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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

The last sentence is very true, but what makes me really sad is that the consequences of this leak is that at least in Germany and UK, the government look for ways to fast-track the same kind of surveillance system. They want the same thing for themselves!

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Yes, that's right. I wonder whether Snowden could foresee this consequence of the leaks.

It's obvious - the countries which possess such technologies will have big advantage over countries which do not, so they have no other option as to pursue the same capabilities.

The only other possibility would be for the Internet to "reinvent itself" to provide true privacy and anonymity, but that is probably not doable.

It's doable. But to achieve that and create a "new" Internet, the governments will need to break this Internet, and make it increasingly a more awful and dangerous place to be on.

I'm really pissed off at governments for doing this because so many services were starting to be so convenient. But now we'll have to take back much of that convenience to get more secure - all because the governments want to abuse that power, and because seemingly the people are not united and strong enough to demand a change of policy.

My understanding is that the contractors that built this capability are selling it internationally anyway. The only thing that's US-specific or surprising about the system is its interaction with our particular laws and particular rights, which it doesn't need to pretend to respect in other regimes.

Kind of takes the piss out of the argument that we have to keep all of this a secret for "national security"

Shhhh.

Perhaps the NSA could create an API and sell licenses to other countries? ;-)

They already do this so it seems.

In the Netherlands they ask for data about Dutch people via the NSA. Doing it this way they don't officially have direct access to the data so they don't need a warrant for it.

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