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Comment by blumentopf | Hacker News Reader

Is the rationale behind PRISM really terrorism?

Here in Germany there's a lot of talk that PRISM is ultimately a tool for industry espionage. The Boundless Informant world map shows Germany in bright orange. People are wondering: Is Germany breeding terrorists or is NSA simply interested in trade secrets?

Going by that logic, terrorism is a red herring. By making details about PRISM and NSA's hacking activities public, Snowden is undermining the US's ability to covertly vacuum up trade secrets, thus weakening the US industry. That's why the US government is freaking out. You can bet that German companies are now reconsidering using cloud services hosted in the US, or cloud services at all, or American (closed source / potentially backdoored) software at all.

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Don't be offended by this, please, but what could Germany in particular possibly be doing that's so awesome and advanced that the United States would have to resort to theft to replicate it?

If it were the case, I would expect companies to be involved in corporate espionage, not the government.

Smart and innovative people live outside of us too. As for the theft, it could be as simple as stealing a patent idea and patenting it in us so no matter what the original inventor does some of his money wil go to us government.

Sure, but even so I would expect a competing American company to be concerned about that... there's no reason for the NSA to care, since it probably doesn't affect national security.

The thing that brings us security is money. Money is powe and power is safety. That's how it affects national security.

Even so - we still have more money to burn than most other countries.

But that doesn't explain the 'heat map' as a map of industrial espionage. Egypt is 'hotter' than Germany, and Iran, Afghanistan and Syria are red hot. It makes far more sense as a map of locations of intelligence gathering interest.

NSA has it now. Who knows what other organisation is collecting data, going to inherit data collected by other organisations or just leasing access on a "per case" basis.

Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network. Even if they are clean, a motivated party could blackmail them if anyone in their immediate circle has done anything illegal.

Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?

Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network.

Not that i'm putting on my tinfoil hat or anything, but from what I understand, Obama essentially did that (assigned something like a 'voter' rating) during the last election. Not through any illegal means, mind you (that i'm aware of), but still he was able to win the election handily through efficient social engineering and voter targeting. So there does appear to be a use case for this being effective.

That does actually raise an interesting question -- assuming this network still exists in ten years time, what happens to it? Does it get folded into the tax bureaucracy, healthcare, do lawyers get to access it?

Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?

Strictly speaking, not much more than they could do now, just hacking people's likely easily bruteforced email and social media accounts. They'd be more interested in a credit card number/SSN database anyway I think.

When an argument starts failing you move the goalposts and make another argument. Concede the original but claim it is something else that you can better defend.

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