When I explained I was originally from America, the man made a face, held his hand up to his ear like a telephone, and said, "USA? Why are you listening to my mobile phone? Why are you listening to my phone calls?" He was joking, of course, as he promptly laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and provided directions to the field, but it really startled me to discover that in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, the immediate reaction to an American would be to bring up the NSA.Sure, this all started under Bush. But if anything it's accelerated under Obama's "Smart Diplomacy". Just get the right sort of "Smart" people in charge, and they will realize that Chancellor Merkel would immediately think "Stasi" when she found out that the NSA was tapping her phone. The right sort of "Smart" people who would realize that the Cold War was over, and so espionage programs and goals should be re-thought to fit the new geopolotical reality. The right sort of "Smart" people who could make tradeoffs favoring the long term strategic, not the short term tactical.
And the more elite Europeans aren't blind to the opportunities presented by the scandal either. I spoke to several high-level investment executives over the last few weeks, and to a man, they see the scandal as being a reason for Europe to make a serious effort to break away from the technology chains of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and other American companies that have dominated the world. The larger the corporation, the more determined they are to keep the US out of their emails and servers.
Pretty smart, right there. And Vox sums it up to a "T":
This isn't merely a diplomatic or political scandal, it is probably an economic one as well.
9 comments:
The thing that bothers me about all the news commentary about this is how it's framed as World vs USA when it should be framed as EVERYBODY against the NSA.
Hubris *will* be followed by Nemesis.
Yep, there WILL be an economic fallout and I don't believe people understand how large an impact that will be. And +1 on DMD's comment!
Unintended Consequences......
It should be cast as not just NSA screwing the Valley, but the whole Fed.gov screwing the Valley. You yourself have pointed out the role of the FISA courts, turning this into Executive and Judicial branches doing the screwing. Add into that Congress approving all this crap and you have the trifecta.
Thing is, the NSA's job has always been to monitor things like Angela Merkel's cell phone. 90% of this backlash is from governments acting violated who do the exact same thing (as much as they can). The people who should be outraged about having their cellphone monitored are our neighbors, and they don't seem to be. I sure don't hear a lot of agonizing about this in my circles of friends, coworkers, etc..
They can ditch Microsoft fairly easily. Linux is widely available and while the process of getting every app you want to run under Linux is going to take the effort of the software vendors, the 90% of what an office typically needs has been hit with open source.
Ditching Twitter and teh FB is more a case of getting addicts to realize they have an addiction.
Bush?
Maybe Bush 1...
I know for a personally witnessed fact that by the mid '90s, there were .gov blackbox racks in every major ILEC and peering point.
Not only that, but international data trunk lines have been monitored since they first existed.
All that is open source now... it's "talkable".
The only difference, is that now, they finally have sufficient power in the technology to actually attempt to do something with all the data.
The spying itself isn't the scandal. We aren't the only ones using these techniques to spy on allies and foes alike. The scandal is that the US allowed it to be leaked. The politicians in other countries simply see blood in the water and are jumping on the opportunity to seem patriotic to their constituents and call party foul on the US. And yes, they will also likely use it to try and bolster software companies in their own countries. If you had the opportunity to steal some of the fat man's pie, would you?
I need to stop commenting before I've had coffee...that rant really goes all over the place...
And I need to read other people's comments first. Graybeard already covered everything in my rant.
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