US bugged Merkel's phone from 2002 until 2013, report claims

Disclaimer: Colombian here

It makes no sense to use quotation marks around the term American Imperialism, as if it wasn't real. That the US is an empire is beyond question, and Snowden has shown that it has turned the internet into an unprecedented tool for global control.

No statesman in their right mind would allow a foreign power to freely operate such a tool undisturbed in their territory/population. Internet sovereignty should be a priority of any government interested in preserving at least some degree of national autonomy, and indeed neglecting to so after what has been made public would be either a sign of great weakness or of being a US-puppet government... or both. The later is the case of my government. The countries that have complained louder are indeed the countries with some degree of power.

Speaking of the Chinese, I think that Snowden has only proved that there is actually a lot to learn from them. They have been the smartest ones since the begining, when early on they realised the nature of Google, Facebook and the like, and refused to let their population become addicted to giving all their information for US corporations to mine, store, analyze, profit, and provide intelligence to the US government.

Of course the above doesn't mean that the Internet should become surveilled by all local governments. The point is that the changes that should be made are toward a globally decentralised web should also not lead to locally operated surveillance, but the first does not imply the second. Surveillance is a political decision.

Chinese Internet is both more autonomous and more controlled. The first attribute is desireable while the second is not. I think it is key to keep in mind the distinction between those two things to make the best out of what is coming next.

> This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism"

Funny you mention that, cause Latin America has always been treated as a colony by the US. Recent detention of the Bolivian presidential plane is a good example of this arrogant attitude.

There's less prominent, but a similar condescending tone towards Europe, which for decades has been a puppet in the US geopolitical games. It could be tolerated while the threat of the evil commies existed. That threat is long gone, but militant ambitions of the US remained.

After the decade of wars, kidnappings, tortures, drones, and general world policing by the US, Europeans and other nations have had enough of it. I see a wave of anti-American, pro-nationalist sentiment on the rise. It is unfortunate, but rightly deserved.

The irony of it is that it is the military and security complex that will cash in on this development. More threats means more money and more power, which is less freedom for us, the people.

This is a good point, one of the outcomes of this mess might be more control over internets than less control. At some point we'll need to dust off our uucp code to get back to a more independent network.

That said, when I was at USC and the 'net' was ARPANet and the Fido was just the name of a dog, it was very much a 'controlled' net with no spam (your host got detached) or commercial speech (same punishment). Which made for a pretty sterile (if geeky experience). When Berkeley and PARC started to create gateways between those 'unwashed' nodes and the ARPAnet it was quite different. I could easily see a call to go more 'milnet' on the public infrastructure with the monitoring overt and 'known' like it was on ARPAnet in the same of security. That would be a bad outcome in my opinion.

I too fear the China-style internet as a response. However there are alternative responses which may be beneficial if we take a constructive approach. I see no better time than now for many countries to get behind the ideas of Eben Moglen and actively fund open source work in the basic hardware and software than all countries need. Some 21 countries are getting together to challenge the US at the UN. I would love it if these same 21 countries put money where their mouth is and actively funded the thousands of excellent independent open source developers who would love to actively create fully free and open-source basic software and hardware full time. These individuals are not hard to identify and support. Give them the money to quit their day jobs and build FOSS full time.

I fear Tyrannical Governments will create an "American Internet," a "Chinese Internet," a "European Internet," and a "Rest-of-the-world Internet."

It will happen quietly, and no one outside the tech community will know until it's too late.

I think the outrage isn't that we (Americans) did it. The pros know we spy on everything we can, all the time. But the outrage is that now there are newspapers all over the world telling John Q. Public (Johan Q. Public?) what happened. That puts pressure on Merkel from her own citizens. So the Americans will take their public lumps, apologize, and everyone will get back to business.

What people need to understand is america is not spying just for political reasons or "national security". NSA is also basically a spying agency for hire , used by US private corporations to win contracts (weapons,it,....) or predict the foreign competitor next move (just like the CIA served private interests in Latin America, just google United Fruits and Guatemala... ).

I have a suspicion that the "world leaders bin tapped" storyline is intended to set the stage for a "hey we're all in this together" kumbaya agreement where the leaders substitute their judgement for ours and allow the surveillance to continue.

Ugh, so let's stifle the media on the subject? The fact that the leader of a powerful nation is making any sort of protest should be lauded by the tech community.

I thought the german government immediately asked for the US government to "clarify" it's intelligence gathering in germany.

That's about as 'outraged' as they can get isn't it?

Personal phone calls make sense, when the spying is personal.

Or when the Chinese were caught doing the same thing.

That is not a bad response from his position. From say a game theoretic point of view.

Imagine is he is not the president but say a mafia boss, maybe a powerful drug lord. And it turns out one of the drug mules for a competing drug gangs gets murdered by Obama's men. Now, war is about to start. And all the drug lords have a meeting. Obama can claim he didn't personally order the murder and he didn't know it was about to happen. He has men working for him who receive general instruction like "keep the product flowing no matter what cost" with specifically no concrete instruction (especially in written form). Now that protects him. If worse comes to worse, he can simply replace a scapegoat low level employee and keep the organization going forward. The same modus operandi is probably at play with regard to a lot of this stuff from the White House.

It's worth remembering that Barack Obama was not president of the US until 2008. It's safe to assume that in 2002 he was the subject of, not the instigator of, surveillance.

> Wonder what else [Obama] "didn't know"

Here's a laundry list from a libertarian / conservative commentator who often says insightful things even when I disagree with him:

[Obama] was himself clueless as to the extent and severity of the problems in his signature legislation. Two weeks after the Benghazi massacre, he was still parroting the Susan Rice line about anti-Islamic videos, which the CIA knew within hours had had nothing to do with the murder of Ambassador Stevens.

Obama had no idea for three years his IRS might be slow-walking Tea Party applications for tax exemptions. He wasn’t in the loop about Eric Holder’s phone taps on Fox News or the Associated Press.

Nobody told him. The president has not been more deeply implicated in the scandals since re-election because he could credibly say, "How was I supposed to know what was going on?"

Source: http://buchanan.org/blog/queen-obamaland-5957

I haven't been following the story close enough, but he never apologized for spying on U.S. citizens, he defended that, right?

Politician move #178, also know as the "Reagan Shim Sham": just say you don't know anything about it.

Hypocrites indeed.

Hopefully humanity will come up with a way to replace these parasites called politicians.

I believe not even too many years later we will remember this era of humanity as the darkest of the dark ages.

Think the Russians hope no one notices how quiet they are right now about all this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Soviet_and_Russian_e...

According to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev, "SVR and GRU (Russia's external and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War"

At least somebody with influence is getting angry at all.

... your point?

I'm quite sure there are many governments spying (or trying to apy) on Obama's cell phone, including European governments. To expect otherwise is naive and that's why his personal electronic devices are highly secured.

There was an article that made this same comparison recently, and discussed why it doesn't matter: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/10/23/the-politics-of-hypocris...

> What is interesting is not whether France (or Mexico, or Brazil, or Germany) is being hypocritical in pretending to be shocked at what the US is doing. It’s whether their response (hypocritical as it may be) has real political consequences. And it surely does

Well...

we voted in all the Representatives, Senators and Presidents who, in turn, voted to implement the programs though. We do have some culpability.

As a non-American, I have no rights in your country and my views no not count for diddly-squat. In fact, the NSA surveillance are specifically supposed to target at me as a non-American.

So as an America, if you do not approve of their actions then you need to do something about it. You succeeded in one revolution, maybe it is time for another.

It's too easy to claim that citizens are not involved in what the government is doing. One reason these agencies are so bold is because Americans themselves are completely dismissive of the rights of foreigners, thanks to the old manifest destiny attitude.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that it's not just that "everyone does it", it's more about the fact that everyone will do it, regardless of the circumstances.

Consider for a moment what would happen if the U.S. stopped all its foreign & domestic spying. What would happen? Do you think China will stop their spy programs? How about Russia? The UK? The rest of Europe?

No. The U.S. would be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to intelligence. It's like an arms race, except instead of weapons, it's knowledge. Just because one player quits or gets caught, doesn't mean everyone else will stop. In fact, it would be to their advantage if a few players left the table.

That's why I find this whole spying thing nonsense. It's one thing to spy on regular citizens, but it's another to spy on targets (like Angela Merkel) who are political actors and/or heads of state. It should be expected.