NSA Hacked Email Account of Mexican President 242
rtoz writes "The National Security Agency (NSA ) of United States hacked into the Mexican president's public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking and the political system. The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico. This operation, dubbed 'Flatliquid,' is described in a document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Meanwhile U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is urging the Supreme Court not to take up the first case it has received on controversial National Security Agency cybersnooping."
Re:Well that's new (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well that's new (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA not only has the capability to violate client attorney privilege at every point in the course, and to threaten judges, lawyers and everyone up and down the line, they have demonstrated the will to ignore the courts already by ignoring the FISA courts rulings.
Not only should the supreme court rule on this before any lower court can, it should invalidate the entire domestic spying apparatus.
And that's likely just what will happen given the circumstances. Judges do not like their power being questioned.
Re:So what is this about? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the same as claiming that "he claims to know all about China's and Russia's intelligence". He was saying that they didn't get the documents from him since he didn't have them after turning them over.
Re:So what is this about? (Score:3, Insightful)
You need to read that again, and then I think you have a choice to make.
I don't need to read anything again. What you claimed he said is not what he said. You're just spreading more baseless FUD like in the last article.
Re:As a Mexican... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can say nobody is surprised this happened. President Calderón would have been silly not to assume something like this.
Mexicans understand the world beyond Latin America a lot better then the rest of Latin America does. The US spies on everybody, everybody spies on the US, when anybody gets caught there's a lot of pretentious bitching because a the electorate doesn't understand this, but nobody takes it very seriously. Thus France's initial response to the NSA allegations was an extremely self-righteous defense of the Right to Privacy, and it was immediately followed by everyone who has ever met France going "WTF? You're a million times worse the NSA could ever hope to be." There's actually probably more spying between friends then enemies. Latvia got burned really badly back when Hitler (the supposed anti-Communist Crusader) sold them out to Stalin, so they'd be fools if they don't have plenty of ways to verify their current anti-Russian protector (aka: Barrack Hussein Obama) isn't doing it to them.
OTOH everyone else in Latin Amer4ica is acting like the entire world lied to them by stealing their email. Which is technically true, but it's also technically true that part of being a grown-up real nation is knowing that they will always steal your secrets.
No hard feelings (Score:4, Insightful)
"The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico."
Hardly. When you have huge difference of powers the weaker nation, Mexico in this case, can only act as offended but forget the issue very soon and go on.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
The National Security Agency (NSA ) of United States hacked into the Mexican president's public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking
OK, seriously? From his public email? Even Obama has a "public email" you can send shit to. Little old ladies and bent out of shape whack jobs pounding away at their keyboard send stuff to El Presidente's "public email".
Next...
Of course the Russian Foreign Service Security guy who hacks Obama's public email would write that he "gained deep insight" into Obama's secret thoughts this way. Otherwise he'd be deemed useless and have his budget cut.
From a non-American point-of-view you could probably gain a lot of little insights from the Obama admin's responses to their public email. You would know what Obama's dealing with at a grassroots level, for example. A very common way for countries to not make a concession is for them to politely say that if they do that their publics will freak out. Reading Obama's email would let Putin know when Obama was lying about that shit. You would not know much more about Obama's actual positions then he tells you himself because he's got to know it's trivial for a foreign agent to register john.smith@yahoo.com and shoot Obama an email, but you'd get real insights into the political constraints Obama had to deal with.
Re:Well that's new (Score:5, Insightful)
We've crossed a threshold in human history. We are going from an existence where it was simply not financially or physically feasible to monitor every person 24/7. In less than two decades, the practical limits on surveillance have basically died. This is a massive and fundamental change in the structure of society and how we deal with this now, is going to shape the future of world society and culture.
Really, it's already past time to start addressing these issues, and more complacency is just going to ensure the most sociopathic systems possible will be cemented into our future. The 4th Amendment needs its own unyielding ideologically pure NRA type organization because if there are no limits on government power, eventually it will start brutalizing people.
Re:Well that's new (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree with your first paragraph.
As to the second paragraph, surveillance just by itself is obnoxious, and potentially very dangerous for a free society, but limited in various respects since there isn't necessarily a "do" tied to the "see". The truly awful point was the Rubicon crossed when the Supreme Court decided that Obamacare was constitutional, that the US Federal Government had the power to order individual citizens to do whatever it pleased. (Of course I'm not thrilled by the asset forfeiture programs, nor by prosecutors freezing all the funds of defendants leaving them unable to defend themselves either.)
But I agree with the overall point, there needs to be more discussion and thought put into Constitutional protections and how they apply with the changing conditions that result from changes in technology that makes things possible that were formerly impossible. But as part of that discussion there also needs to be consideration of how the protections play out in peace versus war, and the strange war we are in now. I'm not thrilled by the "uneven" way the courts have been approaching some of that.
Re:Well that's new (Score:3, Insightful)
To the best of my knowledge the Supreme Court doesn't have original jurisdiction for the case. That is, it can't act as a trial court, it has to be an appeals court. That means that this case has to start the way almost every other case does which is in a lower level federal court. The Supreme Court doesn't have unlimited jurisdiction.
Re:With a friends like Americans, who needs friend (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there are other countries practicing espionage against US interests it would be foolish in the extreme to de-fang their own intelligence services.
So how does that explain why the US needs to collect call information for most, if not all, American citizens? If the NSA wants to target foreign militaries for spying, fine. Enemy foreign governments, sure. That's what they're supposed to be doing. Domestic civilian spying, on the other hand, is inexcusable, even by your logic.
Re:So what is this about? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's another reason, which I'm surprised nobody on /. has stated, due to the types of people who should frequent a joint like this.
In the IT industry, analytical personality types are over-represented. This personality type values integrity and competence. It also abhors hypocrisy.
Everybody knows taht China and Russia are dirtbags when it comes to human rights. That's not news to anybody who has been awake for more than 5 minutes of the past 2 decades.
The US government repeatedly condemns both Russia and China for various human rights abuses, including spying on their own people.
The fact that the US government has been doing the exact same thing in secret, is both completely lacking in integrity, and about as hypocritical as you can get.
I'm sure there was at least a little bit of "I'll get this hypocritical bastards!" in Snowden's mind when he released this information, and I wouldn't blame him. But that's why releasing information on China's abuses is irrelevant at this point.
Re:As a Mexican living in Argentina... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think it's unusual for a small country to follow it's large neighbors closely you clearly haven't spent much time in Europe. Scandinavia and the Finns pay an inordinate amount of attention to Germany and Russia. Portugal pays a lot of attention to Spain, and Portugal isn't that much smaller then Spain. The Irish are renowned for their ability to denigrate anything English, while being more English then the goddamned English.
You're missing key points of the French timeline. While Snowden was still in HK they played the part of the wronged party. Then, on July 4th, Le Monde pointed out they were as bad as the US. The Morales incident didn't happen until the 5th.
As for Rousseff, I'm not knocking for encrypting her email. I'm knocking her for acting surprised that she needed to. Brazil is not some little country everyone ignores anymore. It's a real country, which actually tries to have influence in the world, which means that the people it's trying to influence have a damn good reason to spy on it.
As for spying on governments, it doesn't matter whether you think the US should have this info. It doesn't matter whether you think the Russian/Chinese/French/etc. should have this info. We will all hack your computers to get it. Your responses should be a) implement good security at all times, not just because somebody's having a spy-scandal, b) have spys/hacks of your own so you have some idea of what's compromised, and c) have a couple convincing-sounding offended speeches ready for when somebody gets caught spying on your ass because the hoi polloi don't understand spying is the default. You can bring morality into this conversation if you want, all you'll do is convince everyone that you are a) lying to cover up your extensive spy networks, or b) are an idiot. There is no c) nice Mexican boy goes to UN and abolishes spying.
As for the other NSA stuff, keep in mind that the entire point of the NSA is to spy on non-Americans. That is why it exists. I'd agree it would be very nice if they were more discriminating in their targets, but their job is not to be fair to Brazilians. That's what Brazilians have a government for. The NSA's job is to protect Americans. You can disagree with that purpose all you want, until your current country becomes a state nobody who can stop it will care.
As for bases in Latin countries, there are two. GitMo and a recent one in Brazil. If the Brazilians throw us out that won't be a tragedy for us, because we still have the Brits and the Brits own Ascension and the Falklands. If it's a choice between giving up SigInt on people who want to kill us and moving troops to the Falklands we will make that choice seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Technically this would anger one of our two allies in Latin America (Argentina would be pissed, Columbia wouldn't), but we only allied with Argentina to ensure they wouldn't attack the Falklands again, and they'd be suicidal to attack a US Base, so that wouldn't matter either.
That's actually the problem with electing anti-American Presidents who ally with the Cubans and Venezuelans. Since we'll never get cooperation from them anyway, there's no reason not to be mean to their people.
First Brazil, now Mexico, who's next ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who will be next ?
America is fast losing friends if this trend is continuing.
Not that long ago, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, North Koreans were painted as EVIL because America said so ~ and the world (mainly Europeans, plus many third world countries) generally subscribe to that view because the United States of America supposed to be trustworthy
Is America anymore trustworthy than the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, or North Koreans ?
Re:So what is this about? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess that's why he's keen on embarrassing the US rather than say Russia or China.
Well, since he worked for the USA and didn't work for Russa or China, I'd imagine the number of insider documents he has about the intelligence services of Russia and China is zero.
"But why doesn't Jeff Bezos talk about Google's operations, hmm? Why is it always Amazon that he wants us to think about? What is it that he has to hide? He's obviously a Google double agent, isn't he?"