Why We Spy on Our Allies (2000) | Hacker News Reader

Why We Spy on Our Allies (2000)

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36 pointstechinsidr7 comments

Interesting attempt at an explanation, but pretty far off the mark.

Start with, everybody spies on everybody. Do you think Russia spies on the United States?[1] You bet it does. Or tries to.

The US just has gotten very good at spying. Better than any other nation right now. They have unlimited resources to spy with, while most European countries don't spend their money on that.

Every few years (as this year 2000 article shows), the US gets caught spying on its friends, and has to scale that back a bit and apologize. But almost every country has a foreign intelligence unit, and they're not very good.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

>Start with, everybody spies on everybody. Do you think Russia spies on the United States?[1] You bet it does. Or tries to.

Only it doesn't matter much. Back in the USSR days it mattered. Nowadays, what would Russia, a not that powerful country do with it's spying? Not much.

Whereas the top dog, with the resources it has available, and the breadth of it's spying, it uses it for tons of stuff (mostly grabbing resources for cheap, ensuring friendly lackeys are in government everywhere it can, etc).

It is because your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith. In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances. You'd rather not go through the hassle of moving toward less dirigisme.

vs.

"What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no* defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government."* -- Noam Chomsky

= nice try, but no. That's not less dirigisme, that's more. Why, even you say it yourself without knowing, when you talk about adapting to circumstances, many of which exactly this rat race creates.

Even if someone has an otherwise good point - if this crap is mixed in, this propaganda against government and by extension against the people having at least a theoretical defense which might one day become a real one, I find it hard to ignore that. Because a little sugar makes medicine go down, but also rat poison. Democracy is not the problem, its subversion by all sorts of groups including the people itself is. If we're not good enough to deserve it, then let's be good enough, instead of just giving up and going along with blind greed, and/or following people who have no idea where the fuck they're even going.

>Why We Spy on Our Allies (2000)

>>your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith.

We Are All Mercantilists Now (2008)

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/we_are_all_mercantili...

I am certain (seriously) that is supported by neither the German government nor its people, but it's worth noting that German firms have illegally (according to German law) supplied Iran's nuclear program with embargoed technology. While this understandably gives little comfort to German citizens, I am guessing (given the monetary, administrative, and foreign policy costs of overreach) that the NSA is more interested in this kind of thing than particular details of Green Party politics.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nuclear-technology...

At least that doesn't justify the tapping of the fax machine at Brussels.

This piece is so awful, no wonder it's a Wall Street Journal op-ed...the WSJ is a good paper, but its editorial page was always screwy, even before Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal.

Woolsey of course does what you'd expect - when caught in government/corporate espionage, he throws up whatever dirt was found out to change the subject. His examples are a laugh. Bribing Brazilian officials? Woolsey and his cronies had been working to keep Brazil a dictatorship until 15 years before he wrote this piece. Saudi corruption? Woolsey had worked it along with his companions so that the US had its army occupying Saudi Arabia in 2000 against the will of most Saudis, who lived and still live under a US-backed dictatorship. It took a plane through the Pentagon and two through the WTC to get the US occupation out of Saudi Arabia.

Then he has contempt for the "statist" Airbus. How is Airbus more statist than Boeing, which is completely dependent on the government dole, to manufacture aircraft which most strategic planners say are not of much use in the modern type guerrilla wars the US is now working to counter?

Europe has always been a laboratory for innovative technology - Linux, MySQL, SuSE, QT, Rovio, SAP, Siemens, CERN and the world wide web. Eastern Europe is a treasure trove of technical talent, if not established technical companies. It's possible the Bay Area is the ultimate destination for much tech monetization - even US cities bemoan this. But plenty of technology gets invented in Europe.

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