Comment by guiambros
12 years ago
That's why, ironically, the best hope for privacy-minded US citizens (like a good part of HN readers) comes from outside governments.
People like Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, that had the courage to cancel state visits and declaring outraged by the state-sponsored spying supported by the Obama Administration.
We need many more governments standing up and threatening to cut commercial ties with the US, until we can see some traction.
Sadly, I'm not very hopeful that this will happen, given the commercial interests involved. Mexico had a slow initial response, but it's starting to demonstrate some reaction. Germany and France are my hopes [1].
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/22/mexico-presiden...
France and Germany can't. They are both export based economies.
Yeah, but chancellor Merkel must be really pissed off with all the latest shenanigans [1] by her friends across the pond...
And everybody else must be really pissed off with the latest documents. Here's the punch line:
> Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.
[1] http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/10/how-nsa-targeted-ch...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...
I think in the end it will be shown that both the Germans and French also engaged in surveillance or have partnerships with other intelligence agencies. The five sisters can't be the only big partnership.