N.S.A. Dragnet Included Allies, Aid Groups and Business Elite

From the beginning of the crisis, these people loudly blamed the victim, accusing NSA-critics of anti-americanism and telling us that "the NSA discussion is over".

Then, with time, the industrial espionage stories started to emerge (and it became known that Merkel's phone has been bugged since 2002). Turns out, there are quite a few instances where German companies had their trade secrets stolen by American intelligence agencies, which in turn gave those secrets to US competitors.

So now even the most blindly devoted atlanticists in government know that they must do something against the NSA problem, and to make it worse, they have to do something that actually works (as opposed to feel-good measures).

I am genuinely curious why the former would be defensible while the latter not. The former in this case would trend toward causing (at some point) some level of death an destruction, the latter amounts to high level piracy.

Is the basis for the former's defensibility the assumption that it is strictly defensive in nature?

Why would a country not have a program to enhance it's own industry through espionage?

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft...

Rules regarding abuse of dominant position could have been applied much stricter. Some of these companies have 90-something percent market share on several of the geographic and product markets they operate in. But not one of them has been forced to split up. MS was forced not to include IE in Windows and MS and Intel were fined (fined!), but not one of them have been forced to open access to (or just make it possible to export) their social graph. Apple is still allowed to block other content providers from selling movies and music iPhone and iPad. The iphone costs more or less the same all over Europe as does the music and movies on it. Amazon has been allowed to apply predatory pricing for more than a decade.

Tax laws could have been designed so that companies were taxed on their European profits, just like the European companies they compete against.

These companies barely employ Europeans, barely pay any European tax, but they hold thousands of European patents and make hundreds of billions of euro in Europe and operate in markets where there is curiously enough still not/no longer serious competition from European companies.

I don't believe for a second that NSA hasn't used their spying to improve American competitiveness.

Exactly. And this is something that has been going on for ages,

To be clear, it's not like they feel they promote "select private enterprises" by doing so. That is, it's not "let's help our pals at company X" -- it's more like "let's give the US corporations a leverage against Mexico / Brasil / France etc".

It already is an unfair (and illegal in most cases) leverage because it's based on huge spying machinery. But when it's also combined with the kind of huge diplomatic, political and military pressure the US has, then it becomes a way to crush competition, in other words post-colonialism at its best.

And no, not "all countries do the same" (a common counter-argument). A lot, maybe all countries do have spying agencies, but most of them are concerned with internal affairs (dissidents and such) and dangerous neighborhoud countries (feuds). And of course, their scale and scope is orders of magnitude smaller.

Only someone watching too much 24 and Homeland would believe that countries such as, say, Chile, Argentina, Luxemburg, Czech republic, Albania, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, Colombia and such have the same kind of spying infrastructure and reach as the US has (and much much less the diplomatic might to take advantage of it, even if they had). It's not called a "superpower" for nothing.

For instance, Japan works very hard to grow rice even though it would be much cheaper to import rice from China. It's because not being able to feed your own population is bad in a war. Energy (oil) is the same way.

The line between military and industry is often not very clear.

“We do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line,” said Vanee Vines, an N.S.A. spokeswoman.

But she added that some economic spying was justified by national security needs. “The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security,” Ms. Vines said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/18/brazil-jets-idUSL2...

So, you build a data centre in a "Switzerland of data" and throw something like national government-level resources into its physical security, and buttress it with legislation highly supportive of nondisclosure and customer privacy. So what? To get any utility out of such a place, outside users need to send traffic to and from it. Unlike, say, copyright enforcement takedowns or what have you, the NSA's surveillance isn't highly reliant on physical proximity to that kind of facility, or nearby listening posts. Much of the Sigint took place at vulnerable transoceanic Internet traffic convergence points in countries like the UK and Germany.

How would a Switzerland of Data stop that? :-)

Either play along with the 14 eyes, or join some loose alliance with the BRIC countries.

The result of your decision, combined with your country's geo-political circumstances, could range from political/economic isolation and worst-case scenario military invasion, to mild prosperity in exchange for total colonialist-like obedience at the expense of your own citizens' full potential in prosperity and living standards.

http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...

The particular EU antitrustocrat was involved in decisions relating to many other firms that FedGov might find of interest, including Gazprom, Citigroup, JP Morgan, HSBC, ICAP, ISI, UMG, EMI, Panasonic, Toshiba, Intel.

I'm not defending use of the NSA's surveillance apparatus for economic espionage; in fact, I'd be happy to see all relevant FedGov employees fired, denied their pensions, and prosecuted if that's true. What I'm saying is simply let's not assume software companies are the beneficiaries when there may be legitimate reasons to spy on companies like Gazprom, which is controlled by the Russian government and likely the largest natural gas extractor in the world.

Put it this way, if you or I hacked say, I dunno... NASA, looking for proof of , oh random subject... aliens... Would it be a defence to say, "I was just looking, I did no harm. I didn't use any data I saw"? Or would the US try to prosecute such a person? Hmmmmm