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Comment by spitx | Hacker News Reader

Let's not get overboard.

Europe (alongside EVERY nation that has a respectably digital-ready telecommunications network) spies on it's peoples.

It's almost a mark of a nation's jetting into the trillion dollar club.

America gets the lion share of the criticism because it has been bestowed on - for better or worse owing to its capacity for taking human toll (of its own citizenry) - the uneasy office of the global police order.

European critics should ask themselves which country constitutes the majority of NATO's standing forces.

Is it Spain? Germany? Scotland? France? Italy?

You can have your say when your countrymen submit themselves in (proportionally) larger numbers.

Until then, take a seat.

Source:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjrBO10n8V8

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I have no idea what the NATO has to do with it. As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.

Your argument is at best ignorant, and at worst willfully distracting from the cause.

America was admired for setting an example as a great nation where people can live freely. The policing activities after WW2 (for which Europe has to be thankful) were mostly ill conceived (with the low points being Vitnam and Iraq).

  As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.
  America was admired for setting an example as a 
  great nation where people can live freely.

What, in the civilized lands of Stiegl, has ever threatened the free movement and assembly of people, at least since the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire? And what has prevented Austrians from immigrating to the shores of America, like the Germans, Swedes and the Dutch?

I'd really like to know.

(Very trace amounts of sarcasm deposited in this response.)

What has NATO got to do with it? We (Austria) don't want to be part of the global police, nor do we need one.

And we can have our say without beeing part of NATO.

This is about spying on your partners, including high ranking officials, torture, secret laws and courts, extralegal executions, and a general degeneration of U.S. policies towards authoritarianism, which we have been witnessing for almost a decade now.

Do you really have a say? Austria was not allowed to join any global police (NATO or Warsaw Pact). I.e. it got in independence in 1955 only after promises of neutrality.

Sure not.

The US standing military is for defending the US empire and has nothing to do with NATO. NATO's task was never to be a global police. That's a task some US politicians selected for the US. We've seen how that works.

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