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Comment by doczoidberg | Hacker News Reader

The war against terror is only an excuse for this overwhelming mass cyber-espionage.

Explain me why you spy out german government. Is Merkel a potential terrorist? Yes sure.

What's on the roof of the US embassy in Berlin then? http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...

Europe loves to complain about the US but can't be arsed to actually do anything about it, they just keep electing leaders that do what the US says.

It's surprisingly hard to find political leaders that are willing to stand up to the US and still have reasonable opinions on how to run a country.

The USA works very hard to radicalize anti american factions within a country. If the choices are US backed dictator, or religious nutjob, its not much of a hard choice.

Who are the dictators and religious nutjobs in power in Europe?

Perhaps because it's pretty obvious that the US is a force for good in the world and only crazy people would deny that.

It's almost as if there's some mutually beneficial relationship going on between US and European intelligence and military agencies, and the anger of Europe's governments is mostly political sideshow...

The Deep State model works so well in Turkey, why not replicate it worldwide?

I can understand feeling morally opposed to it, but a realist might tell you that it's important to spy on the German government simply because it's a powerful actor, even if it's an ally of the United States.

While another realist would point out that being caught spying on our fellow allies has seriously damaged our relations with them.

Or not. Merkel doesn't seem to care much anymore. They probably knew this was happening. It was just embarrassing that suddenly the public also knew.

Bingo, and if you think that they're not (trying to?) watch us, you'd be wrong.

That realist would be a fool who takes the exasperated statements of politicians at face-value. Were any long term trade agreements threatened? Embargoed in a way where they actually did it, not just talked about it? Was military cooperation withdrawn, diplomatic ties severed?

Absolutely none of this happened. A lot of words happened. Mysteriously, for exactly as long as Snowden was in the news right up till Russia invaded the Ukraine.

A realist would point our that our allies are also spying on us and the outrage is a facade being leveraged for political ends.

That's why she wasn't spied on.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/11/us-germany-usa-spy...

That reports they can't find forensic evidence. But the US Senate's statements[1] make it plain that it did.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/28/politics/white-house-stopp...

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