I'm pretty sure our German services know much more than they say. There is also a lot of cooperation between German services and the US. Keep in mind that Germany hosts major military and intelligence installations for the US. The central US military commands for Europe and Africa are both hosted in Germany. The US organizes a lot of the world-wide military activities (aka wars) from Germany. We host US nuclear weapons. We have surveillance installations here. The CIA and NSA have bases here...
Representing Germany as a US client state made sense a generation ago, when it was an occupied nation not least because of its aggressive actions towards European Jewry, and because of the Cold War. Now it is home to a large Muslim population, many of whom are the targets of this surveillance, and the US is allied with Israel. Also, we have been fighting wars in the Middle East for over a decade.
I would suggest that the Germans are more than either a client state or allies. They are a leading state in the EU if not its defacto leader, and the EU is not your grandfather's EU.
Whatever metapolitical order establishes itself in cyberspace will certainly respect the real world politics, which is that relations between the US and EU are tense, and Germany's relationship with its own Muslim population is ambiguous as regards the concepts being thrown around here -- 'treason' and 'duties of a citizen' and 'sovereignty'.
Technical persons would do well to think through what they really want out of the world political order, and to pursue policies with good will that are conducive to peace. Perpetuating the political order of the last century will be both futile and counterproductive.
The main problem is that the ruling political parties in Germany are - please excuse the language, i don't know how else to put this - sucking US d*ck big time. The way the whole NSA/Snowden thing has been handled in Germany is a fucking joke.
What's more, the US and Germany have Cold War era agreements that basically allow the US to do whatever they damn well please.
Sure, they cancelled the one was made public (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/germany-nixes-surveillance-pa...) but considering Germany was founded under US/British occupation, I would be surprised if there weren't less public agreements that state more or less the same. After all, the German government was paranoid about the Soviets at the time, so they were happy to have the US handle everything.
I am also convinced that the German authorities know much more than we like to think (they don't say that they know nothing), and I'm also pretty sure the NSA and CIA know as much as the German authorities.
While everybody is mostly focused on Deutsche Telecom and Stellar, I'm more concerned about the long list of big-profile red-filled dots ('SIGINT collection points from AS') in the dox and slides:
* AS1299 (TeliaSonera)
* AS3549 (Level3/GBLX)
* AS6762 (TelecomItalia/Sparkle)
* AS3320 (DeutscheTelekom)
* AS1273 (CW Cable and Wireless)
* AS702 (Verizon/UUNET)
This list covers most of the uplink/transit/tier-1 providers, serving most of EU operators (TATA and TINET being the biggest absents here).
The BBC broadcast a good documentary on the broad issue of internet survelliance a few weeks ago (Horizon: Inside the Dark Web). It's been uploaded to YouTube and is well worth a watch.
There is a segment in the programme that starts at 4 mins 50 sec that explains how key fibre optic cables that connect the UK and US handle as much as 25% of all internet traffic. It also explains how relatively simple it is for GCHQ to insert an "optical tap" that allows them to capture the data that flows through the cables.
I'm not sure if they see this for the first time, or whether it's a little staged for the camera, but those guys have to be feeling really uncomfortable. Imagine some journalist coming to your office, and showing you slides with passwords, that can access you infrastructure. http://vimeo.com/106026217
That's a rather odd thing to believe. As an American, I certainly never felt like I was immune to foreign governments spying on me.
My problem is when my government collects tons of data about my own life and is then able to assemble it into any kind of crime they want. It's the collection of my personal information by my own government and then the use of that information for social control that I don't expect to happen. I would expect other governments to keep a close eye on me, especially if I were to get into a position where I could affect national policy. That is, after all, the role of an intelligence agency. [Insert long discussion about how spying and intelligence agencies have done a lot to prevent many wars.]
Why did they feel this way? Did they feel that freedom somehow meant being left alone by every government on the planet? There was a general understanding that people are in some form of agreement with their own government, right? And that this agreement had absolutely no bearing on any other government, right?
Evidence that the US spy agencies engage in large scale espionage on its own people is outrageous. Evidence that US spy agencies engage is foreign espionage is expected.
What is the difference? The US has made explicit commitments to its people through things like the 1st and 4th amendments to protect their privacy.
And this is exactly why more and more non-US-citizen don't like the US anymore. Seeing the world in two classes "US" and "non-US". Yes, I know, no secret service is better. The question is: Are secret services compatible with democracy? More and more indicators let me think: no.
My take on that is that spying is supposed to have as it primary justification the objective of determining a foreign nations true intentions. Its a method to confirm or disprove what is said. Germany, for example, says its no threat to the US, and US spying will hopefully confirm this. And of course vice-versa. So, spying on politicians and policy makers can be argued to be legit. However whole sale spying on citizens is not.
What gone wrong here is that spying is now used for law enforcement, instead of a tool for diplomacy.
The thing is that Germany is a close ally to the US. It's one thing to spy on your ally's leaders to make sure you know what they are up to, but it's another to engage in mass surveillance of their civilian population. The US is doing to friend and foe alike what they have publicly shamed China over.
Spying on citizens of another nation is an act of aggression because it undermines the sovereignty of that nation. If you're outraged to find out the NSA is spying on US citizens, why wouldn't you be outraged to find out the US closest allies (say, Japan, the UK, France, Germany or Canada) are spying on US citizens?
Why should it be acceptable for them to do what would be unacceptable if your own elected representatives did it to you? But undermining the sovereignty of other nations seems to be SOP these days. See US drone strikes in Pakistan or the Russian not-quite-official involvement in the Ukraine.
It's not that what the NSA has been doing is orders of magnitude worse (though some would argue it is), it's the sum of all these things the US has been doing while the presidents and media are continuously cheering for Team America as the One True Beacon of Freedom and Democracy.
Europeans (and Germans in particular) have been uneasy about US politics and how they clash with the country's public image at least since the days after 9/11 (I remember thinking "oh crap, the US will go to war with someone over this") and this is just another drop in the bucket. I guess you react to ultra-nationalism differently if you a have strongly engrained cultural memories of what it's like to be a nation that is "superior" to everyone.
A few years ago I worked for a small Telco company who provided software for virtual MNOs, and security there was not that, let's say, inspiring confidence.
It is generally a problem with small companies in the Internet and Mobile-services areas that security is only an afterthought. Partially also due to the fact that the protocols which are used are pretty old and do not implement much, if any, security measures.
edit: customers of the company were mostly in eastern europe, middle east and oceania, so maybe that was another reason ;-)
There's also the problem that when communications companies think of security, they may be thinking of "revenue protection" more than customer privacy (that is, making sure that customers have to pay to communicate, and that they get billed accurately).
Ross Anderson liked to point out that the crypto that some cell phones used to discourage you from using aftermarket batteries was stronger than the crypto they used to protect your voice calls over the air. He's also suggested that the crypto in GSM ended up more focused on subscriber authentication than on voice privacy.
There is also now a source for the notion that governments pressured the designers of GSM to make it not provide strong cryptographic privacy:
Here is a sad thing: Governments are STILL pressuring the designers of GSM to make it not provide strong cryptographic privacy. Like, today. We got some documents from ETSI only a couple of years ago showing that they are designing a cryptographic backdoor mode for the official GSM end-to-end voice encryption, which isn't even deployed yet. The use of the backdoor mode will be optional according to carriers' view of their jurisdictional obligations.
Sorry, that last part is less on-topic for this thread. But in the big picture, I'm sure the people who are involved in those efforts are not making corresponding compromises in the billing and revenue-protection areas.
Maybe we should have ethics taught in CS so that people know that it's wrong even if you are sitting at a terminal and having fun because the work is challenging.
Many universities do, I know for sure UCLA does, although the course it is taken by other engineers as well so many case studies are from other areas. The closest one to CS at the time I was taking it was about Intel's floating point fiasco, but it did not sound as bad as others because it did not affect people's lives.
Hopefully they'll add recent NSA scandal to the syllabus.
That sounds silly. Ethics is subjective. When you teach "This is wrong." and the student replies "I feel it's right.", what do you say? Unless you have some ethical framework plus a good reason to follow act according that framework, you operate on the level of subjective feelings and opinions.
Having access to an ISP at the level the NSA does, geolocation, complete communications surveillance and MitM attacks become very easy. I'm based in Cologne and a customer of one of the breached ISPs - very annoyed.
Has there been a single report, story, or even rumor that the United States has ever used the NSA to assist american corporations in developing inventions?
Nothing in any of the snowden reports even hints at this - so I think your comment that "no patents have original ideas any more because of spying" is a little out there.
Don't be ridiculous. An idea is original if there's no prior art. If there's no prior art, spying on other people doesn't magically cause prior art to spring into being.
The main problem in this whole story is the inability to punish the misbehavior without getting hit by the backlash. It's the same with Russia's recent activities. We lack efficient means of punishment on a global scale when dealing with powerful nations. Therefore the best option is usually to improve defense measures and that takes time.
What "recent activities"? I'm afraid the very powerful nations that have done what TFA says have also frame your understanding of what Russia did.
Some thinking points: a) Russia is next to Ukraine, so it's like they're dealing with a dispute in their borders (e.g not like certain countries that go across the globe to the middle east or asia to assert their "national interests"). b) Ukraine's legitimate voted for government was toppled by a minority (including nazi sympathizers) with western support. c) The population of Ukraine has tons of people that are pro-Russia and are of Russian descent. Crimea in particular had voted to unite with Russia time and again.
Imagine Mexico's legitimate government had been toppled by a Russian-supported coalition (with pro-nazi's among them). Imagine Baja California had 90% people of USA descent that had voted for union with California. What the US response to that would be?
The misbehavior in Ukraine was US gobertment giving 6 billion dollars to rebels against the democratically elected, Russian speaking majority.
It was the Secretary of State of the US who talked about the 6 billions they gave.
After forcing a coup d'Etat in Ukraine and protecting the rebels (no violence should be used), the Pro Russian majority revolted and then the US of course change their opinion to VIOLENCE SHOULD BE USED against pro Russians.
It become clear that the US put a puppet in Ukraine gobertment. It was only after that Russia secured Sevastopol against the occupation. Sevastopol has been Russian for centuries.
US was alone in their war against Russia until the civilian plane crashed. Europe leaders were told by companies that breaking almost a trillion dollars pacific relationship with Russia in order to satisfy US interest was crazy.
Instantly after the crash US and Germany (then France) condemned Russia without proof. To this day we have not a single proof that Pro Russians hit the plane.
Quite the contrary, the Pro Russians were winning and hitting a commercial plane was against their interest.
In fact I bet it was manufactured like the chemical attack in Syria in order to put public opinion on the side of politicians.
I am not Russian, I am European, and seeing European leaders go against their interest following the war mongering US is disgusting.
The US is afraid about Europe-Russia and China integration, as it could force US out of Euroasia, and the petrodollar to collapse.
The US wants to invade Iran in order to steal their natural gas(more reserves than anywhere else in the world), and Syria in order to force European gaseoduct gas to be controlled by the US.
For this first they have to weak Russia, as Russia faced the US when the US attacked both countries. Russia has their Mediterranean fleet in Syria and a pacific relationship with Iran.
I knew skript kids who were networking mapping cities and national networks like TymNet back in 87. Around 2k I made a map of the Netherlands, because it was a small but interesting country. The bigger boys play with bigger toys.
Most likely, the hacked company in the video is Horizon Energy in the UAE. The first part of the IP matches of the UAE, and you can see the name horizon on the screen. after quick search you can see Horizon has energy operations in the ME and Africa.
Really? I get that as part of the diplomatic games they have to take on an outward posture of being shocked by such revelations, but aren't their intelligence agencies fully aware that these things are just par for the course?
I'm not so sure - a decent argument could be made that the German government really wants to get into the FVEY club. Both Snowden and Drake have said things that suggest this.
(note: government != the people, who are justifiably mad)
[+] [-] lispm|11 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Africa_Command in Stuttgart/Germany. Imagine that, the US military activities for Africa are coordinated in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_European_Command in Stuttgart/Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex in Griesheim/Germany hosts 1000+ people working for the NSA.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Intelligence_Cent... under construction in Wiesbaden/Germany, for the US Army and the NSA.
[+] [-] jegoodwin3|11 years ago|reply
I would suggest that the Germans are more than either a client state or allies. They are a leading state in the EU if not its defacto leader, and the EU is not your grandfather's EU.
Whatever metapolitical order establishes itself in cyberspace will certainly respect the real world politics, which is that relations between the US and EU are tense, and Germany's relationship with its own Muslim population is ambiguous as regards the concepts being thrown around here -- 'treason' and 'duties of a citizen' and 'sovereignty'.
Technical persons would do well to think through what they really want out of the world political order, and to pursue policies with good will that are conducive to peace. Perpetuating the political order of the last century will be both futile and counterproductive.
[+] [-] sauere|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|11 years ago|reply
Sure, they cancelled the one was made public (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/germany-nixes-surveillance-pa...) but considering Germany was founded under US/British occupation, I would be surprised if there weren't less public agreements that state more or less the same. After all, the German government was paranoid about the Soviets at the time, so they were happy to have the US handle everything.
[+] [-] valevk|11 years ago|reply
I am also convinced that the German authorities know much more than we like to think (they don't say that they know nothing), and I'm also pretty sure the NSA and CIA know as much as the German authorities.
[+] [-] kaeso|11 years ago|reply
* AS1299 (TeliaSonera)
* AS3549 (Level3/GBLX)
* AS6762 (TelecomItalia/Sparkle)
* AS3320 (DeutscheTelekom)
* AS1273 (CW Cable and Wireless)
* AS702 (Verizon/UUNET)
This list covers most of the uplink/transit/tier-1 providers, serving most of EU operators (TATA and TINET being the biggest absents here).
[+] [-] chestnut-tree|11 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjNkbLBEqg
There is a segment in the programme that starts at 4 mins 50 sec that explains how key fibre optic cables that connect the UK and US handle as much as 25% of all internet traffic. It also explains how relatively simple it is for GCHQ to insert an "optical tap" that allows them to capture the data that flows through the cables.
[+] [-] etiam|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valevk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|11 years ago|reply
Millions of Germans that honestly believed they wouldn't be spied on anymore once they were part of the "free" West.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
My problem is when my government collects tons of data about my own life and is then able to assemble it into any kind of crime they want. It's the collection of my personal information by my own government and then the use of that information for social control that I don't expect to happen. I would expect other governments to keep a close eye on me, especially if I were to get into a position where I could affect national policy. That is, after all, the role of an intelligence agency. [Insert long discussion about how spying and intelligence agencies have done a lot to prevent many wars.]
Why did they feel this way? Did they feel that freedom somehow meant being left alone by every government on the planet? There was a general understanding that people are in some form of agreement with their own government, right? And that this agreement had absolutely no bearing on any other government, right?
[+] [-] crazy1van|11 years ago|reply
What is the difference? The US has made explicit commitments to its people through things like the 1st and 4th amendments to protect their privacy.
[+] [-] panzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan_cx|11 years ago|reply
What gone wrong here is that spying is now used for law enforcement, instead of a tool for diplomacy.
[+] [-] pluma|11 years ago|reply
Spying on citizens of another nation is an act of aggression because it undermines the sovereignty of that nation. If you're outraged to find out the NSA is spying on US citizens, why wouldn't you be outraged to find out the US closest allies (say, Japan, the UK, France, Germany or Canada) are spying on US citizens?
Why should it be acceptable for them to do what would be unacceptable if your own elected representatives did it to you? But undermining the sovereignty of other nations seems to be SOP these days. See US drone strikes in Pakistan or the Russian not-quite-official involvement in the Ukraine.
It's not that what the NSA has been doing is orders of magnitude worse (though some would argue it is), it's the sum of all these things the US has been doing while the presidents and media are continuously cheering for Team America as the One True Beacon of Freedom and Democracy.
Europeans (and Germans in particular) have been uneasy about US politics and how they clash with the country's public image at least since the days after 9/11 (I remember thinking "oh crap, the US will go to war with someone over this") and this is just another drop in the bucket. I guess you react to ultra-nationalism differently if you a have strongly engrained cultural memories of what it's like to be a nation that is "superior" to everyone.
[+] [-] mike_hearn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reirob|11 years ago|reply
I wanted to post it, but it was already posted and is a dead link. Why? I don't know, but it's a creepy feeling.
[0] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/217618-spy-court-renews...
[+] [-] metafex|11 years ago|reply
edit: customers of the company were mostly in eastern europe, middle east and oceania, so maybe that was another reason ;-)
[+] [-] schoen|11 years ago|reply
Ross Anderson liked to point out that the crypto that some cell phones used to discourage you from using aftermarket batteries was stronger than the crypto they used to protect your voice calls over the air. He's also suggested that the crypto in GSM ended up more focused on subscriber authentication than on voice privacy.
There is also now a source for the notion that governments pressured the designers of GSM to make it not provide strong cryptographic privacy:
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Sources-We-were-pres...
Here is a sad thing: Governments are STILL pressuring the designers of GSM to make it not provide strong cryptographic privacy. Like, today. We got some documents from ETSI only a couple of years ago showing that they are designing a cryptographic backdoor mode for the official GSM end-to-end voice encryption, which isn't even deployed yet. The use of the backdoor mode will be optional according to carriers' view of their jurisdictional obligations.
Sorry, that last part is less on-topic for this thread. But in the big picture, I'm sure the people who are involved in those efforts are not making corresponding compromises in the billing and revenue-protection areas.
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/open-season-on-virgin-mobile-c...
(VM USA was a VMNO, but now it's more of a Sprint brand, since 2009 Sprint owns them outright)
[+] [-] rukugu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takeda|11 years ago|reply
Hopefully they'll add recent NSA scandal to the syllabus.
[+] [-] RivieraKid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BillFranklin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japasc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|11 years ago|reply
Nothing in any of the snowden reports even hints at this - so I think your comment that "no patents have original ideas any more because of spying" is a little out there.
[+] [-] colanderman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
Some thinking points: a) Russia is next to Ukraine, so it's like they're dealing with a dispute in their borders (e.g not like certain countries that go across the globe to the middle east or asia to assert their "national interests"). b) Ukraine's legitimate voted for government was toppled by a minority (including nazi sympathizers) with western support. c) The population of Ukraine has tons of people that are pro-Russia and are of Russian descent. Crimea in particular had voted to unite with Russia time and again.
Imagine Mexico's legitimate government had been toppled by a Russian-supported coalition (with pro-nazi's among them). Imagine Baja California had 90% people of USA descent that had voted for union with California. What the US response to that would be?
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
The misbehavior in Ukraine was US gobertment giving 6 billion dollars to rebels against the democratically elected, Russian speaking majority.
It was the Secretary of State of the US who talked about the 6 billions they gave.
After forcing a coup d'Etat in Ukraine and protecting the rebels (no violence should be used), the Pro Russian majority revolted and then the US of course change their opinion to VIOLENCE SHOULD BE USED against pro Russians.
It become clear that the US put a puppet in Ukraine gobertment. It was only after that Russia secured Sevastopol against the occupation. Sevastopol has been Russian for centuries.
US was alone in their war against Russia until the civilian plane crashed. Europe leaders were told by companies that breaking almost a trillion dollars pacific relationship with Russia in order to satisfy US interest was crazy.
Instantly after the crash US and Germany (then France) condemned Russia without proof. To this day we have not a single proof that Pro Russians hit the plane.
Quite the contrary, the Pro Russians were winning and hitting a commercial plane was against their interest.
In fact I bet it was manufactured like the chemical attack in Syria in order to put public opinion on the side of politicians.
I am not Russian, I am European, and seeing European leaders go against their interest following the war mongering US is disgusting.
The US is afraid about Europe-Russia and China integration, as it could force US out of Euroasia, and the petrodollar to collapse.
The US wants to invade Iran in order to steal their natural gas(more reserves than anywhere else in the world), and Syria in order to force European gaseoduct gas to be controlled by the US.
For this first they have to weak Russia, as Russia faced the US when the US attacked both countries. Russia has their Mediterranean fleet in Syria and a pacific relationship with Iran.
If someone should be punished, it is the US.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgulaid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorstupid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takeda|11 years ago|reply
What if US spies on German citizens, and Germany spies on US citizens and then they both exchange with each other what they have learned?
[+] [-] igl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] markdutton|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, when Apple launches a new product, the front page looks like the front page of Apple.com, for more than 1 day.
[+] [-] BillFranklin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreasvc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdkl95|11 years ago|reply
(note: government != the people, who are justifiably mad)
[+] [-] Keyframe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]