Brazil said it!

[leo9]

This problem raises some questions:

Is it ok for a country to spy on other countries - friend or foe - as it pleases?
I suppose you can say that it's okay for them to TRY. What's NOT okay is for a county to use technology to spy upon others, then bitch and moan when those others are found to be spying on them.

Nations routinely spy on their friends as well as their enemies, because their interests are never 100% aligned - if nothing else, their economies are in competition, and the line between state and industrial espionage is notoriously fuzzy. And the targets routinely complain if they catch them at it. What is making this more than just a routine exchange of diplomatic notes is the sheer scale of the operation; it's not one or two bought civil servants or microphones in offices, it's other nations' entire business potentially laid open.

The astonishing thing, and a sign of how much the US is still feared and/or admired around the world, is that there hasn't been a comparable outcry by all of Europe. I'd say it makes me despise my own government, if they could sink lower in my esteem.

Is it a threat to democracy?
A tricky question. Is spying on Brazil a threat to democracy in the US? Probably not. In fact, spying on some countries (not necessarily Brazil) could be of benefit to democracy, not only in the US but in the rest of the world. BUT, spying on your own citizens is a threat to democracy, since a part of democratic freedoms is the freedom to remove incompetent or dangerous leaders through free elections. Spying on people in order to limit that freedom is a definite threat to democracy.

It depends entirely on how the power that it gives the US is used. But Latin America has reason to fear US interference in the operation of its democracies. If I were a Latin American politician, I'd have on my wall Kissinger's justification for the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government: "The US won't stand by and watch a country go Communist just because of the stupidity of its people."

Is it time for the countries to make their own IT net?
I don't know about that. Half the politicians in THIS country don't seem capable of dealing with a postage stamp, much less the complexities of email.

As so often demonstrated by their pronouncements on such topics as Wikileaks and online porn, yes, but it's not the politicians, thank Wayland, who would be building the new servers.

Will the WWW fracture if that happens?
I think governments might fracture before the internet does. Hell, half the twelve year olds in the world can hack into just about any infrastructure, it seems. What makes them think that any such IT network would be safe from them?

The biggest thing politicians don't understand about the Net is that it was designed to be decentralised and unblockable. The fact that all the big servers are in the US is an accident of history, not a necessary part of the architecture, and it would certainly be an improvement if there were more elsewhere.

But breaking it up would mean rolling back twenty years of industrial and commercial progress. There is WAY too much money invested for that to happen. On a smaller scale, we see this in countries like Egypt where the gov't tries to shut down the Net because it's being used by rebels, and has to switch it on again because the entire business community is screaming.

What would make a difference, and will surely happen, is the much wider adoption of open source high-level encryption (open source, because nobody can plant state-sponsored backdoors in it without being caught.) There was a time when the US government tried to make PGP illegal, for the usual reasons, but these days I would guess they can crack PGP if they want to badly enough. It will be interesting to see if they try to ban the new generation of encryptions.

Should the UN over guidelines for spying, and be equipped to see that they are followed?
The UN is a failed, ineffective, impotent organization, incapable of doing anything that any one member of the Security Council doesn't like. Any "guidelines" it might develop would be ignored whenever it suited those members to do so, and nothing could be done to stop it.

Agreed. Even gov'ts like Brazil can't do anything about this at their level. This is not a fight between gov'ts: more clearly than ever before in my life, it's a fight between rulers and the people, and friendly rulers can just hold our coats while we take on the other sort.

But we know the ground and hold the strongpoints. I'm hopeful.