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Comment by alandarev | Hacker News Reader

But it seems to be absolutely OK to spy on all the people who use Celsium?

Well if you're not american you're guilty until proven innocent regardless. You should have thought of that before you decided to not be born in America.

Down vote all you want it's true. A lot of you are only mad and arguing about it because the same spying you have no problem applying to the rest of the world is blowing back in your face.

Well, that's sort of the point of having a spy agency. It's supposed to invade the privacy of other countries' citizens for the benefit of its own. What country do you live in? I'd bet good money that it has its own signals intelligence service too. Spying on foreigners is a tool of statecraft, and statecraft is a shady business.

Yeah, all I've seen in this article was "Americans, americans, americans..". I though we have already found out that NSA is a world wide problem and, among other adversary effects, poses a serious threat to literary break Internet into regional networks, not that "NSA is bad because it listens to the phone calls of americans".

The only people who can make the NSA stop/change the way it functions is Americans though.

Im with you in spirit, but the US partly gets away with all this because other countries not only support them, but aid them. Prime sorry example, UK and GCHQ. Cant help thinking that if a lot of US allies simply said no, something might change. If the international community stood up to the US Gov, Americans themselves might then ask more question about the internal working.

Sadly here in the UK, Im vaguely sure we out do the US in terms of privacy invasion. So, I'll have a Coke and a smile and......

Ross Anderson has an interesting recent paper on network effects in surveillance partnerships.

http://weis2014.econinfosec.org/papers/Anderson-WEIS2014.pdf

"My first big point is that all the three factors which lead to monopoly—network effects, low marginal costs and technical lock-in—are present and growing in the national-intelligence nexus itself. The Snowden papers show that neutrals like Sweden and India are heavily involved in information sharing with the NSA, even though they have tried for years to pretend otherwise."

"[P]layers in an intelligence network may come to see their relationship with the other agencies as their key asset [...]"

Lots of other interesting things there.

Apparently not Americans - because we have no actual vote in how they're run. Congress doesn't either. So that leaves the Executive branch - which comes down to 1 (one) American.

I can't back this up, but I would lay odds that the influence the NSA/CIA has over the President is far greater than the reverse (and that this has been true for decades, regardless of who sits in the chair).

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