> It isn't even the first time GCHQ has been caught spying on other European countries
The polite open secret of espionage is that spying on your allies isn't just normal, it's part and parcel of basic modern statecraft. Being able to anticipate the moves of your allies, understand their thought processes, and watch them for compromises are all incredibly useful things, and the first two very important for working closely with an ally. This is, quite frankly, normal stuff.
What generally doesn't happen is public discussion of it. The public tends to think of espionage as something that would only ever be directed against enemies or threats. That's at odds with the information that enables diplomacy to function well. Every world leader knows their allies are spying on them, and tries to do the same in return. The only weird thing is being publicly exposed, at which point every leader postures against the thing they all rely on.
There's really no need to suspect a commercial conspiracy when normal diplomacy is sufficient to explain this kind of thing. But I guess this is boring by comparison to imagining that a historical financial center only functions through ill-gotten commercial intelligence.
> But I guess this is boring by comparison to imagining that a historical financial center only functions through ill-gotten commercial intelligence.
Nobody said anything about "only functioning because..."
The entire basis for your position seems to be that an intelligence apparatus can only do exactly one thing at a time. It can either be for diplomatic reasons OR commercial spying, not both...
In reality governments extract as much value out of the intelligence networks and collected information as they can. If the collected information is going to help a domestic business interest against a foreign one (e.g. contract negotiations, mergers, sales, etc) you can bet your butt that tips will be supplied.
You really think that the US government doesn't routinely "tip" off Boeing and several European countries Airbus?
Countries look out for their own self interests beyond anything else. Expecting that they'll only do so some of the time rather than all of the time, seems like an opinion based more around how you'd wish a country to act morally, rather than the reality on the ground.
> The entire basis for your position seems to be that an intelligence apparatus can only do exactly one thing at a time. It can either be for diplomatic reasons OR commercial spying, not both...
I understand fully! Any competent intelligence agency is of course capable of serving more than one purpose at once. I do not in any way, shape, form, or manner believe that an intelligence apparatus is inherently capable of pursuing only a single task. Please accept my apologies for this egregious failure on my part to communicate clearly.
You're absolutely, completely right. All of this is completely normal. With that in mind, perhaps potshots at professionals doing things considered normal could be better justified?
The point is that these are clear examples of the NSA engaging in economic espionage, including tipping off US corporations with intelligence. Many countries do it. China is a worse and likely a much more frequent offender than the US, but the US still does it.
It may be worth considering that the examples may not be as clear as their presenter might believe them to be. There may be a difference between spying on a given target and spying on a given target for a particular reason.
In general, there are two claims being made here. Claim one is that the US has spied on a series of corporations. Claim two is that this has been done for the purposes of economic gain. The truth of claim one makes it possible for claim two to be true, but a cautious reader might note that what is possible and what is certainly true can at times be different.
Not to wax cynical, but Ms. Rousseff's claim that there's no possible other reason to spy on Petrobras is not credible. Not because she was clearly lying (I cannot begin to evaluate that), but because there's no reasonable world in which she understood all possible aspects of the decision-making process that produced that spying.
Given the type of corruption that Petrobras has been involved in, spies could have been pursuing a financial trail. This is not a certainty, of course, but it is sufficiently plausible that it's impossible to be certain that the NSA could only have been active there for purposes of industrial espionage.
Sure, that's certainly plausible. There are many reasons why an intelligence agency might want to spy on a large nation's state-owned energy conglomerate. The US government has indeed denied that the Petrobras spying was for economic gain [1]:
>"The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber," the agency said in an emailed response to a Washington Post story on the subject last month.
>In a statement issued on Sunday night after the latest revelations aired in Brazil, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said: "It is not a secret that the intelligence community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.
>"We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."
>But he again denied this amounted to industrial espionage. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
Maybe they're right. But how can we possibly know they're actually telling the truth? Especially when the intelligence agencies' job is essentially to lie?
Snowden said they routinely conduct economic espionage[0] and the CIA tried it too[1]. If you had read the links above (particularly [3]) you'd know this already.
>The polite open secret of espionage is that spying on your allies isn't just normal, it's part and parcel of basic modern statecraft. Being able to anticipate the moves of your allies, understand their thought processes, and watch them for compromises are all incredibly useful things, and the first two very important for working closely with an ally. This is, quite frankly, normal stuff.
If this information is beneficial to both sides, it should be freely exchanged. Relying on everybody spying in each other allows poor information to cause massive mistakes, creates a power imbalance should one agency outperform another, and requires a massive investment in a sector that is also capable of economic espionage and the creation of a surveillance state.
If this is a necessary element of state diplomacy, how can interactions between countries like the US and Mexico ever be fair? And how is the public benefitting from this large investment in state controlled espionage?
> If this information is beneficial to both sides, it should be freely exchanged.
A lot of it is. You still want independent confirmation of these things. It reduces incentive to lie (by increasing the probability of being caught), and can mitigate some types of miscommunication. E.g. maybe your ally can't admit something that they know to be true, because it happens to be unpopular domestically.
I'm not sure that this is sufficient justification, but the benefit does exist.
> If this is a necessary element of state diplomacy, how can interactions between countries like the US and Mexico ever be fair?
How can they ever be fair if it isn't? Fairness is just not a property that interactions generally have. Every actor has advantages, and those advantages are rarely equal for all parties.
>maybe your ally can't admit something that they know to be true, because it happens to be unpopular domestically.
It's not like diplomacy is done in public, there are ample opportunities to convey your true intentions.
>How can they ever be fair if it isn't?
Sure, you're right that "true" fairness is likely unobtainable. This system adds an unnecessary additional component that serves only to further the aims of the powerful. Calling it a normal, necessary part of diplomacy makes it seem like it's in everyone's best interest.
The other open secret is that intelligence services in most countries have no where near the number of people they need to listen to all the taps they have, let alone comprehend it all. And because the people they're surveilling almost certainly know that they're being surveilled all the information has to be treated as potentially suspect because it could be manipulated.
Plus, the people being spied upon have their own misconceptions, agendas, and potentially warped ideologies that confound everything. Wrap this all in a bureaucratic malaise with much-too-small-to-compete salary caps and intelligence is way less effectually than people think.
This is largely the truth and the scary part about it all. Incompetence abounds more than we would ever want to know, but often it's not just incompetence.
I often think of William Binney's thinthread program, designed to protect Americans privacy while still performing the core node taps at a handful of millions cost. It was scrapped for a program that cost billions, didn't protect Americans privacy, and lost the real intel in the increased haystack size...
That's not incompetence. That's kickback cruft to good old boys literally weakening national security for more money. There is a reason certain counties in Virginia have the largest growth of millionaires in America since 9/11.
> The polite open secret of espionage is that spying on your allies isn't just normal, it's part and parcel of basic modern statecraft.
And the corollary to the fact that spying on all of your enemies and all of your friends is considered a basic necessity for modern states: when political actors start press releasing accusations of spying, the aim is generally the manipulation of public opinion, not actual concern.
> There's really no need to suspect a commercial conspiracy when normal diplomacy is sufficient to explain this kind of thing.
I don't know that the two are particularly distinguishable.
Why do you think they aren't? Sure, Texas doesn't have anything like the NSA. Still, you can bet that Texan senators and reps discover things that they aren't officially supposed to know, and some of that information reaches their colleagues back home.
You are comparing states with groceries...let's compare the Afganistan war with an afterschool fight or terrorists with pranksters and see where it leads us.
Spying activities are hostile actions. They are used to gain unfair economic advantage, overtrow governments, win elections(for their fav candidate) and other nasty stuff.
If the british government needs more data to find terrorists they could use their political power to improve the data sharing at the EU level.
You are correct, pretty much all spying at GCHQ is aimed at friendly competition in the business arena (and politics) and has nothing to do with 'hunt the bin Laden', 'kiddy porn' and all those things that they say they do. Even during the Cold War the bulk of operations were directed at allies and customers for the arms trade, not the Soviet Union.
There is some dangerous thinking going on with this assumption that 'we must let our spies bug everything and everyone, including our allies' that should not be glossed over.
There is the 'copying homework problem' that we all know from school. If you spend all of your efforts copying the efforts of others (whether it is a school assignment or a business proposal) then this really can be to your own detriment. It is far better to do your own work and then to compare with others to see if you have missed something. Starting with the work of others and changing a few details doesn't get you top grades or the contract. It is a risky strategy.
Another problem with over-reliance on spying is that this is actually being done by a defence contractor who may not have your best interests at heart. A large part of the GCHQ infrastructure is put in place by American companies and they are upstream. Imagine you are trying to sell bombs to Saudi Arabia, representing the interests of British companies and doing your best to secure jobs for people in your constituency.
If the defence contractor doing the spying services also have bomb factories in the USA then there is a conflict of interest going on, they have visibility on what deal is being proposed and can make sure their competing offer gouges the Saudis but does not appear to be based on insider information.
Spying also has a chilling effect and targets of spying efforts can go quiet if they know that too many walls have ears. If you were a European company would you prefer to deal with your European neighbours, getting bids from France, Germany or Spain (for example) or would you want to have known snitch-countries bidding too? The Five Eyes run the risk of just being left out of the running as untrustworthy, particularly in countries outside the Anglo-Saxon world.
> If you were a European company would you prefer to deal with your European neighbours, getting bids from France, Germany or Spain (for example) or would you want to have known snitch-countries bidding too?
Unless we are to pretend that only the Five Eyes do spying, I would assume that France, Germany, and Spain all have competent intelligence systems and thus the result is probably more or less a wash.
It may also be worth considering that there could be a difference to be distinguished between noting that a given practice is common and endorsing it. The former is an observation, the latter a judgment call. It may even be possible to offer the former without weighing in on the latter, though some will tend to interpret this as a statement of enthusiastic endorsement.
Perhaps I failed to season what I thought to be clearly phrased as observations with sufficient qualifiers? If so, please accept my humble apologies for misleading you by being unclear.
Although Russia has plenty of satellites in orbit, do other nations have fleets of Hubble grade satellites pointing downwards as per UK/USA? Nope.
Okay, telecoms now go by cable, but do countries in mainland Europe have cables reaching out across the world leading back as happens in the UK? Nope. When it was just phone lines all cable for communication across the British empire led back to England, if you wanted to place a call from country A in Africa to country B in Africa it would not take a direct route, it would go to England first with a nice BT switchboard operator connecting the call. This infrastructure was built upon over time to have the fibre optic magic we have today. Much has changed but this inheritance from history is not to be overlooked. If a European company on the continent is trying to get a trade deal with a country that was formally coloured pink then that call is likely to be routed through Five Eyes comms, not some dedicated fibre. Clearly France have plenty of cables going across the border to Germany, but not to Australia.
Every king since the beginning of time has had his spies, there is no country on the planet that does not have some capability. However, The Five Eyes operation is on an entirely different scale to what nations outside of UK/USA have. Essentially the other three eyes are only there due to geography, they are lesser partners without the need or resources to participate at the level that the other two do.
The UK is also a junior partner, the reason GCHQ is so big is that there are laws in the US that are there to prevent the three letter agencies spying on the domestic population. GCHQ does that for them and has been built with the help of US contractors. It is one and the same operation with conflicts of interest on occasion - Airbus for instance.
I know it sounds wrong but I sometimes wish there was more spying going on from countries outside of Five Eyes. It would at least be possible to keep US/UK politicians a bit more honest if other countries has a bit more of an appreciation regarding what is going on. The reality though is that other countries just do not have the resources, people, skills, technology to do that. They buy the stories Washington and London tells them with no inside information to give them a more informed view.
As you can appreciate it can be hard to get reliable sources when the Official Secrets Act is involved. But I do have something for you in the public domain.
Quick question though - did the STASI spy on NATO countries? Yes. Was their primary mission domestic control and keeping tabs on the domestic population? Yes. Is it reasonable to think that the UK/USA spy agencies were any different? Did they spend time monitoring the Soviets? Yes. Did they spy on Arthur Scargill and the miners? Yes. What about Greenpeace? Yes. Fundamentally the miner's strike was an existential threat to the ruling elite whereas the Soviets weren't ever going to invade. Hence the mission creep.
Furthermore, if you do have mates from school days that do work there and, after plying them with lots of alcohol in an effort to find out more, you soon realise that they are all working in isolation, not knowing much about the big picture. There are only 'tells' such as their reason for doing the work. Yet amongst the tells a picture emerges, for instance overall capabilities or that your friends aren't actually working on the things in the mission statement. For a while the war on 'kiddy porn' was an acceptable reason for working there alongside fighting organised crime and The War Against Terror.
But when you examine these noble efforts you soon realise that a little bit of a fig leaf is being presented. GCHQ are not the ones unearthing the Panama Papers, the 'kiddy porn' mission ended up becoming regular police work rather than what the UK needed GCHQ for and then The War Against Terror certainly was not anything that the public were led to believe, despite the public diplomacy that existed at the time regarding 'intercepted intelligence chatter'. Now is not the time for in-depth discussion on this latter aspect, however, you can check how 'intelligence' was gathered during the war, for instance the 'Dodgy Dossier' that Tony Blair prepared for Iraq, that was based on some paper found in the public domain by Number 10 and 'sexed up a bit'.
So, on to what is available in the public domain. A good place to start is with Duncan Campbell, the investigative journalist that brought knowledge of ECHELON to the world. This is now a long time ago and very much from the Cold War. The report made for the European Parliament is a very good place to start, here is a little overview of that:
If you then dig a little bit deeper and read the testimony of whistleblowers that spoke to Duncan Campbell you will find that there is much to support my assertion. There is one story that almost made daylight concerning Menwith Hill, a listening station that was supposed to be pointing east. There weren't Russian voices coming in over the ether, however, there was the voice of Strom Thurmond, a big believer in the war machine and a congressman definitely in the pockets of the arms companies. Despite this GCHQ were doing the listening for their counterparts on him, who was as trustworthy as you could have wished for and definitely not a Soviet asset.
In war you do not have complete information and reliable sources of what is going on in other people's kitchens. However, if you study what is in the public domain and do a little bit of asking around then you can get a glimpse of what is going on. History is important too, with the UK there is the former empire and the 'Special Relationship', both shaping what the doughnut is really about.
And decades into Chomsky's campaigns to tear down the mythologies of the nobility of modern governments, people in the tech community continue to get all confused and offended when self-identified socialists use euphemisms like "sociopath" for powerful capitalists. We should have been carrying his books around school as teens instead of The God Delusion.
"He admitted that he was opposed to democracy, that he thought offshore tax havens were good, that he believed workers shouldn’t have any rights beyond their contracts, and that he had no idea how capitalism could possibly avert the climate change crisis. The right often tries to avoid discussing these implications of its philosophy. Dr. Mitchell was quite blunt in saying that democracy is bad and tax avoidance is good. I am grateful to him because, while I find these positions morally objectionable in the extreme, it is helpful when I can point to someone’s actual words rather than having to accuse them of burying their true feelings beneath euphemisms." - Reflections on Debating the Right, Nathan J. Robinson
The polite open secret of espionage is that spying on your allies isn't just normal, it's part and parcel of basic modern statecraft. Being able to anticipate the moves of your allies, understand their thought processes, and watch them for compromises are all incredibly useful things, and the first two very important for working closely with an ally. This is, quite frankly, normal stuff.
What generally doesn't happen is public discussion of it. The public tends to think of espionage as something that would only ever be directed against enemies or threats. That's at odds with the information that enables diplomacy to function well. Every world leader knows their allies are spying on them, and tries to do the same in return. The only weird thing is being publicly exposed, at which point every leader postures against the thing they all rely on.
There's really no need to suspect a commercial conspiracy when normal diplomacy is sufficient to explain this kind of thing. But I guess this is boring by comparison to imagining that a historical financial center only functions through ill-gotten commercial intelligence.