The U.S. Government's Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Government's Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations

firstlook.org

104 pointsLibertatea16 comments

This is shockingly old news. I can't find the LA Times article on this from 1999, but here's a story from the Independent, circa 2000:

"Documents obtained by the Independent on Sunday reveal how the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) - propelled by the newly-elected Clinton administration's policy of 'aggressive advocacy' to support American firms compete for overseas contracts - have immersed themselves in the new hot trade war. Targets have included UK and European firms. At stake are contracts worth billions of dollars."

https://web.archive.org/web/20110901092355/http://www.indepe...

EDIT: found it. Covered in the US press in February 2000:

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/24/news/mn-2072

EDIT AGAIN: And while I'm in the mood for digging, here's a story from 1995. French caught CIA engaging in economic espionage:

"In the French operation, the CIA was, in effect, spying for Hollywood: At least part of the mission was reportedly designed to determine the strength of the French bargaining position in television and telecommunications trade negotiations. The United States was opposed to French demands to restrict imports of U.S. television programming into Europe."

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-10-11/news/mn-55816_1_cia-o...

It's long been known that the CIA is actively involved in all sorts of foreign espionage and operations to forward American business interests. I mean, hell, just look at Panama. We firebombed their capital city because the president had the gall to say that he wanted to hire Panamanian companies to do construction and maintenance on the Panama Canal after we ceded ownership back to them. The US government claimed that this was, somehow, 'socialism' and launched an attack. They've done similar things all over South America for decades. The CIA is the biggest enemy of democracy outside of the US, and the NSA is the biggest enemy of democracy inside of it.

I think that this is somewhat due to different definitions of parsing what "economic espionage" means.

As you say, it's old news that NSA and CIA have tried to figure out bargaining strength. CIA was doing that even before SIGINT became the easiest way to find that information out. And this Economist story http://www.economist.com/node/1842124 from 2003 flat-out states that NSA detected Airbus bribing Saudi officials in the 90s, causing the Clinton Administration to intervene.

The U.S. government has never made statements that they're not trying to negotiate trade deals and treaties that are in the interests of U.S. companies, and they find data of companies like Airbus/EADS and Petrobras useful in figuring out their (the USG's) own negotiating strategy, or in detecting our allies and partners "circumventing" trade rules to assist their own domestic industry, must like your LA Times article relates to.

But that's not the same as exfiltrating such data directly from Airbus to Boeing, which is the kind of thing NSA claims they're not (and have not been) doing.

It's interesting that Greenwald's story mentions a strategy document that argues for going in that direction (the China strategy in reverse?) but a strategy proposal is just that--a proposal.

Infuriatingly, they do this only for the largest US companies while small business in America is left to fend for itself. Travel to China or Russia much as a small business?

One example: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/china-corporate-esp...

If your counterparty has the right relationships as the provincial or state level you're a target. This, FCPA, DCMA... US small business plays by a set of lofty one-sided rules.

Yes, the question not talked about in the article is how to disseminate the information to US companies. You'd have to be part of the club. And then it raises the question if the big guys spy on our own smaller companies that are not part of the club.

You have to realize the mindset of the people who support and go about these sorts of things. First off, obviously, they are fine with 'cheating' in any form so long as it is for 'our team'. They don't believe in 'fair play' at all and think things like open and fair elections, economic competition, etc are all just fantasies sold to the rubes of the public to keep them complacent. They believe strongly that the only way to actually survive is for 'hard men' to be in the shadows making 'hard choices' (choices so hard that they always involve stomping an innocent to death 99% of the time).

But it's more than that. When they look at America and its position on the world stage, it sees various pillars holding up America. The major industries and areas in which America leads the world. Things like media publishing, for instance. The reason it is so easy for an MPAA/RIAA shill to get the ear of a Congressperson is because they know how Congresspeople think. While the public sees a beautiful alternative, with artists selling their work directly to the public, tens or hundreds of thousands of them all making a decent living from their work, the only thing a Congressperson sees is a swarm of rats gnawing through one of the pillars that holds the country up. Decentralization is an abject horror to them. Centralization of power and wealth is the way they are convinced that the world works. Centralization, of course, as we now know, breeds very brittle systems. They become lethargic and incapable of fending off competition from more agile players. So there is a constant battle to keep the smaller players suppressed and lots of running around putting out fires trying to prop up the bloated, inefficient centralized 'pillars'.

They don't believe in 'fair play' at all

I would bet a lot of that has to do with the Prisoner's Dilemma more than ethics.

always involve stomping an innocent to death 99% of the time

Err... are you being hyperbolic? Or metaphoric? Or do you really believe that is what our statesmen spend their days doing?

The challenge is defining whose "team" you're on. Individual, family, chorines, country, race?? Different people prioritize these differently, but if you're sharing data with your team I should think the circle of people you're sharing with would define the team, but there may be reasons to keep part of your team in the dark too. It all depends on higher level strategy. In some cases we see who is clearly on the team, and in some cases who is clearly not. The public doesn't seem to fit cleanly into either of these camps in all cases.

A personal principle I have is that you cannot contain secrets because they inevitably leak. So the starting assumption must be, can you deal with a leak?

I imagine that they would have had similar conversations when the corporates joined the "club" for getting information. What is the downside to participating in this? Maybe you get shits from media for a bit and then everyone forgets and you carry on in your business.

Having come from another country, I am truly glad that US residents are far more sensitive (therefore downsides are higher for US corporates), Chinese people for example, don't care as much and as a result corporates can get away with more and consciously choose to do more

Far more sensitive? I doubt that they care that other countries suffer from it, after all "everybody spies".

One seemingly trivial (but potentially significant) thing about Greenwald and Obidyar's new venture that just bugs me is that "The Intercept" doesn't have its own domain name, and instead appears as a subdirectory inside of the firstlook.org site.

I know that First Look Media is going to play host to more than just this one publication (if you look at the homepage, there is a blog post from Matt Taibbi talking about his new collaboration with the organization), but that arrangement is not unique to First Look. It doesn't take a lot of effort to come up with a whole host of publications that operate under larger corporate umbrellas but which are accessible via their own independent domain name, even when they share resources with other sites. And I can't think of a single publication that is set up the way that The Intercept is.

I'm a longtime Greenwald reader (back from when he first joined Salon.com), and yet I don't think I have visited The Intercept's homepage directly (typing out the url myself) even once since it got off the ground. I don't know why I haven't; I guess it just feels amateurish to nest a substantive news site inside a boring corporate holding company website. It feels like they don't care about building "The Intercept" as a meaningful brand, and as a result I probably don't want to build any personal loyalty to a brand that feels like it might just go away. I say this as someone who completely supports the effort.

I also wonder how this might impact their search results, given that the firstlook.org homepage is effectively a non-entity, and each subdirectory will need to be separately indexed as separate site (for instance, firstlook.org/theinterscept/ has its own sitemap.xml).

What's even weirder to me is that it seems like they even own theintercept.com, which is currently redirecting to firstlook.org/theintercept/. Why don't they use it? It can't only be me. This has to be affecting their readership.

How is any of that relevant? Completely off-topic.

Perhaps off-topic with regards to the contents of this article, but as someone who wants to see information like this disseminated to a large audience, I think that decisions like this that may hurt that effort are relevant.

In building an audience on the web, we claw after increased traffic by playing with anything that could change user behavior. Domain names have an effect.

Maybe I'm wrong, and the specific issue I'm raising doesn't have any bearing on anything at all. But if I'm right, I think it matters. Most of the Snowden leaks are now being disseminated through The Intercept; if you care about this story you should care about the medium through which it is delivered. If you want to see these stories lead to change, you should want as many people to read them as possible.

If firstlook.org isn't the only place they intend to publish their stories, it makes perfect sense. After all, why present a single target to those who wish to censor you? I think FL wants to reach out to other journalistic entities to use their platform. In that vein, The Intercept is one channel in a network.

If it's a "secret plan", how do they know about it?

I always valued HN over reddit. Obviously I'm wrong.

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