> Crypto AG, a Swiss firm that dominated the global market, turns out to have been jointly owned by the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND. They would sell rigged machines to friends and enemies alike, including several NATO countries.
Because many of us come from the US and Germany and are what many consider the "good guys". Even if we don't come from the US or Germany our political and economic systems are more aligned with those countries than some other countries.
To flip this on its head, would you argue that the people working to secure the Nazi's torture camp computers were being the good guys? Did they have any ethical obligations to make it easier for Ally powers to decipher the records after the war was won (or even before) to help people reunite with their families?
Well espionage is a closed circle and not many people knows how it's done. If you want more flavors just Google "operation gladio" and read all sort aof crazy things they did back in the CW.
How does distrust create trust exactly? I give out trust freely (within reason) until it's broken. Gaining back trust is hard. When I find out you went through my mails to find out if I'm trustworthy, you loose my trust.
When I learned of the BND's Crypto AG involvement I felt a deep sense of shame. All the CIA's fuck ups in south america for example. Not only the CIA anymore, we where involved too. Which makes me loose some trust in my government to act on my/our behalf. There is a cost to it and the benefits are questionable at best.
One very prominent example is the Open Skies Treaty. Basically, signatories permit reconnaissance aircraft to fly over for the purposes of enforcing arms control. It is legalized spying.
I think the idea is that it forces allies to interact with genuine intentions, lest one tries to deceive the other and is caught because of some intelligence that's been gathered.
It's the backbone of a gentleman's agreement between allies to not act maliciously toward each other.
Yup like the time when the BND basically helps the US to do industrial espionage against Germany.
And the when the government found out about it (through Snowden) and didn't really do anything.
I mean even if giving asyl to Snowden wasn't possible permanently they could have given it to him for a short time to at least allow him to sadly speak in front of the German government.
Or EU countries allowing extradition to countries which haven't signed the human rights charter (like the US, ironically Russia did sign it).
Through then if we consider how the BND was founded it would be supposing if it's not at least partially undermined by some US intelligence agencies...
But normal people have been sufficiently scared, so that they "care" about privacy.
For example "Facebook bad" -- but everybody uses WhatsApp.
When you mention that its the same company, people don't care. The important thing is that they can tell their friends that they don't use Facebook, because "Facebook bad".
The problem is most also don't understand the consequences and possibilities even much less inversive privacy problems allow. Once you explain to them they tend to first care a lot, then are helpless because it seems holes and then at some point give up just because they don't know how to go on with upholding privacy.
But more importantly the bomb if the Snowden revelations was less about privacy inversion but industries espionage. Worse the institution which main purpose include preventing that had helped in it.
>Of course, that excludes spying to steal intellectual property.
Of course, only bad actors like China, Russia or North Korea would break patent-, copyright law, etc. The good guys only do it for financial gain or to get coordinates for kill drones.
The Cold War was mostly a spy game and it kept the peace for decades. There was no gigantic WW3, no nuclear holocaust, and kept the regional conflicts limited to that specific region.
Everyone plays the great game, even allies vs other allies (e.g. the French spying on US businesses, and the US NSA spying on Europeans during negotiations).
It's only objectively better until another world war comes - we are not immune, and then, it will be easily objectively worse. This argument is rather pointless - externalizing warfare to poor nations and then saying the world is "peaceful" is quite immoral.
Espionage is not used by governments to maintain peace and reduce war fatalities - it's used by governments to gain an edge over their adversaries. Espionage existed in WW2 as it did in times of peace - to say peace is a consequence of it is absurd.
MAD is the only thing that has prevented major world conflict.
It might, but that makes it even more important to use as a "normal" person. (Until it's proven to be a honeypot, of course.)
a) it befuddles the trite commercial spying done by google et al
b) you decrease the signal to noise ratio for those operating the honeypot by adding your mundane activities and have them spend resources trying to figure out what you are really up to
I enjoyed reading that the paranoia of the Soviets that it was a western plot was justified, but as their allies bought the technology it gave second hand information from Moscow anyways.
Fun part was that CIA was focused mainly on espionage purpose while the BND was mainly focused on earning money they can spend without supervision for other secret projects.
We don't know, but we do know that during the investigation into it when it became publicly know a complain from the CIA surfaced that the BND acted to profit orientated. Through I would have to look up the exact details tbh. Just something which I found kinda amusing when I stumbled over it.
