Can anyone point to countries which are not going down this same route? In my head Europe is doing better with protecting privacy, but maybe that's just an impression. Canada? Not Australia. Japan?
I call male bovine excrement on the assessment of Sweden though. Full take collection, installed by and heavily integrated with FVEY, is the gist of it. Describing it as "Little or none" seems like a cynical joke.
There’s internet censorship and there’s China. Nobody else is in the same league.
The only explanation I can think of is if censorship and surveillance are just being casually lumped together, but people understand that they’re not synonyms, right? Right?
Either your government blocks / censors your er, controversial statements, or you're afraid to post your controversial statements because the government is watching you. Same effect.
China blocks access to anything on the internet that disagrees with their ruling party. They block any VPN or SSH. Like, not just for avoiding filters, just at all. They degrade any encrypted traffic by just doing compression analysis and dropping packets if your traffic looks encrypted.
This is not the same thing as the NSA’s dragnet surveillance or anything the UK is doing. China is already at the endgame you are hypothesizing, and you’re creating a false equivalency through a slippery slope. A slope where the bottom is where China is today.
The chart is literally titled "Internet censorship and surveillance by country (2014)" with categories that don't differentiate between censorship and surveillance, so I'm relatively certain that the two have been lumped together.
If I made an article called “human rights violations and numbers of reality tv shows by country” and painted Saudi Arabia and Germany the same color, it should rightly raise some eyebrows.
Give the U.S. time. We're trying to catch up to China as quickly as we can.
Personally, I find it unrealistic to expect that such huge opportunity(almost by the second log of citizens activities and opinions as well as precise control of who sees and hears what) will arise and the people in power will not exploit it.
China is taking a more direct route but in general it looks like the political elite's dreams are about to come true on global scale.
edit: HN really hated that idea :) I could not find the source of the claim but it makes sense to me.
Where on earth did you get this idea? Are you suggesting European countries does not have police or intelligence agencies performing surveillance?
The idea is that if a country can't do mass surveillance on it's own people due to political reasons, still can just let an ally do it and get that information from that ally as a part of information sharing agreement.
At least I would require a better source than "if I remember correctly" in order to be convinced.
Sure they wouldn't want to let USA complete access, so they can spend their time keeping the US espionage on the desired domain and everyone happy and politicians elected.
Not that I don't believe that the USA are heavily involved in Europe and cooperate pretty tightly with European intelligence services but the original question was about mass surveillance of the citizens. For example how do you explain the GDRP if the point is to let the USA snoop on European citizens?
Anyway, there's the Five Eyes alliance that does it, why wouldn't there be an arrangement between EU and USA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
>"Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens."
At this point you need to look on a country-by-country basis, I doubt there's a secret EU-level agreement to let the USA spy on EU citizens. For instance I could believe that the Germans might consider it, if only because they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to international intelligence and diplomacy. That being said industrial espionage would be an obvious drawback.
On the other hand I really don't expect French intelligence to accept such a scheme. French has its own network for international intelligence and is perfectly capable of spying on its own citizens if it wants to. There's simply too much to lose letting the USA in unchecked.
As for the rest of Europe it's also hard to make a simple guess. Some countries like Poland are historically very USA-friendly and might accept something like that. Others on the other hand align much more with Russia nowadays and might be more willing to collaborate with the FSB than the CIA.
So I still don't buy the "european countries let the USA spy on their citizens". It's too much of a leap considered the evidence we have.
On your second point, industrial espionage is, I suspect, a large factor in determining which countries should be spied on. Does anyone really think that Boeing doesn't get competitor info from US agencies?
>The German, French and Spanish governments have reacted angrily to reports based on National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Snowden since June, revealing the interception of communications by tens of millions of their citizens each month.
The parent was saying that European countries are complicit and actually want the USA to spy on their citizens so that they can recover the intelligence indirectly.
>Does anyone really think that Boeing doesn't get competitor info from US agencies?
Not me at least, which is exactly why I don't expect that the french and german governments for instance to be perfectly fine with the USA spying on Airbus's employees for instance.
> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes.
Or, more recently, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/25907502
>US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has alleged the National Security Agency engaged in industrial espionage. >In an interview with Germany's ARD TV channel, the former NSA contractor said the agency would spy on big German companies that competed with US firms.
And the US spying on trade talk negotiations from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/26/germany-eu-us-...
>Der Spiegel said files obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the NSA spied on the EU in New York after it moved to new rooms in autumn 2012 and that the NSA runs a bugging programme in more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide called the "Special Collection Service", which has "little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists"
Other countries too, such as France, from http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1993/Espionage-Takes-Toll-On-Ai...
> Gone are the Cold War days when one Soviet agent reportedly tried to stick a gyroscope in his pocket during one trade fair. But a Russian spy official and a former chief of French intelligence said in recent interviews that that their agents were involved in industrial espionage.
According to the Guardian and other sources, there's something called the 14-Eyes, which is a working agreement between the FVEY and the SIGINT organizations of nine other countries, including multiple European ones, like Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/02/nsa-portrait-t...
One of the results is that the german intelligence services will get more resources to do analysis on their own in the near future.
[0]: https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/06/1812850-ungesc... (page 484 ff.)