Japan Made Secret Deals with the NSA That Expanded Global Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Japan Made Secret Deals with the NSA That Expanded Global Surveillance

theintercept.com

124 pointsetiam12 comments

There is a lot of shady stuff with Japan and USA surveillance.

Japan has started fingerprinting all non-citizens in 2007. at immigration checkpoints in airports and harbors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-BIS

The winning bid for this system was by Accenture, same company that handles US's fingerprinting system, and their bid was 100,000JPY, or approximately $900 at the time. This doesn't cover even the cost of one single machine.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/accenture-japan-visit-and-the-...

A stateless corporation in Bermuda in control of millions of biometric IDs (fingerprints) that are usually hard to obtain for the US gov/spy agencies? In this post-Snowden world, I'm having trouble believing that there's nothing shady going on here.

I really love Japan, but my visits in the past 3 years and having to enter a fingerprint and photo are rather offputting. I think it's a real shame.

Trump's got your fingerprints, homeboy!

> Miyashita, now an associate professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, said it was his understanding that NSA operates in the country outside Japan’s legal jurisdiction due to an agreement that grants U.S. military facilities in Japan extraterritoriality.

Is America's agreement with Japan in this respect unique? It sounds something like Guantanamo Bay being both outside the purview of Cuban law but simultaneously not under the aegis of the Constitution.

This maybe isn't the best example, but there's the NSA listening station that operates from the US Embassy in Berlin. Being an embassy would give it extraterritoriality, but I don't think Germany is happy about the Americans doing it, especially since it was used to tap Angela Merkel's phone.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...

Similar events occurred in Greece, embassies being spy hubs is hardly a new thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...

> Is America's agreement with Japan in this respect unique?

No. Each agreement with each country granting territory to US for military bases is somewhat unique - see for example all the trouble with Turkey and Saudi Arabia recently.

Obviously there are some guidelines and principles the US will always push for (typically that bases are considered US territory in respect of any jurisdiction claim the host country might have, that military personnel gets local immunity for their actions, etc etc), but that does not mean they are automatically considered US territory for the purposes of US law.

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