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Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing the point of why the USA would not just stop this weird spying on everybody. From China I'd expect nothing more but the USA? They're supposed to be a decent country.

Then we would not need all these super unpractical counter measures.

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Did people already forget all about the 2013 leaks? Do you actually think that the EU is not complicit in the same surveillance practiced by the US?

> For example, Der Spiegel revealed how the German Foreign Intelligence Service transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA", while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret treaty signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance...

How is my data any more secure on a German server than an American server? Some asshole is snooping on it anyway, and the NSA gets access by extension.

Perhaps it isn't, but if that's the case the ruling is about giving you legal redress to fix it.

People forget that the reason this happens is that most countries have laws against spying domestically. They usually don't have laws prohibiting them from taking data from other spy agencies spying on their own country. So the cheap and easy workaround is you let your friends spy on you for you. It's usually pretty critical for counterintelligence anyway. As the first place an enemy tries to get into is the counterintelligence department.

This is the important part that is glanced over. It's very much a situation of tit for tat but we can be hopeful that rulings like these aren't just lip service. Schrems has been a positive force for privacy in the EU.

From corporate spying yes. However GDPR contains specific carve outs for national security, Police, etc.

I was looking for a comment like this.

Yes, GDPR provides greater protection for privacy than US laws and hats off to the EU courts for trying to maintain that protection.

That said, the US and EU are so closely intertwined when it comes to intelligence that I doubt this provides much protection from Western state level actors.

The main problem GDPR solves is companies, not state actors (which are likely to ignore laws anyway).

>They're supposed to be a decent country.

what? since when?

USA was, and still is corrupt. There are plenty of news of USA covering up war crimes, spying on everyone, PATRIOT act itself, drone assasination etc.

and prime example from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

Plus quite honestly if any country behaved like USA in Europe(Allegiance to the flag in schools, "patriotism" etc) they would be under EXTREME scrutiny from their neighbors.

It is still a lesser evil on the world stage to be honest.

Almost all countries have surveillance programs - from the EU to the US to China. They are arguable necessary to maintain national security.

The difference is not that a country surveils but if they have processes in place to protect that information from abuse and keep it to use only for national security interests.

I tend to agree. Just a nit, though: the EU is not a country and does not have intelligence agencies. Member states are and do.

Quite true - my language was not precise

The US intelligence community has had access to privileged information so long that the organizational structure reflects this. Taking that away would be a massive change, which is why they fight it with all they've got.

> They're supposed to be a decent country.

But they are not; they're dropping fast on the world scheme when it comes to human rights and common decency. In many ways it's as bad as China is when it comes to that.

It's interesting that they managed to keep the ICE concentration camps out of the media. Will the >100K of covid-19 related deaths (that have been officially reported) someday be considered genocide / eugenics?

This is certainly a romantic take on the matter but for once the liberal arts students are actually ahead of the curve since for many of them this reading is a part of their standard curriculum (followed by an exercise where some defend the practice and some condemn it): https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95326824311657269

Spying is fair game. So is using obvious spying as a PR or political weapon. Dragnet surveillance is something else, though.

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