U.S. spied on Merkel and other Europeans through Danish cables (2021) | Hacker News Reader

U.S. spied on Merkel and other Europeans through Danish cables (2021)

reuters.com

63 pointsdanielovichdk44 comments

I remember this. It was seen as an extremely serious breach of trust here in Europe. I remember the media trying to downplay it and dumdums on facebook spreading nonsense like "This is nothing, everybody spies. move on, sheeesh".

Well, like..it is? Are you saying it was an actual breach of trust? Spies spy on everyone, they even spy on their own citizens. Next you might tell me EU spy agencies don't spy on their own people or other EU countries.

This is only an acceptable state of affairs under the conditions of nationalism.

Human beings operating outside the boundaries of nationalist mental illness, do not care for this sort of behaviour one bit.

It takes a special mentality to justify this violation of human rights at a fundamental scale.

"Everyone spies" == "Everyone murders innocent people they don't like".

This is a violation of human rights, period. No nation state which engages in this activity should be taken seriously when it comes to the human rights record of their government.

I will always judge Americans by the way they handled the Epstein/Maxwell case. One was painfully obviously executed by the FBI to protect pedophiles, the other had a court proceeding where the main focus was on protecting the identities of the pedophiles.

With this level of ignorance, you can even invade and devastate whole countries with the public completely ignoring it. How many here know of the thousands of dead civilians, many children, and millions displaced refugees as the result of the recent US Syria invasion? We're crossing some lines here I didn't think were crossable.

For me, it was the illegal invasion of Iraq and cold-blooded murder of 5% of its population.

That burst the "American Dream" bubble for me, cold and hard. I came to see the USA for what it really is - a military junta masquerading as a republic, engaged in wide scale repression of human rights, and indeed human beings as a whole, at immense scales.

Subsequent human rights violations, the existence of the utterly vile NSA, the treatment of Julian Assange - these events have merely added another layer to the shit-cake that is the USA's repressive regime, today.

>thousands

Millions.

You speak as if "Americans" as a whole group are responsible for the handling of the Epstein case. And you also have considerable certainty that the FBI killed him. Do you have evidence the rest of us don't?

Americans voted their government in. Of course they are responsible.

Only half the country votes for each party but they're all the same huh

Ah yes, the "each bad incident is the other party's fault" excuse huh. Very convenient excuse whichever party you voted for. The two parties are not all that different in terms of the vast majority of policies anyway.

Even if you think they are so very different, I don't see the other half of Americans doing mass protests against this or that policy. You would think if HALF of all Americans oppose something, there would be mass protests. But there are not. Meaning they don't really oppose it. Which means, yes, they are the same and very much responsible.

Everyone spies on everyone they can spy on.

But not everyone gives their whistleblowers a chemical lobotomy, locked away in a notoriously oppressive torture palace without recourse or any justice, when they reveal information that is vital to the future of humanity...

I have no idea what you're talking about, or how it relates to countries spying on one another.

"Everyone spies on everyone - so therefore its okay to do it"

"We will annihilate whistleblowers when they reveal uncomfortable secrets - because thats okay to do when it suits our national interest"

The whistleblowers have revealed that in fact, NO - nobody spies (violating billions of human beings' rights) at the same grandiose and extensive scale as the criminal 5-eyes coalition currently operating the worlds biggest human rights violations (GCHQ, NSA, Pine Gap, etc.)

I wish you would be more specific about who you're referring to with the "torture palace" talk.

Also, it's quite a stretch to say that privacy violations are "the world's biggest human rights violations" when there's currently much more violent things going on around the globe (genocide in Xinjiang, Sudan for example).

Your comment also ignores the amount of surveillance done by other countries, notably China. Your biased are glaringly obvious by leaving that out, as it's one of the most populous countries in the world and also one of (if not the most) surveilled societies.

Julian Assange is in the worlds most notorious torture palace, currently being chemically lobotomized.

And the NSA's violations of human rights at massive scale fare outpaces anything China can do. Your whataboutism of China is noted. Americans fail consistently to take responsibility for their nations heinous and vile human rights abuses, all the while calling out 'other nations' from a position of moral authority that is just fallacious.

Exactly. That's why it's just expected that the PRC managed to acquire the personnel records of all US federal employees, and it's not a big deal that the PRC stole data on the F-35. Same with industrial espionage, states are just going to keep spying on each other, why get upset about it? It's just what states do.

The countries have every right to be upset, but this is standard practice and everyone does it. There's a reason why counterintelligence agencies exist.

My comment was a preemptive response to the inevitable naive and/or grandstanding rants people here are apt to deliver on the subject. E.g., your own comment.

If your country doesn't value private personal data(unless it is medical) it should be entirely expected to anyone with money to get it. And countries tend to have deep pockets. So them getting data works entirely by design.

He upset about it, but acting surprised or outraged is just fake crocodile tears.

Not exactly surprising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com