Remember the big furor a while ago when Edward Snowden revealed that American intelligence agencies had been spying on their friends and allies as well as their enemies? I even commented on it myself here and there.
One of the politicians most outraged by the unwanted and unnecessary snooping was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Spying among friends, that’s not all right at all,” she said very publicly in 2013. And in July last year in an unprecedented move she expelled, from Germany the CIA station chief, who in plain language is the top American spy in the country.
The German media jumped all over it too, with heavy moralizing tones and whipping up the German public’s natural reaction against what America had been caught doing.
Hmmmm.
That was good stuff.
At least it would have been, but for more recent revelations that Germany’s own spy agency, the BND, have for years been collaborating with America’s National Security Agency (NSA) in spying on Germany’s friends in Paris and Brussels.
What???
Yes, you read it correctly.
While Merkel was whining on about privacy this, and privacy that, her spooks were operating hand in glove with the Americans to spy on supposed friends. And Merkel knew it. As Chancellor she is in charge of overseeing what the BND is up to.
And specifically what the NSA was up to was using the electronic eavesdropping facilities of the BND in Bad Aibling, a town in Bavaria, by giving the Germans phone numbers, search terms or internet addresses they wanted to monitor. The scale of the snooping was huge. In 2013 alone, the Americans snooped in on 690,000 phone numbers and 7.8m search terms.
As investigations and revelations continue we will no doubt hear phrases like “national security’ and ‘terrorist threats’ being cited as the reasons for all this snooping being necessary. That would be fine if it were true. But it isn’t.
The thing that negates all the good elements that those who have been caught red-handed and red-faced will try to emphasize now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag are revelations that the American snoops were also targeting certain commercial companies which, if true is industrial espionage and nothing to do with terrorism.
Airbus, the European aircraft maker and chief rival to America’s Boeing, has already filed a criminal suit with German prosecutors and demanded clarification from the German government.
Of course that doesn’t mean they’ll get it. Since these revelations a lot of ass-covering has started. Several investigations are apparently underway, investigations that will find whatever the government wants them to find. In other words they will only reveal what they think they have to and little else.
So to answer the question posed in the title of today’s post, ‘Heuchler’ is apparently the German word for hypocrite. So ‘Heuchlers’ they are!
When the internet was born it was a tool of the military establishment.
Then it broke out of that stranglehold and escaped into a world of freedom of expression and communication for everyone.
Never before had a system like this been available to the general public. Never before had it been so easy to find information, search for friends, communicate with groups with similar interests, etc. Its popularity was assured.
The world wide web developed at break neck speed, much too quick for the people who hate and detest freedom. They were confounded.
It was a free and open internet.
So how could it ever go wrong?
Well, as with the financial crisis, when you dig down a bit you find the Clinton administration again as the culprit.
During the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was first being woven into social and cultural life, internet companies and corporate advertisers lobbied the Clinton administration to minimize privacy restrictions, so that they could re-engineer the Web to enable commercial surveillance of internet users.
The warnings of public interest groups were ignored as social networks, search engines, service providers and advertisers lobbied hard against even the smallest of efforts at data protection. Motivated by greed, they ensured that commercial surveillance would be pervasively integrated online. They are still at it today, that’s really what cloud computing services are all about.
A few thousand giant corporations, like Google, have become able to capture information every minute, of every hour, of every day, from everyone who uses the internet. And they can’t stop because their profit strategies totally rely on accumulating user data.
Thus began the surveillance society. The government saw how easy this could now be done and began to catch up fast. If there was snooping to be done, they were not to be left out in the cold.
Until Edward Snowden, who had been a computer consultant working for a subcontractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA), copied several hundred thousand classified documents relating to surveillance programs being conducted by the US and its allies in the name of the war on terror, and sent them to journalists, nobody really understood the level of snooping that was going on.
Most of it was unnecessary, intrusive, unproductive and immoral, and after Snowden’s revelations nobody believed the United States government was totally innocent of any wrongdoing.
Further revelations published since have helped to reveal a surveillance system that intrudes into almost every facet of our private lives. Privacy in fact is a thing of the past, unless you have the time, resources and knowledge to try to circumvent it.
If the government was only spying on the communications of foreign countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, and if it was confined to what could be termed ‘unfriendly’ nations and their agents throughout the world, then I don’t think anyone would mind so much. It’s a necessary evil in today’s world.
But unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Friendly nations and heads of state, European institutions, the UN headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to name but a few, have all also come under the snooper’s gaze.
This has not only shown up the irresponsibility and arrogance of those in charge of the snoopers, and their lack of common sense and ethics, but it has also created even more ill will against the United States.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an ally of the United States, was a victim of the snoopers. As a result of that revelation, the German government protested publicly its outrage. It also terminated its longstanding telecommunications service contract with Verizon, directing its business to Deutsche Telekom instead. Two weeks after that it expelled the head of US intelligence in Germany.
The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, also took public stands against US privacy invasions. He, like Merkel, had also personally been a victim of the US snoopers.
Then the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to affirm online privacy as a human right, and in June 2014, responding to the EU, the US Justice Department had to promise to send legislation to Congress that would grant European citizens many of the (inadequate) privacy protections accorded to US citizens.
Bad enough not trusting your supposed ‘allies’, but US intelligence agencies have gone even further. Now they don’t even trust the decent, honest, hard-working citizens of America who have never broken any laws, nor have any intention of doing so.
The Prism program, for example, allows the NSA to collect data from your emails, telephone conversations, contacts, videos, etc., from major US digital companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
The XKeyscore program uses several hundred servers distributed across the world to store information on the activities of every Internet user, including your emails, internet searches, the websites you visit, what you post on social networks, and blogs like this. (Whoops!)
The list goes on and on.
After Snowden’s revelations, commercial firms like Google, Facebook and others scrambled to distance themselves by professing outrage. Their protestations had little to do with political principle but a lot to do with ensuring they continued to make fortunes by collecting data on us.
The US Internet companies went on a public relations offensive, and also raced to reorganize their overseas operations, to reassure worried foreign customers that they were complying with local data protection measures.
IBM, for example, committed over a billion dollars to building additional data centers overseas, hoping to ease customer fears that their data was not safe from the US government’s surveillance. But then the US authorities demanded that Microsoft, which deploys more than a million computers in over 40 countries, hand over emails stored on its servers in Ireland. Data is not safe and private anywhere it seems.
Last week I wrote a post about the Facebook/US Army experiment in trying (successfully) influence how people thought. (Click here if you want to read it.)
And so it continues.
Personally I think it is a pity that the powers that be are able to devote time, energy and money against people who have done nothing wrong, yet seem unwilling to remove child pornography and other evils from the world wide web. But the latter would require a decree of decency and morals that is sadly lacking in those who direct such matters for the government.
The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open Internet, because that free and open internet has already been destroyed.
I’ve said before that America is bad – that’s capital ‘B’, ‘A’ and ‘D’ – at foreign policy. The US Government should know this by now, I’m not the only one saying it. It is a well known fact all over the world – except in America which apparently doesn’t know very much about the rest of the world and also apparently isn’t going to learn any time soon.
There hasn’t been any time in history when America needed to take stock of what has happened and try to make a few friends out there in the big wide world rather than pissing everyone else off needlessly.
Sure if you’re the biggest and strongest on the field you can kick anyone around. But to what purpose when it’s just as easy to get people on your side. Most of the woes America faces, the rest of the world faces too. There’s more in common out there that you might at first think.
Cue the man who was going to bring in great change and had the power to do so. But, no, President Obama hasn’t changed a damn thing. He inherited a great big hole and he just jumped in there with his shovel and keeps on digging.
Worse, he has yet again allowed croneyism to take the place of innovation and good sense.
To help him he has given government positions to the biggest bunch of idiots that you could ever imagine.
Their first job it seems was to continue to piss off Europe. Hot on the heels of the NSA getting caught spying on German Chancellor Merkel, the U.S. Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, was caught in a phone call recording saying “F*** the EU”.
Yes, you read that correctly. And she did all this as she was discussing who should be in the new Ukrainian government.
Whoops! And Double Whoops!!
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Here it is if you want to hear it for yourselves.
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That’s the Secretary of State.
Now what about the Presidential appointeees, the Ambassadors.
You would think the main criteria for choosing your Ambassadors would be to get someone who has an in depth knowledge of the country where they will be posted. Someone well versed in the culture, history, politics etc. Someone who will fit in straight away and make a good impression on behalf of the American people.
Sound sensible?
Yes, of course it does.
Is it the way America chooses its Ambassadors?
No, of course it’s not.
America chooses its Ambassadors, not on ability, but rather on how much money they have raised for the President’s election or re-election campaign.
That’s what you call corruption in any other country. I’m not sure what it’s called in America but the consequences are plain and pathetic to be seen.
Nowhere better than in the most recent hearings for the ambassador positions.
In this lot of new Ambassadors we had Colleen Bell, a TV producer for a soap opera who was picked as the U.S. envoy to Hungary. Did she know anything about Hungary? No. She didn’t utter a word of sense, just relied on waffle and bluff.
The only thing that eased her humiliation was the new Ambassador to Norway who was so clueless he didn’t even know who was in Government there. He even called the Progress Party, which is part of Norway’s ruling coalition, a hate-spewing “fringe element.”
And last in these examples, but not least in terms of inability and unsuitability for the job, was Noah Bryson Mamet. He was the nominee for the Argentina ambassadorship despite the fact that he’d never even visited that country and can’t speak Spanish.
A couple of million dollars for Obama apparently goes a very long way to getting you the job of representing America on the world stage.
Incredible! And not in a good way.
I’ll give you the opportunity to hear Anderson Cooper’s take on it too.
No surprises there, but maybe one or two in the questions.
Let’s see how you do this week.
If you get stuck the answers are, as usual, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down below – but please NO cheating!
Enjoy, and good luck!
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Q. 1: What handicap did the composer Beethoven have?
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Q. 2: According to legend, who rewarded a man for his loyalty by giving him the secret recipe for Drambuie?
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Q. 3: Which two semaphoric letters are found on the famous anti war peace symbol from the 1960’s ?
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Q. 4: In which movie would you find a robot called ‘Gort’?
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Q. 5: What name did the Vikings give to Newfoundland?
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Q. 6: What do all of the following have (or don’t have) in common?
Galileo, Jesse James, Jerry Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, James Doohan, Frodo Baggins, Tony Iommi, Telly Savalas, Boris Yelzin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Daryl Hannah and Gary Burghoff (‘Radar’ O’Reilly from M*A*S*H)
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Q. 7: In literature, King Richard III was desperate and willing to pay a high price for what?
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Q. 8: Which fruit is a port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
a) Orange
b) Banana
c) Ugli
d) Guava
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Q. 9: In China in 1989 in which Beijing Square were the protests against the government crushed by tanks?
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Q. 10: What is the name of the race of giants mentioned in the Bible who lived in Canaan?
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Q. 11: “I coulda had class, I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contender”. What famous actor said the words and in which famous movie?
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Q. 12: Who was the first WBC heavyweight boxing champion in 1978?
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Q. 13: What is the name of the current German Chancellor?
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Q. 14: Put the following in the correct order starting with the fastest and ending with the slowest:
Human, Nimitz class aircraft carrier, Grizzly bear, A common pig, Cheetah, Japanese ‘bullet’ train, Ostrich, Peregrin falcon.
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Q. 15: Which new country was formed in 1971 at the end of the Pakistan / India conflict?
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Q. 16: Who played ‘Lucy Ewing’ in the hit TV Series ‘Dallas’ and what was her rather unkind nickname?
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Q. 17: What was the name of the French underground movement that fought against the Germans in World War II?
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Q. 18: Name the capital and the largest city in New Zealand (a point for each).
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Q. 19: In the ‘Bond’ movies what were the codenames for James Bond’s boss and the person responsible for the gadgets he used?
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Q. 20: What ‘o’clock’ is mentioned in the Bangles hit song ‘Manic Monday’?
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ANSWERS
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Q. 1: What handicap did the composer Beethoven have?
A. 1: He was hearing impaired.
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Q. 2: According to legend, who rewarded a man for his loyalty by giving him the secret recipe for Drambuie?
A. 2: Bonnie Prince Charlie.
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Q. 3: Which two semaphoric letters are found on the famous anti war peace symbol from the 1960’s ?
A. 3: N and D for Nuclear Disarmament.
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Q. 4: In which movie would you find a robot called ‘Gort’?
A. 4: The Day The Earth Stood Still.
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Q. 5: What name did the Vikings give to Newfoundland?
A. 5: Vinland.
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Q. 6: What do all of the following have (or don’t have) in common?
Galileo, Jesse James, Jerry Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, James Doohan, Frodo Baggins, Tony Iommi, Telly Savalas, Boris Yelzin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Daryl Hannah and Gary Burghoff (‘Radar’ O’Reilly from M*A*S*H)
A. 6: They are/were all missing a finger or fingers.
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Q. 7: In literature, King Richard III was desperate and willing to pay a high price for what?
A. 7: “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse.”
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Q. 8: Which fruit is a port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
a) Orange
b) Banana
c) Ugli
d) Guava
A. 8: b) Banana
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Q. 9: In China in 1989 in which Beijing Square were the protests against the government crushed by tanks?
A. 9: Tiananmen Square.
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Q. 10: What is the name of the race of giants mentioned in the Bible who lived in Canaan?
A. 10: Nephilim.
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Q. 11: “I coulda had class, I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contender”. What famous actor said the words and in which famous movie?
A. 11: Marlon Brando in ‘On the Waterfront’.
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Q. 12: Who was the first WBC heavyweight boxing champion in 1978?
A. 12: Ken Norton.
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Q. 13: What is the name of the current German Chancellor?
A. 13: Angela Merkel.
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Q. 14: Put the following in the correct order starting with the fastest and ending with the slowest:
Human, Nimitz class aircraft carrier, Grizzly bear, A common pig, Cheetah, Japanese ‘bullet’ train, Ostrich, Peregrin falcon.
A. 14: The correct order, fastest to slowest, is:
1) Japanese ‘bullet’ train (361 mph); 2) Peregrin falcon (200 mph); 3) Cheetah (70 mph); 4) Ostrich (40 mph); 5) Nimitz class aircraft carrier (34.5 plus mph); 6) grizzly bear (30 mph); 7. Human (28 mph); 8. Common pig (11 mph)
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Q. 15: Which new country was formed in 1971 at the end of the Pakistan / India conflict?
A. 15: Bangladesh.
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Q. 16: Who played ‘Lucy Ewing’ in the hit TV Series ‘Dallas’ and what was her rather unkind nickname?
A. 16: ‘Lucy Ewing’ was played by Charlene Tilton and her nickname because of her lack of height was the ‘Poison Dwarf’
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Q. 17: What was the name of the French underground movement that fought against the Germans in World War II?
A. 17: The Maquis (If you are nice you can also claim a point for ‘French Resistance’)
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Q. 18: Name the capital and the largest city in New Zealand (a point for each).
A. 18: Wellington is the capital; Auckland is the largest city.
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Q. 19: In the ‘Bond’ movies what were the codenames for James Bond’s boss and the person responsible for the gadgets he used?
A. 19: They were known as ‘M’ and ‘Q’.
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Q. 20: What ‘o’clock’ is mentioned in the Bangles hit song ‘Manic Monday’?
You know, sometimes you just have to laugh at the stupidity and short-sightedness of politicians.
The latest idiot to hit the headlines is US House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner. You might remember him, he was the one who wrote the supposed anti-terror law now known as the Patriot Act.
Now he has asked the European Parliament for help in controlling the obviously completely out of control NSA who have decided this piece of ill thought out legislation gives them carte blanch permission to snoop into everybody’s business, friend and foe.
Apparently Congressman Sensenbrenner has belatedly seen the error of his ways and wants Europe to put pressure on the US to change its legislation to stop the spy agency’s mass communications data collecting activities.
Today Sensenbrenner says that the NSA has abused the trust placed in it by the American people. Powers that were designed to protect them, but powers that have been used to spy on them instead. And the Brits are at it too!
Big surprise Jim?
I think not!
Then there is the damage they have done to America’s standing throughout the world. The Merklegate scandal, where the German Chancellor’s cell phone was found to be bugged, is just one of many instances where America has treated its allies like enemies, creating suspicion and distrust where there used to be friendship and cooperation.
And the poor judgment continues, because Sensenbrenner’s solution to the problem he helped to create is not to get rid of this bad legislation, but instead to create even more bad legislation that purports to curtail the excesses of the former.
Won’t work Jimmy.
No point fitting a new lock on the stable door after the horse is already out and galloping roughshod over the privacy of the American people and their friends.
All very well for Jim Sensenbrenner to say sorry now, but wasn’t it inevitable that the massive ill thought out powers handed to the spooks after 9-11 would be abused?
Absolute power does corrupt – always! That is why checks and balances are necessary, only they need to be put in place in time.
fasab 