How surveillance works:
See also: NSA’s Surveillance Operations the Envy of Former Stasi Commander
[T]he US monitors Germany as closely as it does China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daily, an average of 20 million telephone connections and 10 million internet transactions are collected by the NSA. This is ten times as many telephone connections as the NSA monitors for France, e.g.Link. Let's review the bidding. We go easy on "nice" countries like New Zealand and Canada. We go harder on "not-nice" countries like Saudi Arabia and China. Germany--well, old-fashioned Germany was "nice" enough (the ex-Nazis were mostly reformed). But then they took in the East Germany and those East Germans used to run the Stas--oh, right.
The NSA does not spy in the same way on the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, who are class 2 partners and therefore are not targets. Germany, the leaked document says, is only a class 3 partner and therefore is also considered a target.
See also: NSA’s Surveillance Operations the Envy of Former Stasi Commander
2 comments:
Just wondering – do you notice a correlation between the percentage of population that is likely to speak English and the degree to which we spy on that population?
I mean, of course we spy on furrin' countries. If they don't want to be spied on, why don't they speak the same language as good people?
Very crankily yours,
The New York Crank
The main reason the NSA doesn't spy on New Zealand is that they have a very robust intelligence sharing arrangement with our GCSB so they don't need to spy on us personally.
I suspect this is also true for the other countries listed as being class 2.
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