Hacker News Reader

The other thing that is so worrying about the US having the communications of people around the world indiscriminately is that it basically means that the NSA is in a position to blackmail any citizen of any country that enters into a position of power in that country.

Forget installing a shah of Iran or propping some dictator in a South American country. They can now do the same at an arms length. Just collect dirt on all foreigners, wait until they get into power, then use whatever dirt you collected over many years to blackmail that person to do things that are in the self interest of the people at the NSA instead of the self interest of the people that duly elected that representative.

This whole situation is a legitimate threat to democracy in this country, but Congress may try to put checks and balances in place to slow the rate at which it erodes democracy at home. However, of more immediate importance is how this is a legitimate threat to democracy everywhere outside the US.

Many Americans may hear the NSA say things like "We don't do anything illegal and coercive with this information at home" and may believe them. But do most Americans think it is reasonable to coerce elected officials or other countries using any information gathered by the NSA? Should we not be asking the NSA if they actually do that?

This is one of the questions I most want to see asked:

"General Keith B. Alexander, has the NSA ever wittingly used collected information on any foreigner elected to office by his or her citizens to coerce or blackmail that duly elected official to pursue policies that may not be in the interest of the citizens that elected them?"

Despite that I agree and that I think that Assange and Snowden didn't have a better course of action than asking for asylum, I still think it's good to expose dirty things that the Ecuadorian Government is doing.

This is the first article that I see on HN front page about surveillance in Ecuador. If we got this everyday, I would agree that it is a misdirection.

Every day I see stories in the front page about the revelations itself. So I don't think we're getting too distracted. Right now:

The NSA Can't Tell the Difference Between an American and a Foreigner (foreignpolicy.com)

Lawyers said Bush couldn’t spy on Americans. He did it anyway. (washingtonpost.com)

New leak shows NSA harvests To, From, and Bcc lines of e-mail data (arstechnica.com)

Let's keep it healthy.

> So where it's convenient, i.e. US citizens cannot be spied on, the concept of a nation state is invoked, but then non-US citizens basically have no right to privacy, not even the ones their governments give them, because the US can look at anything. Not cool.

Look, when a dog bites the hand of its owner and then bites the neighbor, the greater outrage is that it bit the hand that feeds it.

You're not looking at this from an objective perspective, because you're the neighbor and well, understandably pissed.

Now me? I would put down the dog. But that's just me and it's probably not going to happen.

Umm, no. From the perspective of the neighbor and the whole community, and from the perspective of an educated person who knows the limits of his rights, the greater outrage is that it bit the neighbor. It could have bitten the owner for a number of reasons, such as not having been trained well; the neighbor on the other hand had no choice, he never signed up for a dog but he got bit anyway--and further there's little he can do to prevent it from happening again.

What makes you more anxious, when you lose something you owned or when you lose something a friend lent you? When the latter happens, all I wish for is that it were mine (or that it's an item easily replaceable with money.)

It seems the government has long forgotten the good manners it's Founding Fathers taught it. I can only hope the American people at large have a bit more sense.

>"As far as I know, Ecuador or any other government doesn't yet exercise such monitoring,"

Venezuela does it at phone level, I wouldn't be surprised that Ecuador does the same considering that they are very close in terms of political vision.

Neither Snowden nor Greenwald have revealed any more documents so all we have is a powerpoint presentation, a letter from attorney general Holder, and a document saying the USA tapped a cable connecting to China. Without more information, what else can be discussed?

If Snowden hasn't revealed more then what's the source of the periodic additional leaks Guardian has been publishing? Admittedly the added leaks don't seem to be blockbusters compared to the initial story but they are definitely extra news.

I'll admit I haven't read anything from the Guardian since Greenwald's opinion piece explaining his IRS bill (which was only 2 days ago). Has there been anything interesting since then?

I don't know about since 2 days ago, but before that was news about NSA harvesting From/To/BCC metadata on emails, for example (which wasn't part of the initial leaks).

Yes, everybody is talking about Snowden, and nobody is talking about the facts he revealed. It's distressing, but IMO not surprising.

People love human-interest stories. You see this all the time. In any news story where there's anything resembling a central figure, the stories will be mostly about that person, not about the overall event.

Combine that with the difficulty of asking hard questions, and you get what we see. The government probably doesn't even have to exert any kind of overt pressure.

One reason there is a "crisis of trust" surrounding the revelations Snowden made is that, variously, other governments are complicit in the surveillance, or they are lackadaisical in actually implementing privacy protections by allowing services and products into their communications infrastructure that enable surveillance.

That may change, but I don't see a lot of concrete results in that direction, yet.