A bug is found in Ecuador Embassy in London
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Also, most sophisticated buggings are usually difficult to detect even against a sophisticated adversary. All of which suggests to me that finding this bug in the Ecuador embassy is likely to be coincidence.
For a good recent read on this subject, I'd suggest Foreign Policy: New Flash, States Spy on Each Other http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/01/news_flash_st...
Today we have an Internet infrastructure that for all intents and purposes is centralized in the US. Lots of network collections pass through the US and many commonly used service providers are in the US. HUMINT is now a lot less important because SIGINT became much much much easier.
However abusing the current system for the sake of SIGINT comes at the cost of trust in the current system and architecture. There will be an economic penalty paid by the US of this abuse of trust. At the very least, we're now in a much weaker position to negotiate with the rest of the world when internet governance issues (ICANN for example) come up for discussion.
Spying on EU politicians, corporations, trade negotiations and such is not that. It's using spying to get a leverage and exploit/blackmail/bride/take advantage of other countries.
Except if you redefine "national security" to mean: each and every way a country can exploit and fuck with other countries.
I'm outraged, but it's been obvious that this stuff has been going on for many years. If you didn't know you weren't paying attention.
I used to enjoy reading Tom Ricks Best Defense blog at FP but I stopped reading it once they introduced that monstrosity.
Tecently there have been some misguided statements in the comments on HN that javascript is a requirement for the web and that it is reasonable for designers to always expect its presence. When those designers fail like this - the crap is gone but the important stuff still works great, I think to myself maybe it isn't so misguided. Maybe two wrongs do make a right.
It used to be that when you found out that a country was using embassies for spying, there was diplomatic actions available to discourage it. You could deport diplomats from that country. You could refuse entering into political discussion with them. in worst case, you could close down diplomatic relations with them. All in all, such retaliation keeps the spying at a low key rather than public. It keeps it at a respectable level.
The big problem happens when its a large country like the U.S. doing the spying. The previous stories has all been about the NSA (which this one clearly relate to). As a country, the diplomatic relations against spying is quite limited. It is unlikely you want throw out the U.S. diplomats or close down their embassy. Its not very practical to close down diplomatic relations with the U.S.
So whats left is public outrage.
Yes, embassies are bugged, it happens, as does rape. Things are not "standard operating procedure" just because they happen, and the lack of outrage when crimes are committed only encourages their perpetration.
Your Hanlon's razor approach would make sense had the bug not just been found recently, suggesting it was put there recently and/or not well hidden, coincidentally in a location that happens to house someone wanted by the nation with the largest "defense" budget on the planet likely targeting someone who is known to communicate with arguably the most wanted man on the planet.
Trying to brush this off as a coincidence is a bit of a stretch, given the circumstances.
Why don't you go after diplomatic immunity which allows all sorts of things to happen unpunished?
You're being idealistic. The world does not operate that way, if it did, we would have no need for lawyers as no one would ever take advantage of anyone nor would any one ever want to change the terms --wait, there wouldn't eve be terms of agreement, we'd just know 'the right thing to do'.
I think it's pretty likely that the bug came from the US or one of our allies but its absolutely possible that it didn't. Everyone has home grown political enemies and this would be an excellent time for a false flag to capitalize on a prominent news story.
What is the other direction to to skeptical in?
If some percent of stories that make the government look good are misleading / planted / etc, then logically, some percent of those which make them look bad are likely wrong too.
And how does bugging that embassy relate to terrorism?
That doesn't follow at all. If the government is actively trying to ensure stories make them look good, they certainly wouldn't want any to make them look bad. They certainly wouldn't be creating/planting/whatever stories to do that unless they were provably false and would be used to advantage later (e.g. "look at this bias reporting!").
Yeah, I can't really find a positive outlook to all this international intrigue and espionage. There isn't one, right?
This particular development, though, seems way more dramatic than the rest. I wonder what point there is in waiting until tomorrow to release the source of the bug.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/19/fake-rock-plot-s...
Countries like to crow when they come across potentially rather inept attempts at espionage, but there's no real diplomatic issues raised since everyone expects espionage to be happening. It's PR more than anything else.
What could he possibly be saving to use against them?
No it doesn't, really. I believe this is wishful thinking on your part, but see no evidence of it. You believe the US somehow planted this bug in the Ecuadorian embassy just in case Snowden ended up there? America isn't the only country in the world that bugs embassies and even so, where's the proof this particular bug is that new?
You're assuming that every other government is a puppet state of the US, incapable of making its own decisions or engaging in its own politics. No one else has to give Edward Snowden asylum if they don't want to. If you're talking about his passport being revoked, he was accused of a serious crime and was fleeing the country -- revoking someone's passport under those circumstances is not uncommon. None of this is evidence of the US being 'terrified' of anything.
we are grounding foreign president's planes because we are worried Snowden might be on them
WE did not ground anything, unless I missed the part where the United States runs the European Union. I suppose if there's a thunderstorm in Moscow, it's because the US controls the weather too? If Edward Snowden has a bad egg salad sandwich, the US must be poisoning everyone's chickens?
Consider this... the assumption that Edward Snowden has access to secrets so utterly damaging to the US that the government would be willing to do anything and everything possible to stop him... which brings with it the suggestion that the US is so evil that it would have such a secret still stowed away somewhere....
... and yet we let him leave the country at all. And yet, we appear (despite being 'absolutely terrified') to be working within the system. You think it would be impossible for the CIA to book a couple of flights to Moscow and maybe have Edward Snowden eat a bullet if they were that desperate?
Anyhow, the sad thing is, I don't think the government really cares. This is about making a point, showing their power, and discouraging this from ever happening again.
In fact if they didn't I'd call the CIA to task and ask them to explain why not.
I'd understand Chinese or Russian embassies, but expecting every embassy on Earth is an incredibly permissive stance to take, even as a safety-conscious citizen of the U.S.
Possible communications to/from Julian Assange?
I think the point about expecting every embassy to be bugged being a dangerously lax attitude remains valid, though.
It would be pretty hard to bug Ecuador's embassy the day after they were deemed a threat to national security.
>>> I'd understand Chinese or Russian embassies
"We've always been at war with Eastasia".
Of course, this view does not account for black swans, but I think the possibility of an entirely unprecedented method for a militarily and economically inferior nation to meaningfully harm U.S. citizens and/or interests being developed and put to use (not even accounting for alliances or motives) is sufficiently low that the risk is not worth surveilling the world to mitigate.
Ecuador's HUMINT operations and capabilities will be based out of the embassy. They may not be co-ordinated at the embassy but at some point they will make contact with them.
Even so, it's not about national security, it's about protecting interests, political and business. Interests that are an extension of US/FiveEyes policy. Policies which are largely influenced by big business.
Multi-generational voter apathy has culminated to a point where most people are so disconnected from reality that they thought Snowden could escape the long arm of the US Government.
Before the cold war it was the colonial powers fighting it out, for the same reasons (when the US was still an emerging world player at the time). This gave us the 19th century wars, and WWI and WWII.
After France, UK, etc lost any chance to the "top dog" position, and Germany failed quite spectacularly, they stopped fighting altogether. (Not because of any "hard lessons" learned during WWII -- if it was that, they would have stopped at WWI and even earlier. There was just not much to fight about anymore).