Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Key paragraph: "Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia."

It's probably a good idea to add to the existing network of transoceanic cables

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

but the technical means of monitoring international signal traffic include a lot of other methods besides just having a listening post at the cable landing point, so probably more helpful for worldwide communication privacy is building privacy by design

http://www.privacybydesign.ca/

into every device and every network (and every legal system) all around the world.

You are completely right, but that doesn't make a good headline either for the politicians or the press.

And, not that "well, everyone is doing it" makes it right, etc. etc., but to think that only the US is spying on these communications is a bit naive.

Indeed, the idea that routing your connections through other countries will help you is beyond naive. Nearly every industrialized country, including EU member nations, is documented conducting surveillance on comparable scales, and most of them (including Portugal) work closely with the NSA. Schemes like this, especially when government-sponsored, need to be looked at a lot more skeptically. They aren't doing it for privacy-conscious reasons.

As Der Spiegel put it, the BND spies on everyone but Germans, shares that data with the other collaborating countries, and then gets data on Germans in return. (And the Germans didn't call France the "evil empire" of industrial espionage for no reason.)

Indeed it would be naive to think it. It's a matter of power and control , there are no borders, no countries, no flags , only two parties , the ones who have power and the ones who don't.

Why would you think that the goal of this project is privacy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com