<nettime> NSA-spying-on-Europe outrage somewhat disingenuous

[Robert Arnold <warbaby@warbaby.com>]

Lauren Weinstein, one of the top Internet tech experts, recently posted on
the NNSquad mailing list an enlightening and amusing commentary on the
sillilness of the spying kerfuffle. With Lauren's permission, I'm
re-posting it on nettime for your eddification and amusement. Really, it's
all a tempest in a teapot...

--

NNSquad Digest - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.orgToday's Topics:

  1.   False Indignation and Spy vs. Spy (Lauren Weinstein)

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Date: June 30, 2013 3:03:34 PM PDT
To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org
Subject: [ NNSquad ] False Indignation and Spy vs. Spy



                      False Indignation and Spy vs. Spy

                http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001053.html


Have you heard the news?  Europe is up in arms about reports that the
U.S. has been spying on EU countries!  It's incredible!  It's an
outrage!  It's ... March 17, 2000?  Damn, did the Flux Capacitor go
out of alignment again?

Hmm.  Thirteen years ago ...

In fact, this super sensitive Top Secret document -- "The Wall Street
Journal" for that date, published a little piece by a former CIA
director, entitled "Why We Spy on Our Allies" ( http://j.mp/13jmgsk ).

Golly, that's confusing, isn't it?  I mean, to hear the politicians
talking now, all this spying on communications and such is a new
phenomenon that comes as a shock to everyone -- especially the
politicians (vote for me!) themselves.

It may in many ways be outrageous, but it is anything but new and
anything but a shock -- to anyone who has been paying attention.

When you really think about it, even NSA apparently didn't really
consider this stuff to be as important to keep secret as the politicos
are making out today.  Otherwise, how would it have been possible for
a relatively low level contract worker -- on the job for just a few
months -- to dump so much data so easily into a thumb drive or two?

Either you have to assume that NSA is utterly incompetent -- and
that's not a good bet, they've got some very smart folks there -- or
else you're faced with the facts of the matter -- it's all a big game
of Spy vs. Spy, and pretty much everyone knows it (even though
speaking this truth in public is an ultimate spook and political sin).

You remember the Spy vs. Spy comic strips?  The brilliant Antonio
Prohias created them for "Mad" magazine in 1961.  In the ensuing
decades, the two spies, identical in appearance other than one being
dressed in white and one in black, tried to gain the upper hand over
the other (sometimes even as ostensible colleagues) with every
possible bit of subterfuge and tradecraft at their disposal.

They were sometimes cunning, sometimes inept.  We never knew what
countries they represented, and it didn't matter -- the whole point
was that they were fundamentally indistinguishable from each other in
terms of modus operandi.

While their antics were humorous, some stories from the real world of
spying are even more amusing.  For example, back in 2002, a German
intelligence operation, apparently tapping the phone lines of some 20K
Germans, accidentally triggered the sending of telephone company bills
for the tapping circuits to the targets of those taps!  Oops!  Paging
Agent Howard, Agent Fine, Agent Howard -- nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

Of course, intelligence ops aren't supposed to be funny, and can carry
enormous costs, potentially in terms of dollars, euros, and lives.

But the point is -- and yes it's painful but the truth often is
painful -- everybody with the resources to spy ... is spying.

The U.S., Germany, UK, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, France, and on
and on.  Likely even -- as speculated in 1968's "The President's
Analyst" -- Canada.  ("Canadian spies?" Oh my.)

They spy internally and they spy externally.  They trade data like
kids used to trade baseball cards.  They spy on their enemies and
their allies, for one never knows when your current ally may become an
enemy in a given situation, or an old foe a useful source of info
someday, in the best tradition of "the enemy of my enemy is my
friend."

This is a truth that reaches back to the very dawn of civilization,
merely updated for each new technology as developed and deployed in
the continuing triumph of human ingenuity.

The ancients, given a chance to observe today's intelligence and
spying brouhaha, would likely assert that the gods are laughing at us,
finding hilarious our public attempts at indignation not only over
what is being done, but our laughable efforts to pretend that we
didn't know about it all along.

With Snowden's leaks we have more details now, some that make sense,
others that -- given the limited context available -- have been wildly
blown out of proportion by media and used to damage the reputations of
innocent parties.

But while U.S. politicians who approved NSA's ops via PATRIOT, and
their counterparts in other countries who have supported their own
nations' intelligence endeavors, will hem and haw and pontificate and
lecture, mugging for the cameras and the voters -- they all know
what's really going on and has always been going on.

And so, frankly, do we.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren 
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org 
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com


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