Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
(Found it since I cannot read the full economist article)
Random detail, but "Maximator" is a type of beer (a Starkbier/Doppelbock) brewed by the the very popular Augustiner brewery, not a brand in itself. In fact, it's a Bavarian tradition for the names of Doppelbocks to generally end in "-ator": Celebrator, Optimator, Animator...
(offtopic 2) How's the beer?
.. but it's stuck in Wikipedia's review queue, which means it will be weeks before it goes live, if ever.
Does that happen for all new articles on Wikipedia now?
If so, I'm glad I no longer edit Wikipedia.
You should give it a try. Though, original research is not allowed (and the much maligned bureaucratic processes around frequently vandalized and controversial topics get tiresome), a lot of topics are simply missing or have inadequate or out-of-date information. A lot of content that goes into blogs and other publications can be neatly summarised in a wiki-page, which is really useful to anyone doing a quick research on the topic.
One of the last articles I created on Wikipedia was of Sunder Katwala[1] who at the time was head of the Fabian Society[2]. Shortly after, a deletionist calling itself Wireless Keyboard stuck a Speedy Deletion notice[3] on my article, even though it was patently obvious to anyone who bothered to follow the links why he was notable.
I've only ever created one Wikipedia article since then. Fuck Wikipedia and fuck deletionists.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sunder_Katwala&ol...
Edit: and has already gone live at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximator_(Intelligence_allian....
- Hacker News 4 month ago https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Crypto%20AG
- April 8, in Dutch https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/nieuws/2020/Nederland-maakt-d...
BTW https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/ works for circumventing economist paywall.
"Certain countries were deliberately not allowed to join because within the Maximator alliance they were considered as lacking relevant (signal-/crypto-analytical) expertise and/or experience. Allegedly, these countries include Norway, Spain and Italy."
And
"Belgium is a notable exception in north-western Europe; it had not been invited to join Maximator because of its lack of SIGINT (and COMSEC) capabilities." adding in a footnote that "Belgium’s cryptographic behaviour and discipline were problematic. For instance, at least once it compromised its own communications via a basic mistake in key management;"
:D
Nice going GCHQ!
That said, you could spin it another way: the UK had enough good will and political capital to lean on its European neighbors for a bare-minimum amount of help. "We can tell you how it works, but it's on you to figure the rest out".
Naughty kid not paying attention is also relevant -- you've only got so many hours in the day and so many hours to map out threats. This was still the Cold War and nuclear holocaust was a bigger priority than distant Latin American dictatorship.
Yes, both France and the Netherlands are broadly aligned with the UK, and would fight alongside them in the case of any existential threat. But for colonial wars one might think they'd be happy to see Britain get some egg on her face.
[0] I'll just link to skeptics.se here, where the accepted answer is that the evidence does not completely support this, but there are plenty of links for more reading https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exoce...
Any “friend” who won’t help with small things is a lot less likely to help when it really matters. And the Dutch and French both also have possessions in the New World full of people perfectly happy with the status quo who deserve protection from would be conquerors.
Looks like the IFF info didn't help.
(Had either of the British carriers Hermes or Invincible been sunk, Britain would have retreated.)
But this will not work (at least for decades.) To get favors from US many will spill the beans. And that's not as bad as doing that to Russia or China. EU is made of countries with their own national interests
I had hoped that the EU would break down regulatory barriers and force bureaucratic consolidation, but it seems progress has stalled in the last 10 years.
The EU should have one single intelligence agency - not a dysfunctional collection of fighting to be part of the "in" group.
As such it's basically guaranteed to keep country specific intelligence agencies.
A EU based agency would be interesting, but given how problematic it is to oversee it probably a nightmare to.
A stronger cooperation between EU agencies should be possible.
The EU is heading away from that, not towards it.
The EU is an economic and political union. It might not be complete or perfect, but integration has been happening decade by decade. We now have a single currency, a unified supreme court, a single charter of citizen rights, freedom of movement and a single market. A lot of younger people feel European, there is such a thing as an European identity. Each one of these things was considered impossible at a certain point. It is a slow and hard process but it is happening.
I find that the English-speaking media is particularly keen on repeating the mantra that "the EU is collapsing". I've witnessed this all my life. It became more intense now with Brexit, but the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it. There was also a shift in attitude with the current administration in the US, which sees the EU as an adversary instead of as a friend. So I would take anything I read in English about the EU with a pinch of salt...
There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.
This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU(which European countries tend to just ignore instead of being so hasty like Britain as to actually have a referendum - and if a referendum must be held, just have it again and again until you get the right answer...) and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too.
Perhaps, but that was not what I said at all. What I said is that the UK always chose to not participate in the project, and that the project went on without it. Now, with Brexit, the UK government is openly hostile towards the EU. This is just a fact. Another fact is that the EU was able to maintain a united political front when faced with Brexit (which posed -- and was meant to pose -- an existential threat to the EU). So the reports of EU's death may be premature, as the cliché goes...
> This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU
Well, I haven't. On the contrary, I said that it is a very hard and incomplete project, and that it was considered impossible by a lot of people every step of the way. I also mentioned that it is among the younger generations that a European identity is growing. Not established, but growing.
> and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too
Well, I ignored none of that. You just assumed it.
What I think is undeniable is that there are vested interests in the collapse of the EU. The EU is composed of many small countries, that could be much more easily pushed around if not acting as bloc. Naturally, those who would indeed like to push Europe around dislike the EU. With the stance of the current US administration and of the post-Brexit UK government, it just so happens that in the current year of 2020, a lot of people with such vested interests write in English.
Europe is not a country and the ones that insist it to be are high society politicians who like to pretend they are above the populace.
Let's not forget that it took even the USA several centuries and a civil war to get to a mostly unified country. Even then there are vast differences in culture between states. If (say) California and Texas wouldn't have been part of the USA right now, I doubt they'd choose to merge into it.
Compared to Europe, the US is as homogeneous as it can be. Of course it's heterogeneous but at a regional and sometimes city area level with different customs and traditions imported from other countries and "americanized"
The strength of Europe is their independent countries and diverse cultures and every time an enterprising young fella had grandiose ideas it always ends with an absolute bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions.
Generally speaking the ones that want a "fully integrated" Europe are:
1 - Politicians with a manager mentality who like to get frisky with concepts such as "economies of scale", "standardization", "efficiency", etc. Yet they don't know anything of what a society is.
2 - The usual crème-de-la-crème "citizens of the World" who in reality are just old-money rich ignorant "kids" who can't even fathom what an existence of a real "normal" person is.
3 - People from other parts of the World who think Europe is a country
4 - Competing superpowers who root for the destruction of Europe and know very well that their only hope is for it to implode.
Specifically, Belgian police and standards are a joke. Just look at the way they bungled the response to the French terrorist attack where the perpetrator(s) fled to Brussels / Molenbeek. The rest of the country might be ok, but Brussels has exposed that the Belgian government is unable to govern its own largest city. And how Belgian passports are issued locally by every town government rather than a centralized authority. A joke.
Belgium is as divided as the EU itself. We have 6 distict governments: federal, flemish, walloon, french, german and brussels. That doesn't help in any way.
The things that happen here are sometimes too crazy to mention, like the time a serialkiller escaped because the 2 cops guarding him didn't do their job, and also didn't have any bullets in their guns to stop him. Surreal.
Set up a Google Alert for appropriate keywords, this could get really interesting in the coming months. That's all I can say, sorry.
I think it is ethically problematic to assist/work for any espionage/intelligence related work during peace time.
Of course, that excludes spying to steal intellectual property.
When I learned of the BND's Crypto AG involvement I felt a deep sense of shame. All the CIA's fuck ups in south america for example. Not only the CIA anymore, we where involved too. Which makes me loose some trust in my government to act on my/our behalf. There is a cost to it and the benefits are questionable at best.
I think the idea is that it forces allies to interact with genuine intentions, lest one tries to deceive the other and is caught because of some intelligence that's been gathered.
It's the backbone of a gentleman's agreement between allies to not act maliciously toward each other.
And the when the government found out about it (through Snowden) and didn't really do anything.
I mean even if giving asyl to Snowden wasn't possible permanently they could have given it to him for a short time to at least allow him to sadly speak in front of the German government.
Or EU countries allowing extradition to countries which haven't signed the human rights charter (like the US, ironically Russia did sign it).
Through then if we consider how the BND was founded it would be supposing if it's not at least partially undermined by some US intelligence agencies...
Do normal people in Germany actually care about privacy? Do they take basic steps to protect their privacy?
The problem is most also don't understand the consequences and possibilities even much less inversive privacy problems allow. Once you explain to them they tend to first care a lot, then are helpless because it seems holes and then at some point give up just because they don't know how to go on with upholding privacy.
But more importantly the bomb if the Snowden revelations was less about privacy inversion but industries espionage. Worse the institution which main purpose include preventing that had helped in it.
But normal people have been sufficiently scared, so that they "care" about privacy.
For example "Facebook bad" -- but everybody uses WhatsApp.
When you mention that its the same company, people don't care. The important thing is that they can tell their friends that they don't use Facebook, because "Facebook bad".
Of course, only bad actors like China, Russia or North Korea would break patent-, copyright law, etc. The good guys only do it for financial gain or to get coordinates for kill drones.
Everyone plays the great game, even allies vs other allies (e.g. the French spying on US businesses, and the US NSA spying on Europeans during negotiations).
Is it due to a poor public understanding of realpolitik?
And was it really peaceful? All that espionage essentially led to the proxy wars across the globe that cost countless number of lives.
Espionage is not used by governments to maintain peace and reduce war fatalities - it's used by governments to gain an edge over their adversaries. Espionage existed in WW2 as it did in times of peace - to say peace is a consequence of it is absurd.
MAD is the only thing that has prevented major world conflict.
- Where are all the SAM installations?
- How many aircraft and tanks does such and such country have?
a) it befuddles the trite commercial spying done by google et al
b) you decrease the signal to noise ratio for those operating the honeypot by adding your mundane activities and have them spend resources trying to figure out what you are really up to
But, you (Americans) should be angry because democracy has been in backslide hardcore in the US. Europe has dealt with populism before, unlike the US, and is more likely to recover from these bad times than the US—and it is really due to a multitude of reasons.
My bet is that the US closed the operation once they knew they were certainly busted. Who knows, maybe even a European counter-operation of some sort occurred. The US probably has several other covert operations now based directly on intelligence from the devices with poor encryption. Sure, post World War 2, the US maybe had legitimate reasons to be spying on such activities in general in Europe. They also probably knew (practically guaranteed) over time from various patterns (from good data—whatever that data could possibly be) that a super coordinated secret intelligence operation was going on between European countries, while not knowing who exactly they were (as in not being able to put their finger on what was going on, but still being able to rely on intuition to just know and to justify the means).
Swiss laws permitting ultra-confidentiality in banking do absolutely have a legitimate purpose, but they are problemsome too. Unless you have been living under a rock in recent years, everybody knows that there are plenty of oligarchs (Russian oligarchs in particular) funneling dirty money through the Swiss banking system. America also effectively has its own form of oligarchy too (by the way, guess who is listed top in the world for wealth inequality by Credit Suisse? Russia. Guess who is second? USA.), so it is not like this route seemed unnatural.
Even if the Europeans knew for certain that somebody had some sort of substantial counterintelligence on them, it would still take a long time to figure out the source of failure. That is, unless the US messed up severely, which, I suspect, is probably what happened.
Populism is a creature of democracy, what you're talking about is a failure of the republic; which itself is debatable.
Imagine being in the brainstorming session to come up with name for intelligence agencies alliances.
"It must sound dangerous, yes, but not evil. Like some kind of anti-villain"
So it they had meet in Barcelona they might have ended up with that name (or more likely a tapas name ;)
That said, in the US, the janitor is probably a contractor. Typically ex-military, they have to pass a background check and are cleared to work in public spaces. When cleaning secure areas, they're escorted and watched.
This goes back at least to the original "social engineering" that hackers used to do in the 80's.
In more recent decades, it was also a later well-publicized way that the press knew about the impending starts of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clint...
Even if you're assigned to a NATO joint command you're still paid by your country's military.
Source: studied weapons engineering at Naval college.
On one side, so much secrecy worries me. On the other side kudos for keeping the secret pact secret for so long.
They are just located in Turkey. Turkish Air force practises the delivery so that they can do it if necessary.
Anything new happened ?
However, technically the concept of an european economic union originated with the treaty for the Benelux Economic Union (1958)
(Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg)