out disproportionately at the expense of the collective interest and civil institutions are left to rot and atrophy.

You can waste everything else, but you shouldn’t waste time. That’s the one asset you are innately born with that you can not recover once it is gone.

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