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Comment by mercurialshark | Hacker News Reader

Why We Spy on Our Allies

R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former Director of Central Intelligence.

http://cryptome.org/echelon-cia2.htm?utm_medium=referral&utm...

tl;dr - The CIA spies on European allies because we bribe our way to win contracts, so the CIA gets the proof then blackmails (the Saudis) into handing over some of the contracts to others. Oh sorry quietly has a word.

Look, use your spy satellites to publically shame bribery - that's fine by me. Claim the UK is bribing every government it can find - sure, Cameron and Blair were hardly discreet. But claim that after you have done this service to the world, you then "quietly have a word". Come on. If you are doing this for the greater good, make it public.

I swear, if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.

we bribe our way to win contracts, so the CIA gets the proof then blackmails (the Saudis) [...] the UK is bribing every government it can find

Your comment illuminates things somewhat - at the top end of the international business food-chain there is no real free-market. We can talk about free-markets when discussing small, medium and even large domestic sized businesses. But when we think about integrated circuits, aircraft, shipping, consulting engineering, infrastructure etc, it's about discretion when lobbying to get the winning the bid, discretion in stealing key technologies, and discretion in manipulating the market.

My first instinct was to suggest that encryption is the magic bullet for having a real free market at the top end - but that doesn't stop bribery. In the one hand, we need to protect innovative businesses from having their intellectual property stolen and handed to the incumbent, in the other we need to shine a light on the corruption that pervades everything from soccer to software contracts.

I'm not sure what can be done beyond what you suggest at the end of your post: if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.

Time for the spies to become Wikileaks? The reason they won't do this is because every side has nasty secrets to hide.

Well no, it could be argued that it is a free market of sorts.

...or it would take more technologically sophisticated and less traceable forms.

Really? FIFA was shoving wads of cash into brown envelopes and renting apartments in Trump Tower - for dogs.

Bribery is generally not sophisticated. Especially at the levels the CIA could give a shit about, bribery is an open secret and part of what the ruling classes expect, or at least condone.

Embezzlement- yeah that's hidden. Which is why congress pays whistleblowers. I mean the U.S. Is ridiculously out in front for these sort of things (well officially, I am sure bribery and corruption is still common)

I don't think that works because when you reveal you have a capability, your adversary works quickly to patch/block it, especially if you are quite vocal about it. International corruption wouldn't end by 2017, because the tapped phones would be secured long before then.

Looking at this[0] table of least corrupt countries by perception, Europe has 7 in the top 10. Least corrupt. Least.

Occam's razor: The person who worked in intelligence, and is/was a Washington lawyer lied. Even without data, that surely must have crossed people's minds, no?!

[0] https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

> Looking at this[0] table of least corrupt countries by perception, Europe has 7 in the top 10. Least corrupt. Least.

> Occam's razor: The person who worked in intelligence, and is/was a Washington lawyer lied. Even without data, that surely must have crossed people's minds, no?! > [0] https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

Perception != reality

He was referring to bribery of foreign countries (such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in his examples) that U.S. and European countries compete to win contracts.

Even according to the PERCEPTION index, they're of tiny European countries not named France. Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. A combined population that's about 9 million fewer than that of Italy.

The cryptome.org article refers to Europe.

> He was referring to bribery of foreign countries (such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in his examples) that U.S. and European countries compete to win contracts.

From the first line of the cryptome.org article: 'What is the recent flap regarding Echelon and U.S. spying on European industries all about?'

> Perception != reality

Sorry, they don't have the actual corruption statistics available!

Deleted comment

I've seen the site quoted in The Guardian (a newspaper of record).

Feel free to investigate their methods, and report back! I take them as being somewhat credible. As do you by your own admission.

Oh, such a "holier than thou" attitude in that article - US watching over the naughty naughty Europeans so we can all have a better and safer world. Maybe he should get off that really really high horse just a bit.

I love this! Of course, the US is too much of a saint to ever consider bribing. Instead, we rely on our guns to do the talking. This reminds me of the human right violations report that the American State Dept publishes, always pointing the finger at China while China publishes its own report pointing the finger at the U.S. using as evidence police brutality, Guantanamo Bay, etc.

I'm surprised he was so blunt, didn't expect there were any people like that in Washington. Or perhaps, since he had already retired.

I wish I could upvote this more, this is a fascinating read, and seems to at least give some more perspective to this conversation.

Perspective on how radically warped the mindset of these CIA types are? It was the most obnoxious thing I've read in a while.

scumbags like that with too much power and too little oversight, feeling righteous... if any of you are reading this, please do a properly good deed for this world, and either quit or shoot yourself (that's a honest request, unfortunately)

> shoot yourself

What a bizarrely horrid thing to say.

Does anyone else find it hilarious to see a bureaucrat heading up an enormous and bloated state intelligence apparatus trying to give a lecture about free markets?

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book related to this topic, that I highly recommend reading: http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins-...

> So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.

He must be confusing Europe with the US where bribing is called "lobbying" and is usually not tax deductible: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/ch11.html#en_US_2014_pu...

While we also have corruption at all levels of government in Europe, we still consider bribing illegal. Doing creative accounting to hide the bribes is also illegal.

I think this is referring to bribing foreign officials, not officials of the European country. See, e.g. the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#...

He was referring to bribery of other countries such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in his examples.

I can't name a consumer technology category that the US was sitting at the top of in 2000.

So the reason that they spy on foreign companies is that they hope they can catch bribery going on (if they had credibly evidence without the espionage they wouldn't need the espionage in the first place, thus there must happen that they spy on innocents).

Once they find evidence of corruption they confront the government that is buying, not the one that could punish the company. Clearly the crime of corruption is not of importance to the CIA (why would it, they use it to recruit, and they aren't a police anyway).

Because it effects american business success. That bribed contract that went to an 'inferior' euro corp instead of the 'superior' american corp.

So by finding evidence of corruption, they can leverage that to potentially get the contract to the american corporation, increasing US wealth.

What makes you believe US companies don't use bribe either? Or that any US corp is 'superior'?..

Well, it's clearly superior to blackmail people rather than bribe them.

With bribing, the power balance is in favor of the person being bribed. With blackmail, the one in charge is the one doing the blackmail.

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