U.S. government spied on Brazil's Petrobras oil firm
reuters.com
reuters.com
He manages to twist it into a matter of defense against terrorism:
> Our collection of information regarding terrorist financing saves lives. Since 9/11, the Intelligence Community has found success in disrupting terror networks by following their money as it moves around the globe. International criminal organizations, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, illicit arms dealers, or nations that attempt to avoid international sanctions can also be targeted in an effort to aid America’s and our allies’ interests.
> As we have said previously, the United States collects foreign intelligence - just as many other governments do - to enhance the security of our citizens and protect our interests and those of our allies around the world. The intelligence Community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies and monitor anomalous economic activities is critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.
In every scandal like this there are roles to play, surprising how uniform these things are.
The NSA actually called the program and said that none of their spying was used to give unfair advantages to American companies but they wouldn't comment further.
There were slides showing that they perform MITM against Google, as well as a slide that listed diplomatic and economic espionage as NSA goals.
http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents...
Nobody goes to the NSA and submits an RFP for insider information. Such information flows through informal, undocumented channels, e.g. an agent moonlighting at a bank or speaking freely to a friend.
Given (a) the value of the information and (b) the level of integration between information industries and the NSA, I think it improbable that this information hasn't leaked. Presuming the prior, it would be expected to dis-proportionately benefit firms who are closer to the leaky source, i.e. U.S. firms, a benefit which increases proportional to how quickly said information goes "stale". One may argue that Brasilian firms similarly benefit by being closer to the ultimate source, the Brasilian government. But that, in turn, is similar to the old Deutsch logic that bribes paid to foreign governments should be tax deductible to German firms - it's fighting fire with fire.
Of interest:
* A stolen CA (Diginotar) private key was used to implement at least one MITM attack.
* MITM attack vs. Google.
* Huawei is apparently another "target".
* They can monitor Tor on the metadata level at least.
In comparison, Wikipedia lists him as an "American political commentator, lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author":
edit: I checked, looks like none, someone go change it and let's watch the fireworks.
But yes, I am in fact saying that by classifying Greenwald as less than a full journalist (an activist, a blogger - anything but a professional who earns his living as a credentialed journalist), Reuters is tacitly supporting the government in their surveillance state normalcy and is, as you so colorfully put it, an enemy of the people in a very literal and immediate sense.
I particularly like how you kind of strawman me and ad-hominem me in the same phrase there. Are you aware that the phrase "enemy of the people" is associated with Stalinist propaganda and therefore has overtones of Red Scare and McCarthyism, and in later years a certain dilettante unseriousness on the part of the acusee? Or is that just unconscious for you? Either way, thanks for contributing. I'm always happy to see people who are unclear about what I'm saying to ask for greater clarity.
By identifying his role using words that indicate amateur status, they are supporting the government's desired point of view.
I honestly can't tell if you're just naive or if you disagree with me politically, but if it's naivete I encourage you to start thinking about these issues.
Repeat for every other country and you have the beginning of the end for the dominance of the American computer industry.
Plus, it's also quite ironic considering US started this whole trend of banning companies because of fear of bugs in their hardware. Reap what you sow.
One would assume that any company anywhere that wasn't beholden to the intelligence community would be presently looking for a secure, open source, open-hardware-if-possible, end-to-end solution for networking their data.
Your comment would have been stronger without the quip against people at HN. As you can see from all the hot air from politicians this is not localized to HN.
Sure, they have tried to hack the US on multiple occasions, but that's geopolitics, and very different from selling bugged devices.
Americans are far more dangerous than any bearded fanatic.
Don't toss us all in the same group.
I'm met both online and offline a ton of Americans with aggrandizing and myopic views. Like you I used to think they were victims of the state that time is past. They share the blame.
It is in the NSA's mandate to engage in any espionage that will give the US an advantage. I just don't understand how us spying on a state-controlled Brazilian company is somehow a revelation. It would shock me if we didn't spy on every major foreign company in the world.
We know spying is unfair, but it is also something people have been doing since the dawn of civilization in order to get a leg up on the competition.
Hell, the Navy used to run their personnel management out of the "Bureau of Navigation".
We, as a society, tolerate espionage so long as it is a necessary evil. One of the terms in the assessment of "necessary evil" is the ethics of what they are doing, the other term is how necessary it is. If your evil:necessary ratio goes to high then it program stops being something that any reasonable person can support. As an extreme example to demonstrate the point, if the CIA were installing cameras in the showers of randomly chosen UK citizens, that would be wildly unethical and have next to no benefit, thus making it wildly unacceptable.
You can't just dismiss ethical criticism of a spy agency by saying "well they operate illegally anyway". Excluding the ethical term would be giving them a license to do anything they please.
In this case the topic is economic espionage. So who gets the information? Oil companies? Hedge funds? That's a bit different than intelligence on actual military threats.
Just oil? Or can Embraer count on Boeing having their bid numbers? And, if so, is maintaining a friendly relationship with the US in Brazil's interests?
Honestly, what alternative do we have?
As a side note, I'd like to acknowledge the genial strategy of our leaders and voters when they removed any signal of intelligence from the higher positions in the government, and fouled the US plans of gaining any insight. I judged you badly, people, sorry.
Presumably not, at least in general, otherwise the outcry against persistent Chinese spying on the USA (e.g. the Aurora attack on Google) would probably be much much larger within the U.S.
Or maybe you find that hypocritical, but the USA as a whole does not.
That doesn't make me feel any different that the NSA does it to others. If anything, it means that the NSA is necessary to even the odds.
It would however be News for the rest of the world. The army, the listeners and the spies do have some international Rules that are enforced through political channels. When that fails, the media takes over as a gap action before the army gets involved.
In this case, doing industrial espionage with your military intelligence force is not within the rules.
The name of the game is trust. You probably wouldn't imagine so, but Brazil is a major IT costumer to the US. Now, how do you think your customers feel when they discover that the stuff they buy from you comes with unwanted surprises?
Brazil's not so much an antagonist, but the ruling party under Lula da Silva is traditionally associated with workers parties in Cuba and Venezuela. Brazil has also moved toward increased cooperation with China and Russia in defense and industrial manufacturing, as well as considered aligning its considerable influence on the oil market with OPEC, and is under constant lobbying from Venezuela to do so.
Most importantly, the United States would very much prefer that no power centers of comparable strength arise in the Western Hemisphere, and Brazil's GDP is closing in on France.
Powers in relative decline are always suspicious of rising powers, especially if they could potentially one day exert significant influence in a nearby region.
Foreign policy's a zero-sum game in the IC and defense world.
Every nation thinks about defense in the same semi-paranoid (or "neorealist") mindset. It's a consequence of a dangerous existence in an purely anarchic system.
Oh, wait, I forgot that the NSA's resources are, in practice, also used to conduct industrial espionage:
Not necessarily.
From their mission statement:
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.
I'm noticing a pattern of you being outraged about discovering your own misconceptions to be ill-founded. The NSA just gathers foreign intelligence. Military and terroristic threats are the most important source of foreign intelligence, but we have a vested interest in knowing What's Going On. As does everyone else, of course - it's a two way street.
I know full well that the NSA does more than gather intelligence on foreign threats. The link in my post is about the allegations of industrial espionage that surfaced in the 90s.
This is not just about the US wanting to know what's going on. This is about the US engaging in the sort of behavior that we have rebuked China over -- state-sponsored industrial espionage. It is an abuse of power, regardless of what "everyone else" is doing.
As for my own misconceptions, I assume you are referring to the notion that I and many others had that the NSA would not go as far as to actively sabotage civilian cryptography. I was not alone in believing that. It was common to dismiss such allegations as far-out conspiracy theories until the day the story broke. You can look at the archives of sci.crypt and the cryptography mailing list if you do not believe me. As I said before, nobody expected the NSA to share its cryptanalysis techniques. Nobody expected the NSA to alert us to weaknesses in publicly designed ciphers or cryptosystems. It was widely assumed that the NSA would watch us fumble about and try to find exploitable weaknesses in our systems, not that they would be part of a vast conspiracy to introduce such weaknesses. Plenty of people thought that the NSA was trying to balance its signals intelligence mission with its duty to protect our own communication from foreign interception. There is nothing wrong with being outraged to discover that there is no real attempt to strike such a balance and that the crypto wars are not over by any stretch.
If the NSA were only focused on industrial espionage with these programs then I don't see why they felt the need to target Google (a U.S. corporation in the first place).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but oil is certainly a strategic resource and even if the U.S. never had a single plan to do anything with Brazil's oil, there are both military and national-interest reasons for knowing what Brazil knows about their own oil reserves, refinery capabilities, etc.
Likewise there are embargo-related reasons to know if Brazil has secret agreements to export oil to nations embargoed by the UN.
And the worst part about it all is that whether NSA is around or not, the U.S. does live in a cloak-and-dagger world, just like every other nation does. They can either somehow convince other nations to go about things "fairly" as well (possible with the EU and Brazil perhaps, not so much with Russia and China), or they can immerse themselves in that game as well.
Certainly the U.S. is familiar with the problems of industrial espionage and secret economic agreements (some would say "bribes"), as both have been deployed against the U.S. (yes, even by friends, even by allies).
Many foreign companies use Google.
We push for free trade agreements to neuter foreign businesses' competitivity, and then we still put them under surveillance; how is this okay?
The article says nothing about sabotage
Or you know, re-creating the south-american navy fleet right after Brazil officially announces it found massive amounts of oil on its coast!
Thus, since US do that, and Brazil does not trust US, Brazil closed ties with Russia and China, that actually help (specially Russia... For example, when US sent its newly reactivated fleet to our shores right after the oil news, Brazil invited Russia to do massive military drills, and yay! Russia did came, and ÚS ships started to stay very wide of brazillian waters)
Gee, I wonder why...
After these leaks, however, I think there will be a transition to a "not-so-friendly" state soon, unless the US takes some serious corrective actions.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-30/world/41620705...
All this due to the ending of the cold war.
Now, with the Arab Spring, the US has sought to twist events into a new war. Syria being just the beginning...
How can the international community accept that?
Also:
> Obama said he would investigate the allegations.
How can he still have the guts to play the surprised and innocent one?
This is not one scandal - this is the same scandal played out over a mlion times, but there are just not a million front pages of newspapers.
Many years ago Schneier said that our data trails were like the pollution of our age - and it seems we have just noticed the NSA are the Dark Satanic Mills. This is a fast turnaround - will we be as fast in creating an EPA or a Clean Air Act?
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-g...