Australia Spied On Indonesian President 213
mask.of.sanity writes "Australia tracked calls by Indonesia's president, documents leaked by defence contractor Edward Snowden reveal. The nation's top spy agency the Australian Signals Directorate tracked phone calls made and received on the mobile phone of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for 15 days in August 2009, and also tracked his wife and inner political circle. Indonesia was Australia's nearest and most important regional neighbour."
Who's on first? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I didn't spy, YOU did!"
"No I didn't, YOU did!"
"Well, okay, but I didn't spy on Bob."
Bob: "Oh yes you did!"
"Shit. Okay. we all fucking spied."
"yip"
Are we surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be far more surprised if Australia wasn't doing this. What's more there would be a real problem if they weren't.
In terms of potential conflict with another sovereign state Indonesia simply has to rank highly for Australia. It is close by, has a large military, and has a history of conflicts with Australia. The risk may be very very low, but like house insurance, the risks of your house burning to the ground are low but you still take out insurance.
TWO WEEKS OLD (Score:0, Insightful)
Slashdot, where the fastest people on the net read the slowest news.
Re:Please shoot this man. (Score:3, Insightful)
Killing him won't destroy his documents. It's certain he's got multiple backups with multiple people.
Why would the US government risk egg on their faces and a further highlight the degradation of American Ideals for nothing?
Here comes the downmods (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's the thing guys. This isn't a troll. It's a politically unpopular thing to say, but we're all thinking it. This is America. Good, bad, this is how democracy works. We ask the hard questions. The uncomfortable ones. You people ask and beg and bitch and plead with and about our government regarding surveillance, and how your free speech is being oppressed... but when someone pops the question everyone wants to talk about, you're gonna shut them down. I posted this knowing it would go straight to the depths of this website.
And the real kicker is; no government man in a black helicopter made any of you push the downmod button. You did that. So pro or anti snowden alike... you all got one thing in common: You're afraid to stand up and ask the hard questions. You'd rather let the government take care of things for you, and then bitch about the result. Well, you don't get that privilege if you can't sit down and reason out an argument for why, or why not, to do a hard thing. You don't get to complain about government officials riding roughshod over our rights, because if you're not gonna excercise them to begin with, then why do you even care?
We need to ask this question. This is how we've done business for a very long time. If the policy has changed, shouldn't we, the public, the people, be asking why it was done without our input? Whichever side of the issue you're on, or even no side at all, it should bother you just a bit that nobody anymore can ask the hard questions without being thought of as a "troll" or that it's "flamebait". Because it's neither. And to Godwin this whole thing, yeah, I'm gonna drop a Nazi reference now -- how do you think all those Jews got exterminated? They voted for Hitler. And then they stopped talking. They let the government do whatever it wanted, and as long as they got economic security and comfort, they didn't ask publicly what the cost was. But they knew. Yeah, they knew something was wrong. But they weren't gonna be the ones to talk.
Talking, people, is what democracy is about. If you don't talk, you don't have a democracy, except on paper. So talk people. Snowden lives. Snowden dies. Some other option. Step up to the microphone and say something. Or... or you can sit there and sneer, just like the german people did. But think about where it got them. Decisions need to be made. If you believe in democracy, you should make your opinion known -- because otherwise, the decision will be made without any of our input, and I promise you.. it'll be even worse than what I've put on the table.
Re:Mod this troll too (Score:5, Insightful)
You guys just don't get it. You're the very thing you claim to despise: The government comes and squishes free speech because it's unpopular... but then here you are, doing the same damn thing. The government isn't suppressing us: WE are suppressing us. We're plugging our ears and singing "Glory Glory Hallelujah."
You have the right to free speech, you don't have the right to force anyone to listen to it. You got downmoded, this isn't jackbooted thugs stepping on your throat. This is the collective public saying they think you're a moron and have no interest in listening to the drivel coming out of you. The paranoid schizophrenic hobo shouting on the street corner about the CIA using woodpeckers to control the russians has the right to say his nonsense. That doesn't mean I have to listen to it.
Re:Please shoot this man. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are quite a few reasons not to kill Snowden.
First and foremost: It's pointless. The cat's out of the bag and unless he's REALLY stupid, he's got some kind of dead man switch going. Like "if I vanish, publish that crap". Possibly he even informed the relevant places that this is the case. Or maybe he informed them and is just bluffing. And even if not, the damage is already done, there is precious little he could add to it anyway. At any rate, killing him won't accomplish anything beneficial for the US government. But there are some decisive drawbacks to it.
First, he's not in some insignificant backwater -stan country, he's in Russia. Remember that speck on the map? If not, ask your daddy, he'll tell you about them Russkies and how they used to be the other side of the nuke equilibrium. Also their special forces ain't what you're used to fighting. They're not some half trained religious nutjobs with outdated guns, they're top trained completely insane nutjobs with modern equipment who don't even ponder whether "collateral damage" could possibly have some kind of political impact. The kind of insane nuts that flood a theater full of hostages with nerve gas 'cause some terrorists might be inside. Not quite the kind of enemy you really want to fight over an insignificant nuisance.
And then of course there's the other reason: Public opinion. The US government already has a pretty bad rep, both with its citizens and with people abroad, but even with various governments that got pissed by having their cells and other forms of communication tapped and sniffed into. And then the US goes and kills the person who exposed it. Not only will it instantly raise the question why, and whether he had something even more dangerous to say, it also destroys the last form of goodwill the US still have. Technically, the US, and especially its government, would lose the last bit of credibility and trust it might have with some parts of the world.
In other words, the best thing the US can do right now is to simply wait for it to blow over and possibly start a war or two to distract the world.
Re:Please shoot this man. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong reaction. (Score:4, Insightful)
While the most frequent reaction here is "Well, duh!" (and I must admit it was my first reaction too) that's not the point.
The point is that my government is doing that, and I strongly disapprove of it. Your government is doing that and you (perhaps) strongly disapprove of it. If we have the luck to live in democracies, it's our fucking duty to do something about it.
Re:Are we surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
The interesting thing here is that Australia spied on behalf of NSA. Essentially this is the US spying by proxy. I hope that Australia got something good out of the deal because pissing of your neighbors can be pretty expensive.
Re:Please shoot this man. (Score:2, Insightful)
You and that cold fjord guy should totally hook up. You've got so much in common, I'm sure you'd hit it off straight away.
I am still not convinced that girlintraining and cold fjord are different people. Cold fjord seems to have a style of being 'lucid with possible poor citation' while girlintraining is longwinded, pulls reasonable sounding things straight out of her ass and tends to be far more eloquent.
Both push this similar mishmash of ideas, and just like the shill accounts are quickly modded up to +5 only to be modded back into oblivion the next day.
Re:well that's just redundant (Score:3, Insightful)
"Nothing Snowden has leaked has shown anything that hasn't being going on prior and since WWII."
Most of these programs began in 2011, the internet mass surveillance began in 2002, was stopped in 2005, and restarted in 2007. The technology to mass spy on everyone on the planet didn't exist even in 1995, let alone 1945, GCHQ's 'Tempora' only began in 2011 and is still waiting a law to make it legal. New Zealands mass surveillance officially only began in June this year.
These programs weren't even running during the cold war on the democratic side of the wall. Stasi and KGB had a go at it, but the technology wasn't there for true remote mass surveillance.
So no, it's new.
Re:Who's on first? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you didn't remember what that whole American Revolution was about, the US was supposed to be better. It was supposed to be about not having a bunch of unaccountable rulers and their lackeys monitoring and controlling society.
Snowden's revelations confirm that the Old World is as bad as expected, and that the New World is just as bad as the Old.