Bolivia Initiates Diplomatic Action With France Over Portrayal In Fictional Video Game

from the un-bolivia-ble dept

There's been something of a trend recently in which the digital realm of video games have begun penetrating reality. This has taken several forms, from many countries attempting to dress up their real world military capabilities using video game footage, to infractions within the gaming realm resulting in real world criminal charges. This has come to be in part because gaming has become a dominant form of entertainment for so much of the population and in part because of how realistic games have become.

But neither seems to be much of a factor in what I think is a first: Bolivia has filed a dipolomatic complaint with France in response to the country's fictionalized portrayal in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

The Bolivian government has filed a formal complaint with the French embassy about a video game produced by a French company that portrays the South American country as an area controlled by drug traffickers, authorities said. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Interior Minister Carlos Romero said Bolivia had delivered a letter to the French ambassador and asked that the French government intervene, adding that Bolivia reserved the right to take legal action.

"We have the standing to do it (take legal action), but at first we prefer to go the route of diplomatic negotiation," Romero said.

Now, the setting for the game is a fictionalized version of Bolivia where, contrary to reality, large swaths of the country are controlled by Mexican drug cartels that are wreaking all manner of havoc over the land. The key part of that would be that it's fictional. As in not mirroring reality. You know, such as pretty much every other work of fictional art that has ever been created.

Oh, also, Ubisoft chose Bolivia for the setting specifically because of how much it appreciated the beauty of the country.

In a statement to Reuters on Thursday, Ubisoft said the game is "a work of fiction" and that Bolivia was chosen as the background for the game because of its "magnificent landscapes and rich culture."

"While the game's premise imagines a different reality than the one that exists in Bolivia today, we do hope that the in-game world comes close to representing the country's beautiful topography," Ubisoft said.

I don't know what the workload of the Bolivian diplomatic corps looks like, and I frankly don't care. There simply must be more relevant work to do than shaking a diplomatic fist against the home country of a video game company over an artistic work of fiction. I have no idea what Bolivia's end-game was in trying to get France to intervene in Ubisoft's work, but I'm sure it wasn't the actual outcome, which is to have Bolivia look both petty and silly, as well as hostile to art and free speech.

I'm not sure what standing Bolivia thinks it actually has to do anything about this, but I'm fairly certain that such standing is every bit as fictional as the Bolivia from the game.

Filed Under: bolivia, diplomacy, france, ghost recon wildlands
Companies: ubisoft

How 'Just Metadata' Helped Ruin A Career Diplomat's Life

from the silent-killer dept

Those defending bulk domestic surveillance have dismissively referred to the take as "just metadata." To many people, this likely seems acceptable. It's nothing but call records... or so it often seems. But "just metadata" is actually surveillance state slang for almost anything that can be obtained without a warrant or subpoena -- which includes anything the government considers to be a "third party record," like financial transactions and historical cell site location data.

"Just metadata" is actually a dangerous thing when left in the hands of intelligence agencies. It's what turned State Department advisor Robin Raphel's diplomatic work with Pakistani officials into a severely misguided -- and severely intrusive -- espionage investigation. A series of blundering investigations into people who had done nothing wrong resulted in the DOJ changing its investigative guidelines, but not before Raphel's house was raided (twice) by the FBI and her reputation severely damaged.

In the end, the government had nothing left of its espionage investigation but a single allegation that Raphel kept classified documents at her home. (Not that she shared them with anyone, unlike General Petraeus, who suffered a mild wrist slap and was temporarily considered for a Trump cabinet position.) In the beginning, though, it was all "just metadata."

In February 2013, according to law-enforcement officials, the FBI received information that made its agents think Raphel might be a Pakistani mole.

The tip came in the form of intercepted communications that suggested Raphel had shared sensitive inside information without authorization. Two officials said this included information collected on wiretaps of Pakistani officials in the U.S.

[...]

Investigators began what they call “circling the target,” which means examining the parts of Raphel’s life they could explore without subpoenas or warrants.

[...]

One of the first things they looked at was her “metadata”—the electronic traces of who she called or emailed, and also when and for how long. Her metadata showed she was in frequent contact with a host of Pakistan officials that didn’t seem to match what the FBI believed was her rank and role.

The reason Raphel worked outside of her "rank and role" was because staying within the system meant dealing only with Pakistani officials who would be unable or unwilling to part with useful information. Raphel had plenty of experience in dealing with Pakistan's often-volatile relationship with the US -- something that had been strained even further by President George W. Bush's anti-nuke sanctions and President Obama's increasing reliance on drone strikes, including one that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops, rather than the target the US was seeking.

Raphel may have operated outside of her "rank and role," but she was still aligned with the US's goals, rather than pursuing her own agenda. Apparently, nearly four decades of service to the US government meant nothing. Spurred on by the Snowden leaks, the FBI had a renewed interest in hunting down potential "threats." This is what moved the investigation from mere metadata to something far more intrusive.

After months of circling the target, FBI supervisors decided it was time to delve deeper. To monitor Raphel’s private conversations with Lodhi and other contacts on Skype, the FBI obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—a decision approved at the highest levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.

The FBI used these communications to build a case against Raphel. It still had nothing that showed criminal intent or actually anything resembling wrongdoing. But it did -- with its limited experience in dealing with diplomatic targets -- feel something wasn't quite right. It had lots of "smoke" but no "smoking gun," according to a former FBI official. It dumped a bunch of "smoke" into an affidavit and secured a "sneak and peek" warrant for Raphel's home. After an extensive search, it managed to locate a 20-year-old file related to Raphel's "Diplomatic Security" investigation. Something of little consequence to anyone -- especially this far removed from its originating date -- was used to justify the FBI's more intrusive search later, one that resulted in Raphel's electronic devices and computers being seized.

The search also led to perhaps the most incongruous question Raphel had ever been asked.

Two FBI agents approached her, their faces stony. “Do you know any foreigners?” they asked.

Raphel’s jaw dropped. She had served as a diplomat in six capitals on four continents. She had been an ambassador, and the State Department’s assistant secretary for South Asian affairs. Knowing foreigners had been her job.

“Of course,” she responded, “Tons…Hundreds.”

This was followed by more FBI activity that bore the unmistakable imprint of recently-installed director James Comey. The FBI routed its inquiries with the State Department to someone who wouldn't talk to anyone else about its actions. It forbade the State Department from informing Raphel's coworkers why she wouldn't be returning to work while simultaneously leaking news of the investigation to the New York Times.

The FBI finally began talking to other State Department officials and employees, most of whom felt they had to explain how diplomacy actually worked. They didn't like what they saw in the FBI's "mole-hunting" effort.

At times, Raphel’s colleagues pushed back—warning the FBI that their investigation risked “criminalizing diplomacy,” according to a former official who was briefed on the interviews.

The interviews undercut the FBI's narrative, but it did nothing to slow the agency's roll towards an indictment. The DOJ, however, seemed less sure of the merits of a prosecution. But it also did little to head the FBI off. Meanwhile, Raphel not only lost her career but also her life savings.

Raphel heard nothing for months from the FBI. She had already spent about $100,000 on legal fees, which she paid by tapping into her savings, but the bills were piling up. Jones set up a legal-defense fund and 103 of Raphel’s friends and colleagues, mostly from the State Department, donated nearly $122,000.

The 20-year-old document on which the prosecution hinged could very well have been declassified while the government pursued a conviction, leaving it with nothing but thousands of taxpayer dollars spent and the embarrassment of being unable to determine the difference between diplomatic activity in volatile outposts from actual espionage.

The charges were finally dropped in March of this year. To date, Raphel's security clearance is still revoked and her career as a diplomat is effectively over. This is what "just metadata" -- along with a newfound enthusiasm for hunting down "insider threats" -- can do to a person who spent nearly 40 years serving their country.

Filed Under: diplomacy, espionage, fbi, just metadata, metadata, pakistan, robin raphel, state department

How The CIA's Torture Program Is Destroying The Key Foreign Power The US Had: The Moral High Ground

from the depressing dept

Over a year ago, we wrote about a wonderful piece in Foreign Affairs by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, noting that the real "danger" of the Snowden and Manning revelations was that it effectively killed off the US's ability to use hypocrisy as a policy tool. Here was the key bit (though the whole article is worth reading):

The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.

Few U.S. officials think of their ability to act hypocritically as a key strategic resource. Indeed, one of the reasons American hypocrisy is so effective is that it stems from sincerity: most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. Yet as the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words, it will face increasingly difficult choices -- and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches.

The argument that Farrell and Finnemore made was that the revelations that came about because of the whistleblowing by Snowden and Manning made it such that this hypocrisy didn't function as well, because it made it much easier for others to simply call bullshit.

Now, a new article at Foreign Policy, by Kristin Lord, takes this argument even further, by looking at the CIA torture program and how it has totally undermined America's "soft power" in diplomacy. Lord, thankfully, makes it quite clear that the problem here is the CIA's program and not (as some have tried to argue) the release of the report about the program:

But the fault lies not with those who released the report, as some critics argue, but with those who permitted and perpetrated acts of torture, those who lied about it to America’s elected representatives, and those who willfully kept the president and senior members of the Bush administration in the dark. Their actions undermined not only American values, but also American influence and national security interests. In the words of a former prisoner of war, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the actions laid out in the Senate report “stained our national honor” and “did much harm and little practical good.”

But the key point of Lord's article, like the earlier one by Farrell and Finnemore, is that the US has long relied on its "soft power strategy" of convincing others to do things because it's "the right thing to do." The US has long presented itself as holding a higher moral ground. However, as Lord points out, the soft power the US uses goes beyond just the moral high ground:

While morality is a normative system of values and principles that guides just behavior, soft power is ultimately about influence. As Joseph Nye, the former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has argued, there are many different ways to affect the behavior of others. One can coerce with threats. One can induce with incentives. Or one can exercise the power of attraction, co-opting others who want the same things you want through the legitimacy of your policies and the values upon which they’re founded. The latter is called soft power.

Moral authority facilitates soft power, but so do relationships, shared values, and interlinking interests. Given the ideological component of so many of the national security threats that face the United States going forward — and the inability of any one country to meet them alone — soft power can be an important part of the strategy to address these threats. But Americans will need to cultivate it.

As the article makes clear, it seems like US leaders don't seem to recognize just how important the US's "soft power" is -- and how fragile it might be in the wake of the revelations of the past couple of years. What Farrell and Finnemore described as the power of American hypocrisy is becoming increasingly clear, making it an increasingly less effective diplomatic tool. And others are seizing on this.

Lord's piece then goes into a detailed explanation of what the US needs to do if it wishes to continue exercising "soft power" to influence the world. And part of that is recognizing just how badly the US has screwed up over the past decade and a half (mostly in response to 9/11):

First, it has to “walk the walk,” aligning actions and values, rhetoric and deeds. This is understandably difficult in a country with complex and wide-ranging foreign policy interests, but the United States could do better in one key respect: weighing potential damage to America’s moral authority when considering policy options. Such considerations are often trumped, and not without cause. Policymakers are regularly forced to choose from a series of bad options, and when they do, clear and short-term consequences weigh more heavily than diffuse costs to notions like reputation. If the United States is serious about countering challenges to its national security interests and democratic ideals, however, this must change. Perceptions that the United States does not live up to its own values fundamentally undermine American power and inhibit the country’s ability to defend not just its own interests, but also universal standards of what is right and just. They undermine America’s ability to defend the time-proven value of the moral high ground, and they empower cynical actors eager to seize the propaganda advantage.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening. Rather than using the release of the Snowden documents or the CIA terror report as a true chance to reflect, to admit where things went wrong, and to show a real commitment to doing better in the future and being transparent about it, it has instead resulted in typical partisan bickering, ridiculous and counterproductive defenses of harmful surveillance and torture, and very little actual introspection. It is this response that only helps perpetuate the continuing and rapid deflation of any moral high ground that the US had to stand on.

The basic stated values of the US are something worth spreading and perpetuating. But the only way you can legitimately do that is to admit when the country has strayed from those values, and that means a true and honest accounting of where things went wrong, along with a transparent and concrete plan for dealing with those failings and making sure they don't happen again. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening, and many in power don't seem to understand the damages this is doing to the US's power around the globe.

Filed Under: cia, cia torture, diplomacy, hypocrisy, moral high ground, soft power, torture

DOJ Proposal Would Let FBI Hack Into Computers Overseas With Little Oversight

from the freedom?-what-freedom? dept

Ahmed Ghappour, over at JustSecurity, alerts us to a rather frightening proposal from the Justice Department that would enable law enforcement to hack into the computers of people who are trying to be anonymous online. At issue is that current rules basically would extend the powers granted for terrorism investigations to everyday criminal investigations, concerning specifically the DOJ/FBI's ability to hack into computers. In the past, judges could issue warrants for such computer hacking if the target was known to be located in the same district. But the proposed change would wipe out that limitation, and basically give the DOJ/FBI the power to get approval for hacking into a much broader range of computers. Without the geographical limitation, there's concern about just how broadly this new power would be (ab)used:

The DOJ proposal will result in significant departures from the FBI’s customary practice abroad: overseas cyber operations will be unilateral and invasive; they will not be limited to matters of national security; nor will they be executed with the consent of the host country, or any meaningful coordination with the Department of State or other relevant agency.

Under the DOJ’s proposal, unilateral state action will be the rule, not the exception, in the event an anonymous target “prove[s] to be outside the United States.” The reason is simple: without knowing the target location before the fact, there is no way to provide notice (or obtain consent from) a host country until after its sovereignty has been encroached.

Without advanced knowledge of the host country, law enforcement will not be able to adequately avail itself to protocols currently in place to facilitate foreign relations. For example, the FBI will not be able to coordinate with the Department of State before launching a Network Investigative Technique. This puts the U.S. in a position where a law enforcement entity encroaches on the territorial sovereignty of foreign states without coordination with the agency in charge of its foreign relations.

In short, every new criminal investigation by the FBI will open up the possibility of a diplomatic nightmare and embarrassment. But, really, who cares when there are criminals to go after, right?

When a state’s sovereignty is encroached upon, its response depends on the nature and intensity of the encroachment. In the context of cyberspace, states (including the United States) have asserted sovereignty over their cyber infrastructure, despite the fact that cyberspace as a whole, much like the high seas or outer space, is considered a “global common” under international law.

[....] Given the public nature of the U.S. criminal justice system, it is hard to see how the FBI will avoid risk of prosecution (similar to that in the Chelyabinsk incident) if the DOJ proposal is approved.

The Chelyabinsk incident refers to involved Russia filing criminal hacking charges against the FBI for the FBI logging into a Russian server, seeking evidence against some Russian hackers.

And, of course, there are other issues with the proposal as well -- as you'd expect any time you see law enforcement seek to move anti-terrorism tools over to standard crime-fighting. For example, the current proposal could authorize questionable hacking techniques by the FBI. Ghappour suggests that if the DOJ really wishes to push forward with such a proposal, it needs to clearly limit the techniques that are allowed:

The Rule should not authorize drive-by-downloads that infect every computer that associates with a particular webpage, the use of weaponized software exploits in order to establish “remote access” of a target computer, or deployment methods that risk indiscriminately infecting computer systems along the way to the target. Nor should the Rule authorize a “search” method that requires taking control of peripheral devices (such as a camera or microphone).

There are other suggestions, of course. As it stands, the proposed amendment allows the FBI to use a wide array of invasive (and potentially destructive) hacking techniques where it may not be necessary to do so, against a broad pool of potential targets that could be located virtually anywhere.

Of course, why would the DOJ ever limit itself when it has the chance to get access to an even more powerful tool for hacking into anyone's computers?

Filed Under: anonymity, cooperation, diplomacy, doj, fbi, hacking, overseas, tor

Germany's Latest Half-Hearted Response To Snowden's Revelations: Asking Officially For The Names Of All Spies Working At Foreign Embassies

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Germany has had perhaps the hardest time coming to terms with Edward Snowden's revelations of massive spying by the US and its Five Eyes allies. On the one hand, Germans are acutely sensitive to surveillance because of their country's recent history, giving rise to some of the strongest public reactions against US spying amongst any nation. On the other hand, the German government has doubtless benefitted from information gathered by the US, and is therefore reluctant to complain too much about the NSA's activities.

This has led to a curious series of feeble protestations and largely symbolic actions. Now the German government has come up with another weird idea: asking every foreign country to provide a list of their spies that are operating from embassies within Germany:

German newsmagazine Der Spiegel said that the German Foreign Office has been systematically contacting consular authorities from every foreign nation located in Germany. In each case, the foreign consular representatives have been issued formal requests to release "through official diplomatic channels" an exhaustive list of names of their intelligence operatives operating in Germany under diplomatic cover.

Of course, there's no way of knowing whether a country has fully complied with that request, since by definition the spies are currently secret. Well, most of them are; as the post on Intelnews.org quoted above points out:

A small number of these intelligence officers voluntarily make their presence known to the corresponding intelligence agency of their host country, and are thus officially declared and accredited with the government of the host nation. They typically act as points-of-contact between the embassy and the intelligence agency of the host nation on issues of common concern requiring cross-country collaboration or coordination. But the vast majority of intelligence personnel stationed at a foreign embassy or consulate operate without the official knowledge or consent of the host country. Governments generally accept this as a tacit rule in international intelligence work, which is why Berlin's move is seen as highly unusual.

I imagine many countries will simply add a few more names to the list of intelligence officers that they officially acknowledge as a token measure of compliance, and will then go back to spying with the rest (or just bring in some new ones that they don't declare.) All-in-all, this seems yet another move designed to prove to German citizens that their government is "taking things seriously", and "doing something", while at the same time ensuring that the "something" is largely ineffectual and doesn't harm their relationship with the US.

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Filed Under: diplomacy, ed snowden, espionage, germany, spies

USTR's Special 301 List Of 'Naughty' Countries Without Strong Enough Patent And Copyright Laws Is A Complete Joke

from the as-if-we-didn't-know-that dept

We've talked plenty of times about what a complete joke the USTR's Special 301 report is. It's supposedly a "listing" of "naughty" countries who don't protect intellectual property enough for the US's tastes. However, as we've noted, there is no methodology behind it: a bunch of industry lobbyists submit lists of what countries they don't like to the USTR, the USTR talks to various diplomats, basically rewrites the list to "shame" certain countries, and releases the list. Canada, which has been put on the list for years despite having stricter copyright laws than the US, has officially stated that it simply does not accept the Special 301 findings as legitimate. Chile did the same thing a year ago. As I've mentioned before, at a conference a few years ago, I even saw the then head of the US Copyright Office mock the Special 301 report as a widely recognized joke.

Unfortunately, however, for countries who are heavily reliant on good relations with the United States, being on "the naughty" list is often an effective way to force them to jump through hoops to make Big Pharma or Hollywood happy. As we've discussed, Spain has been pressured into changing its copyright laws via the 301 list multiple times.

George Washington PhD student Gabriel Michael has decided to dig deep into the Special 301 Report and its history to determine if there's any point to it at all, and his initial results suggest that the process is even more of a joke than initially suspected. He notes that there's no real "enforcement" mechanism (at least not one that the US seems willing to use). He also notes that the US is incredibly hypocritical about it. While the Special 301 report mostly complains that other countries don't have enough intellectual property protection, at other times it goes the other way, like when it's the kind of IP that the US government doesn't like (geographical indicators or GI).

...by any reasonably objective standard, the European Union offers very high levels of IP protection. Yet as recently as 2006, Special 301 listed the European Union on its watch list, citing “concerns” about the EU’s geographical indication (GI) regime. Given that GIs are a form of intellectual property, USTR essentially placed the EU on its watch list for offering too much IP—or, if you prefer, the wrong kind of IP. Interestingly, this is a tacit admission by the U.S. that at least some kinds of IP can act as trade barriers.

In researching the effectiveness of the Special 301, Michael notes that supporters of the effort point to a study done in the International Trade Journal called "Special 301 and Royalty Receipts from U.S. Trade Partners" by David Riker, which argued that the Special 301 is effective, because there's a pretty big increase ($5.4 billion annually) in US royalty receipts from countries after being placed on the list. Michael sets out to replicate Riker's results and discovers very, very different results, in part because Riker made some notable errors (claiming Hong Kong was on the priority list, when it wasn't). Riker also only looked at some of the countries in the Special 301 Report. Michael looked at what happened when you viewed all of them, and he also had two more years of data to research. In the end, Michael finds that Riker's conclusions are simply not supported by the data.

To summarize, while I was able to replicate Riker’s results, simply including additional years of data causes his findings of significance to disappear. Likewise, even in his original dataset and models, if Watch List designations are included, the findings of significance disappear.

Ultimately, these results lead me to conclude that Riker’s 2012 article is both theoretically and empirically flawed. It cannot support the conclusion that Special 301 designations are correlated with increased IP royalties from designated countries in subsequent years.

In another post, Michael points out the obvious: the Special 301 list is never actually about intellectual property protections, but about political considerations. He notes that countries that are considered to have stronger IP protection (using the Park-Ginarte Index) are often listed on the Special 301 Report, while others with less protection are not. He even looks at the average of countries on the list and off, and finds that those on the list have higher protection than those off the list: Given that, Michael looked at the leaked Wikileaks State Department cables, where there are a bunch discussing the Special 301, and quickly notes that it's pretty clear that political considerations were much more important than actual concerns about intellectual property conditions. In short, the Special 301 is just a way to diplomatically slap a country with whom we're having other political issues, in order to give the US leverage on some political point. He quotes State Department cables concerning Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia and Norway showing how it's much more about politics.

At some point, it needs to be asked why we have the Special 301 setup at all. It seems designed mainly to piss off other countries, while making Hollywood and Big Pharma feel good. It doesn't seem to do anything beneficial at all.

Filed Under: copyright, diplomacy, evidence, impact, intellectual property, patents, politics, special 301, ustr

Actual Former Government Official Makes Totally Ridiculous Argument That Snowden's 'Harms' Are That Other Countries Are Angry

from the this-person-worked-in-our-government? dept

Sometimes you have to wonder about people who hold government positions and the absolutely ludicrous statements they make. Following Ed Snowden's big NBC interview, NBC apparently asked former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to respond to Snowden's pretty convincing claims that all the hand-wringing about "harms" he caused have no basis in fact. In the interview, Snowden points out, accurately, that no one has yet been able to show a single individual harmed by the revelations. McFaul then makes what may be the single dumbest statement we've heard to date on this whole debate, arguing that the "harm" is that other countries now trust us less -- and that this is somehow Snowden's fault, rather than, you know, the fault of the NSA which is doing the surveillance:

But Michael McFaul, who left the ambassadorship earlier this year to teach at Stanford University, said that the revelations had damaged American diplomatic relationships with friendly countries who were upset by National Security Agency surveillance.

“That’s damage to the United States,” McFaul said. “If you’re a patriot, you don’t want to damage our relationships with our allies.”

Let me get this straight. Based on this line of thinking, we'd actually all be better off if the US media were entirely being censored and/or silent about Putin's actions in Crimea and Ukraine (and Russia), because knowing what he's doing probably makes the US trust Russia less. I'd think McFaul would recognize how silly that argument is in that context, and yet he seems to make it with the US. Similarly, we're better off not knowing about other countries spying on us?

Hell, earlier this week, we wrote about former CIA director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealing that our allies, the French, are almost as sophisticated as the Chinese in hacking the computers of American businessmen. Based on McFaul's ridiculous logic, Gates is no patriot and has "damaged diplomatic relationships with friendly countries" because he revealed questionable activities of the French intelligence agency.

It is downright idiotic to suggest that the revealing of misdeeds is the reason for any harm, rather than the misdeeds themselves. And yet this guy was our leading ambassador to Russia and is now a Stanford professor. And he doesn't seem to understand the difference between wrongdoing and revealing wrongdoing. Incredible. And disturbing.

Filed Under: diplomacy, ed snowden, harm, michael mcfaul, nsa, russia, surveillance

German Government Blocks Ed Snowden From Testifying Before Parliament So As Not To Upset The US

from the we-delicate-flowers dept

A month ago, we wrote about how the German Parliament was opening hearings in the NSA's surveillance of German citizens (including Chancellor Angela Merkel) and that some of the lawmakers wanted Ed Snowden to testify (either in person, or providing evidence remotely). At the time, it was noted that "analysts believe Merkel’s government will find a way to sidestep such a move." And, indeed, that's exactly what's happened. The German government has blocked any such testimony for fear of upsetting the American government.

In a letter to members of a parliamentary committee obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung, government officials say a personal invitation for the US whistleblower would "run counter to the political interests of the Federal Republic", and "put a grave and permanent strain" on US-German relations.

Because the American government is apparently so insecure that it can't handle Ed Snowden testifying to the German Parliament? Really? Sometimes, when you look at world diplomacy, it looks like a bunch of elementary school kids. What happened to mature adults who can disagree about things without it causing an international incident?

Apparently, the Green Party is looking to challenge this decision, but it seems unlikely to change.

Filed Under: angela merkel, diplomacy, ed snowden, germany, nsa, surveillance

'Bay Of Tweets Invasion' Legitimizes Nearly Every Crackpot Anti-US Claim From Dictators Around The Globe

from the a-complete-disaster dept

Last week, we wrote about the Associated Press's Hollywood script-like story of how USAID, who is not supposed to be engaged in intelligence activities, apparently set up a Cuban version of Twitter, called ZunZuneo, designed to give more Cubans a way to communicate with each other -- but also to foment a pro-democracy movement and spy on certain Cubans. While the concept of encouraging democracy and open communications may be good, the fact that it was done via a series of secretive shell companies and that it was used for spying and subversive anti-government efforts is just incredibly stupid. As we noted in our original piece on it, this would likely create huge headaches around the globe for legitimate US humanitarian efforts, because foreign governments will now point to this story as a reason to distrust USAID and pretty much any other US activities.

In fact, the impact is being seen already. Remember how we'd just been discussing Turkey's latest attempt to ban Twitter? Zeynep Tufecki explains how this latest news has played right into the hands of Turkey's Prime Minister, noting that the Twitter ban was actually a calculated strategy to appeal to the fears of lower- and middle-class Turks that Twitter was part of an American plot to foment unrest. To have the ZunZuneo story come out days later simply serves to better confirm that plot:

Until now, though, in trying to paint their online critics as “foreign agents,” these governments were grasping at straws. For example, lacking a better model, Ankara’s AKP mayor, Melih Gokcek, who became the Turkish government’s most vocal spokesperson during the Gezi protests, kept referring to OTPOR — the small, insignificant and defunct Serbian activist organization that received USAID funding in the 1990s — as supposedly the power behind all global protests, including Gezi.

I suspect there will be no more grasping at straws after ZunZeneo. Secretly funded by the U.S. government? Check. Aimed for regime change? Check. Collected information from unsuspecting users for political purposes? Check. Tried clumsily to hide its tracks? Check. The “Cuban Twitter” was a dictator’s fever dream made real.

Meanwhile, what seemed like wacky conspiracy theories a month ago concerning USAID's efforts in Ukraine to overthrow the government there, suddenly seem more legitimate. In fact, most of the claims do appear to be nothing more than crazy conspiracy theories, but prior to the ZunZuneo story coming out, most people would have assumed that that, too, was a crazy conspiracy theory. And that's the huge problem here. Even if most of what USAID does is really important and valuable work for truly noble purposes, the ZunZuneo story undermines all of that, by making any conspiracy story seem legit. Last year, people thought Bolivian President Evo Morales was crazy for expelling USAID, claiming that it was seeking to "conspire against" the Bolivian government. Suddenly it's tough to assume that his claims weren't accurate. Similarly, with this story, there are suddenly additional stories coming out of highly questionable activities by USAID, which often look quite a lot like intelligence activities to undermine foreign governments.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald is reporting that the ZunZuneo story is just a drop in the bucket of US propaganda efforts around the globe.

These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

And, once again, even if the actual impact of these programs is limited, the mere perception that the US government is engaged in these kinds of practices helps push along pretty much any conspiracy theory about US government involvement, no matter how wacky or ridiculous. So, in a bumbling effort to spread a pro-US, pro-democracy message, USAID appears to have done the exact opposite, and handed crackpot authoritarian dictators ever more ammunition to crack down on actual American humanitarian aid and tools for communication.

Filed Under: conspiracy, development, diplomacy, usaid