It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?
It's also worth noting that one of the ways the five eyes get around domestic spying laws is to spy on each other's citizens. So the CIA spy on British citizens the UK government want to spy on, and GCHQ spy on American citizens the US government want to spy on. So this would indirectly allow the US government to spy on US citizens (even more than it already does, anyway)
True. The data taken can end up anywhere, and where it came from is obscured. Too much circumventing of laws or purposefully violating the privacy and human rights of one's own citizens, even for profit.
This is a fun theory that I've heard repeatedly, but with no evidence. Is there any indication that this is actually legal and happening? I have friends who work in the space that tell me that it's neither.
Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there.
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
But this is true, right? The whole movement is based on their legal theory giving them rights to behave in a certian way, and the idea that everyone else wastes that 'right' through ignorance and state manipulation. It's dumb, but not dishonest.
Let's consider it through a personal example. Suppose you are on a call rotation, and agree that the on-call engineer can wake you up at 4AM, but only if it's really important, and that the matter at hand has to involve some knowledge that you have, but didn't put on the wiki. Later, you are woken up at 4AM to discuss the results of a football game, and when challenged your coworker defends that they upheld their end of the bargain. They claim that it wasn't specified who it had to be important to, and that once you had been told who won, you had knowledge related to the call that you hadn't put on the wiki.
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."
You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"
At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.
It’s in air quotes for a reason. Obama ran on promises to end it and protect whistleblowers like Snowden. Then he kept it alive under new branding and doubled down on vilifying whistleblowers like Snowden.
I'm no historian or otherwise an expert but someone told me that secret services exist almost independent from the government that spawned them and that some even continue to exist after the government is gone. (I forget the examples) The point being that it serves itself first and may act to benefit other parties. (The status quo) The government or the citizens may end up further down the list than imagined.
One of the worst presidents the US has had in at least the last 50 years and he was held up as a champion by the left. Expanded the black sites programs, supported some of the worst foreign conflicts the US has been involved in, somehow was elected twice.
I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.
A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.
But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.
A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.
People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
I would say you don't know what "the left" means either, insofar as I don't believe the common use of the word today or then to describe "progressives" was as a loanword for socialism. I don't even think most Americans know what socialism really is, given they're often spotted fawning over the Nordic Model as a proud example, Bernie included, which has nothing to do with socialism. We also have a party called "the Left" here in Denmark, which has nothing to do with the American left in common use today.
It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.
You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.
I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.
My point is that most American leftists don't think he was a great president either.
_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.
Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.
The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.
This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.
Pure libertarians are no more blindly idealistic than pure anything else. Elegant solutions are attractive, perhaps especially to those working in stem. I once had someone assert to me that the standard model of physics couldn't be true, because it wasn't elegant enough. You could say that was Dunning Kruger, but while they were working in SW, their PHD was in particle physics. Reality doesn't really care what we find elegant it seems. Still that tendency is no worse than pure socialists. Perhaps it is the same tendency even. Real solutions are messy compromises. Trying to refactor an old codebase I worked on taught me that as I added back hacks for all the corner cases a second time to my new elegant design.
Pure revisionism. Obama did not run on that promise, but he shut down the email metadata collection program before it was even leaked and limited and then shut down the phone metadata program after it had leaked. Snowden leaked details of compromised computer systems to China. That's not whistleblowing.
I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.
He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.
His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.
Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.
These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken
> I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.
That was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. I, along with many others, pointed it out at that time. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB
> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.
You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.
> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program
The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.
Wasn’t this exact route taken? Government got cases dismissed for lack of standing - plaintiff could not prove they were being spied on… because the government wouldn’t reveal anything.
"We're going to sue you to make you stop" is exactly where you deploy the semilegal sound bite. You then use that as the public justification to stall, deny, countersue, delay, appeal, defend, depose and do everything you can to avoid a decision happening one way or the other until you've already gotten and done what you wanted to get and do.
That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though. It often feels like it, but that's not a universal truth of the court system. If the damage is high enough, courts can fast-track cases. Judges can also issue injunctions before the delays start, and if the argument is too flimsy it can backfire on the defendant.
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
>That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?
Right, but the point is they went through the motions to attempt to follow the law. They weren't simply saying someone else was doing the work and then doing it themselves. They at least attempt to follow the law internally. Which is not something we knew for certain or not in the public.
> They at least attempt to follow the law internally.
What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.
That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.
It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.
It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.
Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
Didn’t these leaks precisely show that the agencies were effectively above the law? I mean, they tried to make it look like they were abiding by the regulations, but effectively tried every work around they could come up with. Including subcontracting domestic spying to foreign intelligence agencies, using the exact mechanism the parent mentioned? It seems you’re contradicting them by making their point.
There is an important distinction between blatant disregard for the law like you would see in authoritarian countries and this trying to twist the letter of the law into allowing something that it wasn’t intended to allow. Both are bad of course, but the latter shows some fear of the checks and balances. Being nefarious is much more expensive if you fear the courts, and have to spend time and effort circumventing it. Trumps recent behavior shows none of this fear of the courts. Even if the courts overturn the executive orders, much of the damage has already been done.
That doesn't mean they care about the law, it just means that they care about maintaining the public perception that they care about the law. They're perfectly happy to keep up the pretense as long as they can still get what they want anyway, even if they have to add a couple extra inconvenient steps to the process. What they won't do is allow the law to stop them from getting what they want.
It is still a good thing that they had to spend so many extra resources hiding. It means at least some of the checks and balances were imposing a cost on bad behavior.
Why are you using Russia and China as examples of the bad guys here. They're not asking for global access to everyones data, the UK is. The UK are the bad guys.
Why did you assume the context was "bad guys?" It's a well-known fact that there's a lot of geopolitical tension between Russia/China and Western Europe. The comment is raising the point that by setting this precedent they are opening the doors for their geopolitical rivals to publicly do the same (we already know it happens through private state-sponsored cyber gangs).
I read it as using Russia and China as the other guys, rather than the bad guys. The idea is to eliminate any pre-existing feelings of trust and illustrate the fact that once your data is held by anyone in the global intelligence community you should think of it as being held by everyone in the global intelligence community.
Whatever you think of their politics, they are authoritarian in structure. There are fewer restrictions on what those governments can do with the information. I’m not saying anyone should trust the UK government here, but it’s easier to see the risks in a country that doesn’t have to be accountable to the people or the legal system.
I dont think that is actually true in those cases.
Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power. Just remember after starting the full scale invasion he proudly declared "I hope I will now be heard" or something to that effect. In Russian mass media the imperial project has long been clear and accepted.
I was pretty sure there was a flipflop in the book too, though. Where the narrator reported now being at war with whomever, and that they had always been at war with that party.
Sure, but the parent comment was aimed at the western side and not at the Russians. The West did everything it could to ignore and deny Russians growing hostility because it would have been inconvenient and maybe it would go away somehow.
> Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
That's a... unique take. You might want to check out the Century of Humiliation. [1] The one thing you do have right is that "good relations" in contemporary times seem to translate into "completely subservient, even to point of a willingness to engaging in self detrimental behavior if demanded." What happened around the second Bush administration was that China no longer had to be subservient, because their economy started booming, and so they could stand up for their own basic interests. One of the very few things they've pushed for is relative autonomy alongside Taiwan, which is even part of an agreement we ostensibly agree to, while then working to undermine that relationship in every way possible. You are either subservient or an enemy. Hegemony in a nutshell.
The same is largely true of Russia as well. Far from wanting the US as an enemy, Putin even inquired about joining NATO in the Clinton era. I'm sure there were some snickers about 'he doesn't get it, does he'? In fact the CIA initially felt Putin would be a terrible leader since he'd be unable to reign in Russia which was spiraling into chaos and mass criminality in the 90s. Their foresight there was about as accurate as usual.
We are talking post 2000s here. What are you referring to with "completely subservient, even to point of a willingness to engaging in self detrimental behavior if demanded." ?
The notion that China is somewhat entitled to dominate its neighbors because it had a bad run 1-2 centuries ago is a bit silly.
and who exactly are we to dictate what a 5000 years old country and civilisation gets to do when we literally fund the mass murder of an entire group of people because it's "God's Promise" ?
The point is that nobody, certainly not the US, cares about things like territorial integrity or 'human rights.' Recent events have caused the US to have to completely drop the facade, which is in many ways a good thing (even if the situation in question is catastrophic and in no way good). It's all just a pretext to the expansion of power and influence. In the case of Taiwan the history of the country is important. The "Republic of China" was a nationalist force that overthrew dynastic China and eventually managed to unify the country in 1927. They were themselves then overthrown in 1949 by the CCP. Their leadership and forces fled to Taiwan (which was already a part of China), and overthrew the local forces there. The CCP did not pursue them beyond that and so the Civil War ended there.
The Republic of China then tried to gain international recognition as an independent nation but, to this day, basically nobody recognizes them as such. And eventually this led to the emergence of the 'one country, two systems' where China would allow some basic autonomy to the province, yet it would remain a part of China. This was accepted by most of the world, including the US. While simultaneously we then did (and are doing) absolutely everything possible to ensure the emergence of a new civil war in the region. It's not at all because we care about Taiwan (beyond it being in a strategically useful location), but primarily to weaken and destabilize China.
Look, China is a big boy and responsible for its own actions. Taiwan has been an autonomous and sovereign entity for many generations. If China invades Taiwan there most likely will be war, if not then not.
You can always construct some historical and geographical claims and justifications. Haven't you heard, China is a near Arctic nation now.
Regarding your edited added hegemony aspect. That is only true if you define subservience as curtailing your imperialist ambitions.
When the US was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush admin and diplomatic circles floated the idea to get China to take on more responsibility in the South China Sea to help manage those territorial disputes.
After all the US was stretched thin and China had and would gain(ed) so much from the rule based order that surely they would be interested in maintaining the status quo and continue to prosper.
Well, next thing China released a map reaffirming their ridiculous 9 dotted line claims and dashed any hope of a cooperation.
Same way the Soviets wanted to “join” NATO in the 50s. To effectively castrate it and make it ineffective.
It would have been easier for them to politically and economically dominate Eastern European countries from “within”.
> Hegemony in a nutshell
From Chinese and Russian perspective sure. Especially Russian politicians have seen the entire world through an exceptionally imperialist lens for centuries.
On the other hand the US has probably been the most “benign” hegemony (relative to their power) in history (still a hegemony of course).
One of the ways the great empires of old learned to create sustainable empires was by giving an exceptional degree of freedom and liberty to those under their control. The US has not been benign in any way shape or form, but what we have done is become the first empire whose borders are not de jure defined, but instead de facto - driven by extreme behind the scenes influence, manipulation, and violence when necessary.
I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate, but Wiki gives "at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections" with another study offering "64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change". [1] Those were both after WW2, and these are only verified "incidents." And this has been paired alongside endless wars, often on completely false pretext, that have led to the deaths of millions and the displacement of what has likely been hundreds of millions. The recent revelations of US AID are also interesting where a ridiculous chunk of "independent media" worldwide seems to largely be a branch of the US intelligence services.
To call this "benevolent" is of course absurd. It's just a new form of imperialistic hegemony, through any and all perspectives. The only asterisk comes in the fact that since it's based on subterfuge instead of in your face stuff, some people remain mostly ignorant to the ways of the world - I suspect especially so amongst those in the US and without a passport.
> Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore.
Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia.
America's concerns over Russia died down a lot from what it was after the collapse of the USSR but never really went away. That said, if Putin hadn't been doing his best to fan the flames America would probably still be focused on the middle east as their new favorite boogeyman.
That was USA scorched Vietnam.
That was USA killing civilians in Iraq and Afganistan.
That was USA overthrowing foreign goverments, including Ukrainian...
And then it preached to Russia on what to do with neighboring states...
USA did a lot of nasty things. But since WW2, it did not invade other countries with explicit intent to annex them and forcibly assimilate their population.
Simply because that has bad optics. We "invade countries" on a regular basis, just not with tanks and battleships, and not to annex them or take their citizens but to get what we want out of them without having to do those messy things.
I'm 100% for my country but we do pull some shifty shit then scream to the heavens when somebody else does the same thing.
Nobody said that it's okay. But there are degrees of evil, and there's clearly one here. The guys who come, drop bombs on you, and leave again are bad, but the guys who come and drop bombs on you and then stay and imprison you and erase your entire culture by force are obviously worse.
> But since WW2, it did not invade other countries with explicit intent to annex them and forcibly assimilate their population.
True but the current lunatic POTUS is essentially threatening that to 2 territories (Canada, Greenland), making noises towards part of a 3rd (Panama), and explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing in a 4th (Gaza). I think the USA's "we're not as bad as Russia" sheen is rapidly disappearing (which makes sense when you consider the two lunatics at the top are essentially considered to be Putin lackeys.)
No dispute that he’s talking a lot of nonsense, but don’t rule out that he is bluffing in a major way with all of this stuff in hopes it will help him to win various concessions. If they can be convinced that Trump genuinely might roll in on an Abrams, pave Gaza from one side to the other, and fill it with Trump casinos, he thinks, then the parties will be more open to making a deal that isn’t ludicrous but is still painful to both sides (as a compromise must be).
Note that I don’t believe it is a genius 4D chess move, or a particularly well executed version of the strategy. But just because his pronouncements are so ridiculous and impractical, and just plain offensive, and just because he’s an idiot, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a bluff.
Gaza has nothing with which to do a deal. So far as I can see, which admittedly isn't necessarily all that far, the only parties there that have any meaningfully influential levers to pull are Israel (whose current (unpopular) leader is welcoming this) and Egypt (who have the Suez canal).
(I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care, though now I think about it I wonder if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea? If so, or indeed if anyone else in the area can, they also become relevant).
Caveat for all of this: I'm guessing wildly on that and you shouldn't take this as deeper than armchair/pub talk.
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.
Yeah, on this one I can only speculate on the real-life endgame Trump imagines he's going to negotiate using this bluff. Maybe he thinks the Arab countries like Jordan could be convinced to demand of Hamas that they stand down in general. Although I certainly don't see either that demand, nor compliance with it, happening.
Yeah, but until American troops are actually in Greenland, Panama, etc., comparing this country to Russia is nuts.
Trump, even in his most incandescently orange rage, STILL doesn't make as many nuclear threats as Putin does. He certainly has been unable to imitate Putin domestically.
One of the big differences between the USA and Russia, is that the US doesn't actually need to annex a country to get what it wants. The US historically acts on behalf of US owned businesses so they can extract mineral and fossil fuel wealth which is funnelled colonial era style back into the US economy. There is no need to plant a flag when it is cheaper and more efficient to achieve the same effect with Chevron.
Using diplomacy and business is good because it leads to LESS DEATH. And anyone can use it. Especially Moscow which had a ton of influence in post soviet space. It was free to be nice and negotiate with Ukraine and get policies good for both but it decided it's beneath it.
It's a choice not a "need". It's a revealing choice. Implying Russia "needed" to annex a country is very revealing too. Like if they don't have enough land and or resources already. You know how sparsely populated it is?
"Need" is obviously being used to refer to capability to execute interests here, and not requirement for survival. The US didn't need to have the cia help oust the Australian government in the 80s, nor did it need to install sympathetic governments across south America for the sake of its mineral companies, but it did it anyway. Russia does not have international mineral businesses with the capability to operate in these places in the same way the US does. Ethics of death only comes into it insofar as if the US did claim territory, it suddenly becomes responsible for the well being of the people living there, which it avoids by privatising the exploitation.
This is ridiculous. Someone with an actual, literal boot on their neck will hear your spiel about exploitation and laugh as much as they can manage.
The US is a state, and like all states it's a sociopath. The reason it's better than others is because it resorts to force later and less often than other states.
It is unironically better this way; your argument implies that having robust systems of law, transnational corporations, and global trade are somehow just as bad as a war of conquest.
They are not in any of those today, but a very recent history suggests they might be only if the government is serious enough to achieve the goals stated by Trump.
Their troops were in fact in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia...
This does not excuse the atrocities and conquest as performed by Russia, while it's true USA does worry about optics much more (i.e. their presence in Serbia was a lot more toned down than in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Serbia is a European "culture" similar to the rest of Europe).
US go-to is "liberating" a territory, which is — interestingly — the same excuse Russia is using in Eastern parts of Ukraine (and which is why it's likely working with most of their own population, obviously helped with media control).
Thing is, when we look at countries that are "liberated" by US in this day and age, they don't look like US puppet states long-term. Look at Iraq for a prime example.
Russia OTOH did indeed use the "liberate" rhetoric wrt Ukraine, but at this point it made it clear that it intends to annex all territory that it can occupy.
It should be noted that the word "liberate" in a military context has a very long history in Russian war propaganda specifically, which is a big reason why they keep using it. It is an immediate call-out to WW2, which has a near-religious status in Russia, but even beyond that, e.g. the 1939 partition of Poland with the Nazis and annexation of West Ukraine and Belarus was also described as "liberation" then.
I think Russia only ever wanted to annex (or really, make into independent states) Eastern parts of Ukraine, even though it attempted to run over all of it (including Kyiv).
Now, Russia has done this already in Georgia: they consider two territories under their occupation independent states, and not part of Russia.
USA does things differently: after establishing military control, it gets local businesses bought out by US companies (investment, right?) while they are struggling, and attempts to influence political landscape.
I'd certainly choose US approach over the other, but ideally, we'd get neither.
Are you the speaker for the majority of the population?
Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?
If majority opposed the war, it would be shameful to support it in public.
Think about it. Autocracy argument here is not relevant: you are not punished for being silent. But if you knew all the neighbors around you oppose something, you'd be ashamed to support it publicly. People are social creatures, and the fear of being rejected by your kind is deeply ingrained in everyone.
Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media. We see kids in Z swag on the streets. We see people signing up and participating in stealing/rapping/torturing/murdering.
If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up? They were not forced. Aren't they afraid of being judged by their neighbors? Are those 1 million sociopaths? Just statistically this doesn't add up.
So yeah, I'd suggest you drop your silly LLM argument, and go outside your bubble (I conclude you are in russia).
>Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media.
Mostly bots, minor officials, public sector employees and their relatives (they are forced to publish pro-war materials on their and their relatives social media under the threat of losing their jobs)
>If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up?
That's less than 1 percent. And keep in mind that to get that one percent, they are paid about 20x the average region salary every month.
>and go outside your bubble
Judging by your arguments, you are not in a bubble, you are directly broadcasting Putin's propaganda about popular support. And this is at a time when, to get his agenda in media, Putin has to sentence people to real prison terms not even for posts with condemnation of war on social media, but even for likes under such posts.
New insult unlocked: indirectly suggest my debate partner's arguments are so simplistic and low-quality that they must be generated by an LLM, which I attempt to exploit with a simple jailbreak.
It was in fashion quite long ago on Twitter, after people broke real russian propaganda bots with this (you know, the ones who posed as Americans or Europeans supporting russia, etc.).
Interesting, I'd never heard of this. Anecdotally, I happen to be an American who's very understanding of Russia's response to the the Euromaidan protests in 2014, in which the CIA more or less staged a Jan 6th in Ukraine to coup the legitimately elected government and install what was functionally a US puppet government - one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians. This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future. All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
I'm not stating that Russia is justified, nor am I suggesting that you should believe them to be.
It's an ugly response with deadly ramifications to an ugly first move with deadly ramifications made by the US government.
This isn't out of character for the US government either, to be clear. The CIA is the premier global expert on covert, astroturfed regime change, after all. Even though we're getting worse at forcing our way of life on foreign populations (Afghanistan, Vietnam), that doesn't negate the dozens of success stories across decades the CIA has under their belt, from the fruit wars in central and south America to illegitimate shahs in Iran... American imperialism is never hard to find.
None of this is true. Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president with strong Russian backing, torpedoed a highly beneficial EU-Ukrainian trade deal under last-minute Russian pressure[1]. Ukrainian youth, who had the most to win from increased trade, employment and studying opportunities, staged a series of mass protest[2]. Yanukovych responded with gradual increase of violence, starting with hired thugs[3] attacking protesters, and culminating with police snipers killing 108 protesters on/around 20 February 2014[4]. That was such a shock that Yanukovych lost all political footing in Ukraine overnight. As he was about to get arrested and criminally tried, he went into hiding. After he was officially declared a wanted fugitive[5], Russian secret services evacuated him to Russia. The very next day after the wave of violence, on 21 February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament assembled and voted unanimously with 328-vs-0 to hold snap elections to find a replacement. Not even a single representative of his own party opposed this. The elections were held on 25 May 2014[6] and the results were recognized by everyone, even by Russia[7].
Calling this chain of events a "CIA coup" is an indication of baffling ignorance of the actual facts. Whoever gave you this "understanding" blatantly lied to you.
> Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president with strong Russian backing, torpedoed a highly beneficial EU-Ukrainian trade deal under last-minute Russian pressure
Several EU countries torpedoed a highly beneficial China-EU trade deal under last-minute USA pressure. Time for a euro maidan?
Bro you found the most biased news sources on the planet. How about you cite the financial times if this is so clear?
I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.
Why would the CIA council things? It would be president and state department.
If we're talking about the Revolution of Dignity the EU and US sadly didn't care that much and generally advised the opposition to try to compromise with Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych himself who decided to flee and Putin who decided to invade in 2014.
And Ukraine didn't go to war, Russia was the one who invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was merely defending itself. Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid the war, Russia was not interested.
Do you think Putin is a US puppet?
In 2022 Biden repeatedly pointed out that the planned full scale invasion was an even worse even stupider idea. Putin invaded anyway.
Gee let's consider here why nobody trusts the cia.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people and absolutely deserve what we get. Morons. Why bother complaining about fascism if we don't even bother to tear down obviously evil structures like the cia? What is the goddamn point?
> in which the CIA more or less staged a Jan 6th in Ukraine to coup the legitimately elected government and install what was functionally a US puppet government
If you start with groundless conspiracy theories it's not surprising where you may end up. The CIA had nothing to do with the revolution of dignity, which was a grassroots protest movement or Ukraines government voting to remove the president after he abandoned the country.
Also Ukraine has had 2 fair and free elections since then (Zelensky beat the incumbent by a landslide) unlike Russia or the parts of the country unfortunate enough to be under their control.
A coup was actually carried out by Russia in crimea. An actual coop where Russian soldiers surrounded the local government at gunpoint
> one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians.
This is false and shows you have no knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. Zelensky is from a minority group(Jewish) and is a native Russian speaker the current head of the army is an ethnic russian born in Russia.
That's not to mention how Russia treats ethnic minorities or even ethnic Russians in territories they capture
> This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future.
He invaded because he's an imperialist. It's pretty simple
> All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
You're imagining this was Americas fault. The only thing America could have done differently to prevent the war was if they somehow agreed to defend Ukraine or get all NATO members to agree to let them join.
The thing is, most people think that governments wants new tools for surveillance. The fact is, they had this power for a very long time (see Crypto A.G. and history of NSA and others), and practical and verifiable E2EE took these capabilities away.
Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.
I think this is an extreme take - they only had those mass surveillance tools since the start of the internet, and any other method of communication (phone calls, physical mail) all required warrants individualized to specific people to tap. But somehow the internet is excluded from all those privacy protections, and now that there’s technology available to ratchet us back to where we used to be, law enforcement agencies are throwing a tantrum about not being able to constantly violate our privacy.
In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.
These (mass surveillance) programs go back to 60s, and it was already prevalent before internet was widespread, also internet was also under blanket surveillance way before. Moreover, this is not only limited to internet per se. Phone calls and any form of unencrypted communications are probably actively monitored for signals intelligence. We're not seeing laws related to this, because mechanisms are probably already in place.
So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".
There are very strict laws against wiretapping on calls within the US. Warrants are required before the call can be recorded. That’s why there was so much controversy over blanket metadata collection.
How to achive total pervasive surveillance? One step at a time where each step is not quite too much to cause rioting and revolution. Outrage has a very short attention span.
Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.
Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".
> If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile?
nothing
the first precedence of not-draft law here was Cloud Act I think
through I would be surprised if China doesn't "de-facto" requires Chineese companies operating outside of China (including Subsidiaries) to cooperate with their secret service in whatever way they want
and if we go back to the "crypto wars" of the ~2000th then there is a lot of precedence of similar law _ideas_ by the US which where turned down
similar we can't say for sure that there aren't secret US court orders which already did force apple to do "something like that" for the FBI or similar, SURE there is a lot of precedence of Apple pushing back against backdoor when it comes to police and offline device encryption, but one thing is in the public and the other fully in secret with gag orders and meant for usage in secret never seeing the light of courts so while it's somewhat unlikely it would be foolish to just assume it isn't the case, especially if we go forward one or two years with the current government...
Anyway UK might realize that now they have left the US they have very little power to force US tech giants to do anything _in the UK_ not even speaking about regulation which is a direct attack on the sovereignty of other states to own/control/decide about their population(s data).
IMHO ignoring the US for a moment because they are in chaos the EU, or at least some key EU states should make a statement that a UK backdoor allowing UK to access EU citizen data would be classified as espionage and isn't permittable if Apple wants to operate in the EU (but formulated to make it clear it's not to put pressure on Apple but on the UK). Sadly I don't see this happening as there are two many politcans which want laws like that, too. Often due to not understanding the implications undermining encryption has on national security, industry espionage and even protection of democracy as a whole... Sometimes also because they are greedy corrupt lobbyist from the industry which produces mass surveillance tools.
There are tangentially similar precedents already, such as the American FACTA law. It is obviously a quite different context, as it just relates to financial information, not all information - but it's a law from the US government, that demands foreign companies send information back to the US.
The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.
The US can get away with this through its immense power and economic influence (for the moment, at least). The UK is a small market of middling relevance, and their government's belief that they're a global power is an anachronism. I hope these decisions cause enough companies to break ties that they're forced to realize their position.
The key difference being that it is perfectly legal for the US to request data on income and gains received by US taxpayers while it is illegal for the US to spy (in certain ways) on US residents.
It is completely routine for countries to exchange data on financial accounts [1]. The only aspect that makes FATCA somewhat unusual is that the US taxes US persons even when they are residents of other countries.
Oh 100%, the content (and context) is completely different. The similarity I mean is a government passing a law that asks a foreign company to hand data over to them.
It's legal in the same way this UK thing is legal - because there's a law justifying it. It may make more moral sense, depending on your political persuasion.
> what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile?
Realistically: Apple is a US company (with lots of foreign entanglements) with US leaders, and the US and UK are close allies with extradition treaties and the like. I'd expect the US government to put lots of pressure on Apple to prevent it from acting on such requests from Russia or China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs would get slapped with espionage charges if they didn't head the warnings (especially if they "provide data on UK minister's phones").
We are watching the redefinition of the idea of territorial sovereignty that emerged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. We in the US see our expectations of privacy shaped in the UK, and the reverse.
Imagine Kim Jong-un goes to a few police stations in North Korea. It might not work on the first try, but eventually, he manages to trick one officer into believing that Trump threatened him on Facebook. Now, the police of a given country can legally request Apple to provide all information from Trump’s iCloud for an "investigation" into threats of violence— even if they are completely fabricated.
What if Apple just stops operating in the UK? They could start selling "English language" iPhones in France, let people go on a day trip if they wanted to buy them. There are ways of sidestepping this bullshit if you're an international company. Supposing they have any integrity, I mean. How far will the UK double down?
I still don’t think the UK is a big enough market for Apple to be that worried about the following, but if the government and Apple escalate to the point of Apple pulling out of the UK, it would be pretty easy for the government to force all of its telecoms to ban any new iPhones from their mobile networks. So the citizens will probably not get to simply walk right around the restrictions that way, assuming the government is serious about this.
Given the desperation for economic growth in the UK, the idea that they would inflict such a massive bit of self harm on themselves over increased spying options is frankly ludicrous.
Why not. Their hegemony is used as a weapon of war, since 1998 when Microsoft was condemned-but-not-penalized for its monopoly. Make it costly for USA to spy & conquer.
