From Pine View Farm

It’s No Secret 0

In Der Spiegel, Christian Stöcker comments on the surveillance state. It’s a subject that Germany and Germans are particularly sensitive to, because Germany and Germans have lived it.

A nugget–follow the link for the rest (caveat: they fell into the trap that others have of confusing SFTP with “direct access,” but, from a policy standpoint, that’s pretty much irrelevant):

And for good reason. The fact that the Americans and the British — it is yet to be revealed who else participated — have granted themselves this enormous power, without ever informing their own people, is a scandal of historic proportions. To the initiated, all the recent public debate about data retention, Internet privacy and the practices of Facebook and Google must have been downright amusing. The state, as it turns out, knew everything all along.

That was precisely the goal, according to the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” he asked in an internal document acquired by the Guardian. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he continued, referring to a GCHQ facility at Menwith Hill in northern England.

I have a thought: Substitute “Russian” and “Chinese” for “American” and “British” wherever those words appear in the article and imagine the uproar that would be coming from Washington over this.

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