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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

"The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States"

- why not identify them?

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Because the requests likely contain legal cladding to forbid disclosing the request, as is the case in Australia. A lot of people would be vindicated if it turned out one of the “democracies” making these requests was Australia.

Australia was my first guess when I read that sentence. But I expect it's not the only one.

It’s likely the five eyes allied nations.

Yep. Most likely to try and catch Chinese spies or other countries like India, Iran, Russia, and others as they continue to go after dissidents abroad.

Or to track US activists and resell the information to the US government, in exchange for data on other five-eyes citizens or access to other surveillance systems (US ones are obviously the best, from a military standpoint).

Or (insert country you have a political agenda against) to (do thing you disagree with) for the purposes of (pushing your own political agenda).

More like "or (insert country that shouldn't be doing something according to its own laws) to (do something against its own laws) for the purposes of (someone's profit)".

Sure and that applies (at least) to the EU (and friends), US, UK, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, India, etc.

Yeah but a lot of those are not democracies, nor do much business at intel level with the US.

Why would it matter if they are democracies or not?

Why would it matter if they "do intel business" with the US, EU, UK, etc. ?

Because that's what the source said they are.

Pakistan?

Let me think - could it be the one country with a complicated situation where most of the security-services apparatus is nominally allied but actually supporting forces opposed to the US (talibans etc), with a sclerotic political system defaulting to military dictatorship every other decade; or the long-standing allied democracies (plural) with a well-documented history of structural cooperation in matters of espionage and surveillance, particularly at the IT level...? Which of the two would the US government rather let run surveillance on US citizens? Mmmh, I wonder!

They let Israel do it to Palestinian Americans.

We already know, it's the Five Eyes

Most likely group, since they info share and this is the standard end-around on laws prohibiting "domestic" surveillance; government has some other country run the surveillance on their nationals.

Anglosphere.

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