JI questioned: > Why is this even newsworthy? It's the NSA's responsibility to provide > sigint and comint. Furthermore, if the delegates are not US citizens, > and at least one end of the communication is outside the US, they are > not even breaking any laws in doing so.
If the US found a similar memo from the French government, you can be sure it would be published immediately as newsworthy. At least in the lapdog US press. NSA's instructions to find tidbits usable to sway Security Council members were newsworthy in the UK, because the UK government is warmongering to suck up to the US, while the UK populace is opposed to the war. So "dirty tricks" being played by the US and UK governments to impose their will on the world are interesting to the UK populace. Most people regard wiretapping their opponents as an evil act, violative of privacy norms. Some people condone it in international relations on self-defense grounds; if your own life is threatened, then you gouge the other guy's eyes out, or chop off his hand, despite being revolted by doing that in normal life. But when wiretapping is used to overturn a legitimate sovereign government, which poses no obvious threat, then wiretapping is not justifiable on self-defense grounds. Civilized morality, rather than brute survival, becomes the defining standard. And the US is violating the standards of civilized morality by wiretapping its opponents (and its allies and neutrals) in an attempt to start a war of aggression. > If the delegations can't be bothered to protect their own > communications, it's their tough luck if they get intercepted. Tell me, how well have the cypherpunks done, after a decade, at protecting their own communications? We're still mostly talking in the clear, as far as I can tell. And no cypherpunk, to my knowledge, is well defended against the kinds of miniature bug that would routinely be planted in every suit jacket laundered anywhere near the UN Building. What was most interesting for me about that NSA message was that it said they needed to add "surge capacity" on some countries on the Security Council. Notably absent from the list was Mexico, which is on the Security Council. I guess NSA is already monitoring Mexican diplomatic communications so well that they didn't need to add any capacity. John PS: I spent a few weeks in Mexico last month. The majority of Mexicans want peace, as does their populist leader. Spain tried to sway Mexican president Vicente Fox from the peace position, and got nowhere. People who have recently experienced war first-hand tend to view it as more of a last resort, compared to people who have only experienced war via TV, videogames, and economic downturns. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]