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Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

Personally, that was the exact moment when I first felt ashamed of the EU and Germany in particular. To put it bluntly, that incident and the absolute lack of outrage from the governments involved (especially in face of Snowden's disclosures preceding it) clarified "we're the US's bitch and we know our place".

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Or, you know, it could be that the EU thought "Jesus, if someone pulls a Snowden on us, we'd like the US to help us grab them, so lets help the US grab Snowden".

I'm pretty sure the EU intelligence community is crapping themselves at the thought of a huge leak happening to them.

EU doesn't syp on their own citizens so NO.

That seems unlikely.

Ironically, the Snowden leaks revealed that EU countries do spy on their citizens, just like the NSA. And yes, that includes Germany and its BND.

It's always struck me as bizarre that, at least in discussion forums like HN, the US is regarded as an unusually bad actor when it's simply the leader of the gang.

the US has become like a modern stasi. the scariest part is the number of people who remain blind about this fact

There is still much good about the U.S. The only thing that people regularly seem to complain about is that they want to act however they choose, ignore how that affects the rest of the world and then when someone stands up and says, no that's bullshit, they act like a spoiled brat about it. [Clarification: I'm not speaking about the U.S. as a whole, just the government agencies that regularly reach beyond their legal authority to achieve illegal objectives]

This is not true^, and indeed the German parliamentary investigation into GCHQ doing this spying is what this is all about.

^The Eu itself doesn't have a spy organisation, but plenty of EU countries do.

They do. The BND had DE-CIX tapped for years (and shared freely with the NSA), for example.

Compared to the US, the scale might be rather tame, but that has more to do with the bloated US intelligence budget than with any "respect" for privacy on the part of the european intelligence services.

The problem with that is that if it happens anywhere outside of France, everyone will just roll their eyes, agree that of course they suspected this was happening, the leak just confirms it and life will carry on as normal...

Meanwhile, in France there would be riots in the streets, ports would be blocked by truckers and the wheels would fall off everything - which is par for the course when anyone upsets the French :P

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