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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what this is all going to look like when it comes out that the NSA spying has at times helped companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Oracle compete with domestic and foreign competition, as well as deal with foreign government regulators.

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The entire West is complicit.

http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...

There is zero evidence in the NYT article that started this discussion that any NSA surveillance directed at EU antitrust bureaucrats would benefit US software companies.

The particular EU antitrustocrat was involved in decisions relating to many other firms that FedGov might find of interest, including Gazprom, Citigroup, JP Morgan, HSBC, ICAP, ISI, UMG, EMI, Panasonic, Toshiba, Intel.

I'm not defending use of the NSA's surveillance apparatus for economic espionage; in fact, I'd be happy to see all relevant FedGov employees fired, denied their pensions, and prosecuted if that's true. What I'm saying is simply let's not assume software companies are the beneficiaries when there may be legitimate reasons to spy on companies like Gazprom, which is controlled by the Russian government and likely the largest natural gas extractor in the world.

No one seemed to care when the French did it.

I agree that industrial spying by national agencies is rather common across the globe. The only difference here is the perception and magnifying glass / media spotlight.

> media spotlight

And as soon as that passes no one will care again.

How about you?

Magnitude isn't a meaningful difference?

Sounds like saying "everybody has an army. there is no difference" in response to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

It's a good bet that intelligence/surveillance spending is roughly proportional to military spending.

Also, the combination with having a military mestastazing like mad all over the world is what makes the spying kinda extra creepy. I guess there were times when France was declaring itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy while waging war on the poor and non-aligned (internationally, that is), but that was before I was born.

That the spying itself is out of control, too, doesn't help. Then there is the amount of international communications that go through the US, versus the amount that goes through France.

There's not even a comparison -- a far cry from "the only difference is media spotlight". (reminds me of Bush voters talking about liberal media btw... if that offends anyone, good, because it takes real energy or natural talent to dismiss differences of orders of magnitude that easily)

Magnitude variance is assumed. Nobody would be surprised that the Russian army can best the Georgian army due to the difference in scale. Nor that the Chinese army with its 1.2 million soldiers can best Vietnam. In the same vein, I don't think anybody has ever had an expectation that the multi-hundred billion dollar US military was going to be spying as much as the Danish military. I think it has been understood post WW2 that the American DoD does a lot of spying in general. The revelation is primarily the total invasiveness into civilian lives, and willingness to flout laws everywhere.

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