France summons U.S. ambassador over spying report
reuters.com
reuters.com
Voltaire said something like: "God, please protect me from my friends. I take care of my enemies."
They most certainly do:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electron...
Disappointingly and not surprisingly he didn't have a problem with the allegations against the NSA.
Something to consider is that points of interest differ within governments. For example, fugitive Marc Rich was believed to have been aided by the US State Department even as the DOJ continuously attempted to kidnap him. In other countries you even end up with military coups when one group really is unhappy with another. On the other hand, there is a lot of noise making in countries with representative elections, which means little.
Edit: I would not be surprised if we start seeing criminal indictments against executives of US internet companies in some countries.
You know, don't judge a blog by its cover ;-).
All this makes it so terribly obvious that Europe literally is not entitled to and can not have or grow a pair of balls anymore. Europe's role is pretty much reduced to hosting the military bases and NSA spying facilities of the US.
As the worldwide balance of power continues to shift over the next decade or two, I believe Merkel's Germany is poised to be extremely relevant, even if it is so at the cost of the cohesion of the EU.
It also reaffirms to me why the UK seems to have very little interest joining the party like their neighbors. Why compete for first fiddle against a self-serving Merkel?
It'll be interesting times but I don't think it's as simple as Europe being relegated to America's extended states.
Especially in a high profile case like Snowden's.
I guess a plane ticket to a non-NATO country through back channels might be better help for people seeking protection from the US than granting refugee status.
To which several European governments, mostly the UK, but also Italy, happily cooperated. The other ones have been lucky enough not to be caught red-handed but I have little doubt that they knew perfectly what was going on (at best) or were actively providing support.
Preventing the issue on formal grounds was probably the easiest way to avoid having to protect someone in Germany from the USA - which is obviously futile.
I don't remember Merkel, or anyone else, saying that they won't even accept asylum request or that they'll refuse the request if it's made according to the law.
It's also likely every nation shares the motive, but it just happens that the US provides the means.
Plus, it's hard to storm the Bastille if it happens to be overseas.
At this point, it appears that our elected representatives all have the same means in mind, regardless of the ends they seek (I would also argue that the sought-ends are the same, too, but I get into a tin-foil hatty area with that). That is across all nations and all parties. Whether it is a domestic or foreign outfit, the means are the same, and I would argue that fact outweighs whatever the theoretical end would be.
Also, with the military might of modern 1st world countries, I don't really believe that it matters if you have to cross an ocean first if you are going to literally storm the Bastille; and with the internet age, the distance doesn't really matter for a figurative storm, either.
A history lesson - storming the bastille [1] is not done by a military, but by pitchfork wielding mobs. Yes, it's going to be tougher to "throw out the bums" if they happen to be a distant country with modern armaments.
> The NSA's targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.
...setting up the "we accidentally all your powerful people while hunting terrorists honest" defense.
Fun fact about that : this number is actually bigger than french population (~ 66M).
What the number makes clear though is that it can't be for targeted terrorism-suspect surveilance. Unless you have something like a million suspects in France.
And in any case they should ask the french authorities/spies for help if they want to know something about french residents.
I wonder how the USA would react if other governments started openly surveilling US citizens/companies/politicians. That'd be one fun thing to watch.
Of course, I'm not implying every french was spied on - it won't make sense since a good part are just kids.
But when your records count for a country exceed their population, you can't be expected to only watch a few bad guys, that's a sign of massive surveillance - or strategic surveillance over tactical surveillance, as Assange would put it.
What I was trying to point out, is that the number makes it clear what the surveillance is about (and that's nothing related to terrorists).
I think either this or getting as much seperated/independent from the US will have any kind of proper effect.
Though I fear nothing really will change since the other countries have spy agencies as well which they want to keep. So a few "outrageous!" will be communicated to the media and business as usual continues.
NSA spook in black shades hands a usb stick to the Minister "your info on Angles strategy for the next eu summit"
French foreign minster (sote voce) "Oh, thank you very much."
Snark aside: what may have riled French feathers is the fact that NSA spied on politicians too. I bet they have lots of blackmail stuff.
Clearly only a fundamentalist puritan would object to those things. I'm so old fashioned.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn#New_York...
2. One politician's behavior means ALL politicians of that country behave wrongly?
$ curl http://cozy.io/install_cozy.sh | HOST=root@ip sh # sudoer required
Edit: even more annoying is that this script is only supposed to run on Debian/Ubuntu - so this script isn't even any more portable than .deb packages
Edit2 to be more constructive: would you accept contributions to build packages? Apart from this annoyance the project looks interesting!
Of course any contribution of this kind is greatly appreciated !
About the channel, the (real) install script is based on Fabric and use SSH. So you can refer directly to this: http://cozy.io/host/install.html
Not that what you are suggesting is good in the first place.
1. they can be signed
2. they can be analyzed (also at a later date if you keep them around) to figure out if any "mis-feature" was added after the fact or came from upstream. Those scripts typically download all kinds of other things during the installation.