US surveillance revelations deepen European fears | Hacker News Reader

US surveillance revelations deepen European fears

reuters.com

184 pointsyoungerdryas76 comments

Whereas we in the EU have our own dubious surveillance programmes, at least they are made by governments we can overthrow ourselves.

Also, European governments mostly grant us basic human rights, have no secret overseas prisons, no death penalty for "treason", no decade long imprisonments for whistle blowing or hacking, no secret military tribunals, no recent record of torture, almost no drones, small military, tiny intelligence budgets etc.

from my very basic understanding of EU privacy laws, the big win is that they treat everybody equally - the rules say what data you can retain, what data you can't, and that's it. What really scares me about all this FISA and PRISM stuff is that they treat foreigners as essentially non-persons. They at least make some effort at pretending there's a due process for american citizens, but if you're a foreigner with your data on a system owned by a US company, you literally have no rights at all.

Yeah, that attitude in the u.s. scares me; the labels we put on noncitizens. Those labels, I believe enabled our compliant media to sell that idiotic Iraq war to the public. I don't recall them tracking the Iraqi civilian deaths at all. I mean, after all, they weren't born in the u.s. so who cares, right?

it's merely formalizing the truth that because they can't vote, the government is not accountable to noncitizens. Do you seriously think that the European Union treats everyone within its borders equally? If that were the case, why are there the banlieues of Paris? Why does Italy treat african boat people so poorly? Why are there stateless individuals of Turkish descent in Germany?

That's a very good point - in the last months the world listened in on Americans debating whether drones can be used against Americans or just against us foreigners, as if we are worth less. Now we learn that the American government speculates that maybe foreigners don't deserve the same degree of privacy.

I hope this isn't new to you. Since day one the NSA has been legally limited to collection of data on foreigners. That part of it is nothing new. FBI is who handled domestic intelligence operations.

While I don't like that attitude (and don't like it for the drone discussion either, or Gitmo), it's not at all anything new. I think the concept dates from the 1800s in fact

What really scares me about all this FISA and PRISM stuff is that they treat foreigners as essentially non-persons.

Something that struck me a while ago is that while most of the modern world talks about protecting "human rights", the ruling classes in the US always seem to talk about protecting things like "Constitutional rights" or "citizens' rights". I'm not sure what that says about their underlying attitude, but it can't be good.

The trouble is, a lot of places have at least tendencies in the same direction, it's just hard to see them if you're a native and get to go in the "EU citizen" queue at customs or whatever it might be, so you don't see how others visiting your country are treated even from the moment they arrive. And since typically those outsiders have no direct influence on policy in places they visit, there is no natural political incentive for each country's government to treat them as much more than a source of revenue for the tourism/education/commercial sector.

With the rise in modern times of ubiquitous international communications networks and relatively quick and easy physical travel between countries, unfortunately this seems to be a race to the bottom, with a lower bound determined only by the point at which people actually stop visiting/communicating with your country, which as a practical matter is going to be difficult for many people to do.

Well, i've seen people avoid visiting USA thanks to airport security (and US airports in general). Insane visa requirements don't help either.

In the age of internet it's actually easier to stop physically moving around.

Well, i've seen people avoid visiting USA thanks to airport security

In fact, you're talking to one right now.

The way I look at it, there are many wonderful places in the world that I would like to visit one day, but I'm never going to make it to all of them in the one lifetime I get. I'd prefer to go to places where I will feel welcome and enjoy myself, not to places where the procedure on arrival or departure is going to make me feel like a criminal just for showing up.

Of course, some people have jobs that require them to travel or have family living abroad or for many other reasons would need to make much greater sacrifices than I do if they were to give up flying. So I try not to assume that everyone else can vote with their wallets as easily as I can on this one.

And another here. I'll pay more to not touch US soil when I travel and I certainly haven't been there in a long time.

I haven't got anything criminal going on, and don't hail from anywhere 'suspicious'. It's just that I don't trust US customs/TFSA to not ruin my day for no reason whatsoever.

And the irony is that foreigners are increasingly being considered as targets fo prosecution without having set foot in the county.

IANAL but (Spain): there is NO way to get an order from the Government which you cannot legally make public. You cannot be forced to keep a secret you did not seek to know (unless you are a Gvt employee, which includes that explicitly).

That's interesting, does anyone know how this is in Germany?

It's interesting. There are few European countries where I can unconditionally refuse to speak to police or refuse them to search my home or person without a warrant. We don't have CCTV cameras like they do in the UK. And when it comes to being able to overthrow your government yourselves, much of Europe has the same sham democracy we do. (Berlusconi? Seriously? Twice?) We have guns, but the parts of Western Europe who really wanted to overthrow their governments within recent history were able to get all the guns and explosives they wanted too. So it's hard to really say one is any better than the other.

> So it's hard to really say one is any better than the other.

Smart people look at both and try and learn, rather than getting on a high horse about "better", when "better" is awfully difficult to define anyway.

> Berlusconi? Seriously? Twice?

Sadly, no: three times, the first being in 1994.

The European Court of Human Rights has established that the right to remain silent under police questioning and the privilege against self-incrimination applies.

All over Europe elections are held at least every 4th or 5th year and governments are regularly overthrown, in Italy more often than anywhere else, I think.

> The European Court of Human Rights has established that the right to remain silent under police questioning and the privilege against self-incrimination applies.

Interesting. But the details of that certainly differ from country to country, at least judging from the reaction to James Duane's "Don't Talk To Police" video. For instance, in the UK, if you refuse to answer police questions, statements you make in favor of your innocence can be thrown out because you didn't mention them to the police under questioning. So the "right to remain silent under police questioning" is much weaker in the UK.

> All over Europe elections are held at least every 4th or 5th year and governments are regularly overthrown

We have elections every other year, so I'm curious why that's considered a point of difference between Europe and the US. The issue is whether the electoral system can effect real change or whether it's fixed by the rich and powerful, e.g. by owning a large chunk of the country's media and continuing to run those and other private businesses while serving as Prime Minister.

it's even more for local positions. To be fully participant in the US government hierarchy (primaries, generals, local, state, federal), you're voting twice a year. Summing up across jurisdictions, the US has something like 5 million discrete elections a year.

To make my usual point: the UK does not have a singular legal system; England and Wales has a separate legal system to Scotland, which is itself separate to the legal system in Scotland. People frequently claim the English and Welsh legal system is the "UK legal system".

For example, when it comes to police questioning, until two years ago, there was no requirement to provide a lawyer under Scots law (though there were various other safeguards, which Google can likely tell you better than I!).

Many European countries don't use a first past the past system that seems to be used n usa, resulting in more coalition governments

not only that, the EU president is unelected - it rotates between the premiership of different states. That would be (somewhat) like Louisiana voting for its governor and having that governor be president of the US for some number of years. So much for 'overthrowing' governments.

Bush? Twice?

>There are few European countries where I can unconditionally refuse to speak to police or refuse them to search my home or person without a warrant.

these rights in the USA are lost when "national security letter" provisions involved

"European governments mostly grant us basic human rights"

In the US the traditional (but fading) attitude is that "The US government protects basic human rights". See, the problem is if government 'grants' you human rights, there's a potential for conflict of interest where the government could decide to no longer grant you that right if it becomes inconvenient.

At least with the US attitude, you can wag your finger and say, "you're failing to protect right X". And yes, that attitude means that the US is not obligated to protect the privacy of foreigners. BUT that is different from the question of whether or not the US should actively violate the privacy of foreigners.

Right. There's a difference between "respect" and "protect" - I think US policy should be to respect the rights of everyone, and protect the rights of citizens; it should protect the rights of others when it can do so conveniently and without stomping on too much else, but it should really commit to those first two.

Well the US rights system has selective applicability to non citizens. For example in a court of law, non-citizens absolutely have the right to a jury, a fair trial, due process, etc. The bill of rights, for example, does not specify 'citizens' in any way.

In the US natural rights system, the primary offender of rights is the government[1]. For example, you can't argue that facebook is violating your first amendment rights when it 'censors' what you post, because your decision to use facebook was voluntary. So when the government protects your rights[2] (as in the bill of rights), it's mostly protecting your rights from itself.

Privacy isn't specifically enumerated in the US constitution (it's been inferred from natural rights and the 10th amendment - to a lesser degree the 5th and 14th as well).

[1] The 'right to life'/'not be assaulted' seems to be the major exception. Obivously someone that is not the government can threaten your life, including, murderers, corporate negligence, foreign states, etc. The 'right to privacy' does take on aspects of this, too, though - since google can drive its cars down public commons and gather information. Do you have a right to privacy, if you're out in what is generally accepted as a public commons? Does it make a difference if google records you (for example) making an ass of yourself, in a sweeping indiscriminate data collection, or if a friend you know happens to be at the right place and the wrong time to record you making an ass of yourself?

[2] This is a very different concept of rights than what the europeans/UN have, which can include things like, the right to water, the right to food, the right to healthcare, the right to education, the right to internet access, etc. Under the US concept of rights might believe that you have the right to not be stopped from having water, stopped from having food, stopped from having healthcare, stopped from being educated, or stopped from accessing the internet, but, by and large, calling it a right to force others to provide these things rubs americans the wrong way (we call them 'entitlements' not 'rights'.)

How much the government protects us from other individuals is one thing, but I was speaking more to interaction with other governments.

This should be in every country's constitution. Well said.

Many EU countries have a legal concept that people have the rights by virtue of their birth, and that the government can't take them away.

small military

It does simplify the issue for EU nations, but it doesn't mean this is the answer for the US. To my knowledge, EU nations get away with very small militaries in part due to the "umbrella" of the friendly US military.

Not to say the US needs a super-mega-ultra-huge military, but this is like when people compare country X to Norway. "Look at how successful Norway is! Look at how wealthy everyone is!" Yeah, I'm sure that has nothing to do with the tremendous quantities of natural resources in Norway. Point being, we need to compare apples to apples.

have no secret overseas prisons

How exactly would you know if the EU nations had secret overseas prisons? Aren't they secret? :)

To be fair, your governments lack the military strength to withstand the US. Germany is still under American occupation. To really throw off the yoke (which I support), you'll need to re-militarize.

And therein lies the problem. The US thinks in terms of military nouns. The EU doesn't :)

This is why those EU states are subordinate to the US and have been so since V-E day. Want to stop being subordinate? Kick out those soldiers.

The EU commission is a bunch of hypocrites. I am an European and I am appalled by the lack of integrity of our politicians: they hand over data on flights, credit cards, SWIFT transactions to other countries and keep trying to pass ACTA in its various forms despite strong opposition of the EU population, they created their own mass-surveillance laws (active in many european countries) and then they pretend to be outraged at the mass-surveillance of the US they themselves have helped facilitate in its full breadth. Cretins!

Indeed! I think the only reason Britain or France still don't have the same mass-surveillance systems in place is their lack of budgets. Otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't be better protected than the americans in the US. Although, the irony being that certainly the US knows more on us (europeans) than our own countries.

Also the phenomenal incompetency of our (British) gubbermint when it comes to buying any item of IT more elaborate than ordering an iPod from Amazon. One of the greatest defences we have against the encroachment of the state in the UK is the amiable ineptness of it at every stage.

The US secret services are also convenient scapegoats, our own government agencies can simply ask them for information on EU citizens that would be illegal to collect in the EU and they probably do so frequently.

We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.

I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.

Less than a fifth of US public budget is spent on defense...

It's a lot, no?

By GDP it's really not, no (about 4.7% for much more ability than any other nation). It's a lot in absolute terms, but so is the American economy.

It is higher as a proportion of GDP than many of our NATO allies, but then again that's actually one of our complaints as Americans... ;)

It really is a lot in global terms. E.g.:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/7971d5fa4...

And the difficulty in spending this much comes in two ways:

a) The more important your hammer becomes, the more everything looks like a nail. The US has frequently undertaken a military response for areas where other countries might use diplomacy.

b) The military, plus contractors, plus jobs that depend on the military, plus PR and lobbying firms, all tend to distort politics in favour of increasing military importance.

Don't get me wrong: the UK and EU in general owes a lot to US military power over the years and should thank the US for a lot of our freedoms. But there is a flip side, and I think it should be recognised that such a large amount of spending does distort things.

The US spends 2.5x as much on the military as does Poland, as a % of GDP.

It's a lot, but not exactly extraordinary.

Britain has access to PRISM. I wouldn't be surprised if other European governments do as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/07/uk-gatherin...

Oh hell. Looks like the anti European thing has just hit poor HN. :(

One interesting thing about Euroscepsis is, to my unscientific observations, that it is pretty well represented in all layers of society. There's plenty anti-EU people of all levels of educations, family backgrounds and vocations. Their reasons wildly vary, though, and those might coincide more with particular groups.

This is not to say that all these people also vote for the populist anti-EU parties, which typically have a broader populist agenda (e.g. EU bad and muslims bad)

Nevertheless, this makes it obvious that there's also plenty of anti-EU folk on HN, simply because there's plenty Europeans here. Especially in a thread with the word 'Europe' in the title, I'm not surprised.

I am not anti-european, on the contrary. I am just against EU agendas that are pushed against the will of the majority of the EU population and clearly against their interests. The EU is a great idea and project, but the EU commission is a bunch of crooks.

It's bullshit blaming the EU, given that it's countries like the UK, Ireland e.a. that are pushing for all of this on order to serve their great friends the US.

It's the EU that stands between us and corrupt national governments handing over our civil rights to US intelligence and business interest. If the EU didn't block this kind of crap half the time we would be way worse of.

I may partly agree with your assessment. There's always room for improvement. But in comparison to the US, the EU is the privacy heaven :)

While I appreciate this statement I doubt that Germany and the EU is fundamentally different from the US in that matter.

Sure, in Germany recently we've been quite successful in fending off planned legislation that would've allowed massive privacy intrusions but in general the political establishment over here isn't exactly a champion of civil liberties either.

Besides, I'm certain both German and EU administrative bodies closely cooperate with the US on intelligence matters and would more than gladly accept sharing those findings.

Yes, they closely cooperate. But EU agencies (except for UK) don't have a record of torture, abduction and overly use of secrecy. Comparing the budgets of the various secret services should be informative. US agencies are WAY bigger and I think much too big. UK is the exception - being in line with US.

Well that's a facile statement, since the EU is only 20 years old. Individual countries in Europe absolutely do have a record of torture, abduction, and secrecy in varying degrees. Are you completely forgetting the 20th century?

didn't several EU countries (I'm thinking poland) aid the US in secret detention facilities?

> Europe, which lacks internet giants of its own, has long yearned to contain the power of the U.S. titans that dominate the Web,

Rubbish. The EU has quite strong notions of privacy and personal freedom, which the US doesn't have. It's not about 'containing' US internet companies it's about protecting the rights of EU citizens and fighting against the societal harms that come with the erosion of privacy.

"Statements from the U.S. government that the monitoring was not aimed at U.S. citizens but only against persons outside the United States do not reassure me at all." I couldn't agree more. It's no fun when they state in such a clear way that we're second-class users, whose rights aren't so important after all.

Germany already exports a lot of data to the US. That includes banking data, flight plans and so forth. So that fear is mostly fake.

Hopefully the current developments provide a small chance of revoking those laws but I highly doubt it.

I agree on the cloud stuff though. Some companies even use it in advertising (your data stays here and is covered by our data protection laws)

I think the biggest worry I would have if I were in Europe is the same worry I would have as an Amazon Marketplace Seller. An Amazon marketplace seller is essentially sharing all their sales performance data with Amazon. This pretty much guarantees that the best way to make money is to see lots of low volume items. Anything that sells in any considerable quantity will not go unnoticed by Amazon and they will start carrying the product themselves.

Anyone in the EU (or any other country) that frequently discusses valuable information via any US service is vulnerable to exploitation. This includes politicians, beaurocrats with gatekeeper positions, banks and other financial services firms, etc. all have information that in the hands of the right person in the US government can be used against them, their firm or their country.

What if the US government deems it appropriate to watch what people in a certain country is saying about the US dollar? That information can be used to manipulate currency markets in favor of the US and we'd be none the wiser.

Every single congressional subcommittee dealing with any foreign affair has an interest in asking the NSA to find out information on and private communication of their counterparts in other countries.

If you want to exercise soft control over all other countries, what better way than to get important people in all those other countries to centralize much of their communications via US Cloud services that the NSA can conveniently eavesdrop on. You get instant access to the words any thoughts of any person you may interact with geopolitically.

I think the worst part is that anyemember of congress could already be using illegitimately gained data and be none the wiser. At the end of the day they make an innocent request like "Get me all the information you have on XXX so I can make an informed decision." Next thing you know, this request is passed along like a game of telephone until a report is drafted up. Nothing stops those requests from making it to the NSA, where a rank an file employee deems it appropriate to spy on the personal communications of foreign nationals because they believe that it is in the best interest of the United States and its position in the World. That data is intercepted and distilled into a report and now that member of congress is operating with insider information, ill-gotten via PRISM, and he is none the wiser and can go on with his life thinking that its only being used for fighting terrorism.

"If you want to exercise soft control over all other countries, what better way than to get important people in all those other countries to centralize much of their communications via US Cloud services that the NSA can conveniently eavesdrop on."

They actually did exactly that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%...

He's not the German Justice Minister.

He's "the justice minister for the German state of Hesse".

While Mr. Hahn isn't directly involved in last week's Blockupy incidents in Frankfurt, one of his colleagues (the state's Minister of Interior) is and certainly benefits if public outrage is targetted on someone else for a while.

"designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning"

Assuredly the U.K. and Israel say the same thing to their people.

Of course, never mind that all three countries swap information. Total surveillance is easily achieved. And it's all perfectly legal.

On the 14th of September 2007, Denmark initiated our Anti-Terroism Surveillance act, wherein ALL phonecalls, texts & internet traffic is saved for at least 2 years.

Welcome to Denmark.

Have you got many terrorists in Denmark?

I wonder how China is thinking as it actively pushes its own web titans and forbids the entrance of Facebook and Google and the like within its national borders.

Phew?

Makes the Huawei boycott feel a bit... special, too, don't you think?

The title was "German State Justice Minister Calls for Boycott of US companies".

I think the only way to roll this back, if it even can be rolled back, is to attack from the states using state power. If CA, NY, TX, UT, VT, every state, starts making their own privacy laws to hamstring the Feds they may have to change their tune for practicality.

Federal laws will overrule state laws every time in this case. The gov't will just claim national security/intelligence laws aren't covered by the 10th Amendment.

The only thing the states could do is pass a Constitutional amendment but that has never been done through state assemblies before.

I'm not sure that the states have any power here. If there's a federal law legalizing it, it doesn't matter what the state laws are. It's basically the reverse of the medical/legal marijuana scenario.

It seems to be working there, though. Also for gay marriage which has become an inevitability.

Marriage as a concept has always been left to the states.

The NSA is by statute international in scope (they are defined as signals intelligence pertaining to foreign nations), and that has always been left to the Federal government exclusively. The individual states don't even have a dream here.

There are federal laws against marijuana but the Feds don't bust people in MA for smoking weed, though apparently technically they could.

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