Snowdon is a dummy

@oralloy,

Try and use your brain, oral. For what possible reason would the US spy on Airbus?

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Try and use your brain, oral. For what possible reason would the US spy on Airbus?

Maybe certain individuals within those corporations were a threat.

Or maybe the US government was interested in knowing the capabilities of the various weapon systems produced.

Maybe the US government was interested in the capabilities of their non-weapons systems.

Maybe someone else was hacking them, and what the NSA was doing was helping to defend them.

Who knows. But whatever the reason was, it wasn't so the NSA could take information and hand it over to US companies.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

But whatever the reason was, it wasn't so the NSA could take information and hand it over to US companies.

Who says so, and with what evidence?

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Who says so, and with what evidence?

The very idea of doing such a thing is repugnant to Americans.

No self-respecting American would ever do such a thing (and the people who work for the NSA are very much self-respecting Americans).

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@oralloy,

LOL. If you say so... ;-)

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Edward Snowden is charged with stealing classified documents...and releasing them to persons unauthorized to have them.

I certainly hope he gets a fair trial...so if the charges are false, he can clear his name.

In the meantime, I do not think he is a dummy.

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@ehBeth,

I'm not the only one who thinks the Petraeus deal was hinky.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/04/23/slap-wrist-sentence-petraeus-reveals-leak-prosecution-double-standard

http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2015/04/27/war-on-whistleblowers-eileen-mcnamara

Quote:

How could U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema fail to consider that discrepancy on May 11 when Sterling is scheduled to be sentenced for leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter about a failed CIA attempt to feed faulty nuclear plans to Iran? The same Justice Department that gave Petraeus a pass is seeking a prison term as long as 25 years against Sterling.

That can’t be justice.

Sterling’s is the eighth case brought against a government official or contractor by a leak-obsessed Obama administration for revealing national security information to journalists. In all prior administrations there had only been three such cases.

Those hit the hardest by federal prosecutors revealed information it was in the American public’s interest to know. Snowden’s revelations led to an ongoing global conversation about privacy and government overreach that the president, himself, has said was warranted and long overdue.

Petraeus, on the other hand, had no higher motive than accommodating his secret lover in the preparation of her sycophantic biography of the married four-star general. According to the indictment, Petraeus gave Paula Broadwell eight black books containing “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings … and [his personal] discussions with the president of the United States.”

There are, indeed, consequences, just not for David Petraeus.

For this he gets probation while Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years for leaking Iraq war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden is in exile in Russia for letting us know the extent of National Security Agency’s surveillance operations and former CIA officer John Kiriakou is finishing up his 30-month prison sentence under house arrest for confirming the name of a covert agent that was never published?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/22/the-double-standard-for-david-petraeus.html

http://www.juancole.com/2015/04/standard-petraeus-whistleblowers.html

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-0305-petraeus-20150305-story.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-petraeus-standard-20150310-story.html

even these guys didn't think things were going to be fair

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/petraeus-keeps-spinning/

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

Petraeus is part of the elite within the elite, the heart of the system. Think Hunger Games.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Think Hunger Games.

?

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@ehBeth,

The movies. Never seen them?

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@oralloy,

Airbus will launch a complaint against unknown persons on suspicion of industrial espionage.

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@Walter Hinteler,

The German foreign intelligence had spied for years on French government, European Union officials and German and European businesses at the behest of the United States National Security Agency.

According to a report [a leaked German intelligence report, first published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper] German and US officials were said to have remained exempt because they were protected by a BND-NSA agreement signed in 2002. It said that in 2013 the NSA fed the BND with 690,000 phone numbers and 7.8 million IP search codes that it wanted put under surveillance.

It emerged that in 2008, Germany’s current conservative Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, was the chancellery official directly responsible for the BND. At that time, the report claimed, the BND informed the chancellery that it was assisting the NSA in its spying operation against Germany’s European partners. They obviously didn't report the industrial espionage - at least, it looks like until tonight.

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@Olivier5,

nope

I'm pretty much a documentary/Independent Film kinda person.

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@Walter Hinteler,

This is really sad. You can't trust anyone anymore. I mean, we knew that the US and Brits were spying of the rest of us but now also the Germans.

European Union, anyone?

Also yesterday we heard on TV that Lufthansa was spying on its employees's private life and political orientations... WTF?

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@ehBeth,

I'm an avid follower of anything sci-fiesque. Dystopias in particular are interesting for what they say about society. More and more of the sci-fi movies coming from Hollywood nowadays are about social inequality gone mad, the 1% vs the 99%, etc.

Hunger Games is about a future society where filthy rich people living in "the Capitol" subdue their people living in misery and hunger by way of threats and brutal TV games. The high society in the Capitol invests a lot in pretense, and is totally detached from the poor -- it forms another reality, inaccessible to the plebians, almost divine.

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Yeah...don't want any of that favoritism.

I hope Edward Snowden gets a fair and impartial trial on the charges he faces.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Also yesterday we heard on TV that Lufthansa was spying on its employees's private life and political orientations... WTF?

If you refer to what happened in France at the French Lufthansa branch - that has been known since November 2013.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Oh so that wasn't corporate wide, but just by the French branch?

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@Olivier5,

Oui.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Now it has been said that the BND spied for NSA on Austria as well- the Federal Prosecution Office is investigating: treason, poltical and industrial espionage.

According to the latest information, the BND was "schooled" by the GCHQ to get phone and internet data (for the British) from the telekom's data central in Frankfurt: in return, the British service wanted to give them access to their data. The third partner in the project, called "Monkeyshoulder, should have been NSA. It was stopped after a year by the new president of the BND.

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Snowdon is a dummy

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