On 11/06/13 16:05, Stefan Arentz wrote:
I am a bit sad it is so US centric.
Initially I, too, was bemused at how US-centric it seemed to be, not just because this has been directly linked to activities by GCHQ which affect me as a British citizen.
Upon closer reading of the letter, and a reinterpretation of what I see to be the very badly written first sentence: "which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States" (I now take that to mean the spying of the NSA in the US of the Internet activity of people, rather than the spying of the Internet activity of people residing in the US), it seems to address the concerns of all people.
I understand it is mainly targeted at the NSA and the warrantless spying on US citizens
It's partially targeted at that, but also at whatever PRISM is (nobody seems quite sure what it is: is it a backdoor in the services mentioned? is it a method of requesting information from the services by court order? is it a method of filtering packets, from wiretaps, to those services for further inspection?) without explicitly mentioning it. Confusingly, the revelations about wiretaps on Verizon customers and PRISM were pretty close together, and many news outlets have been confusing the two.
Are other countries going to be considered for this campaign? S. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
So, to get to my point, it should concern you as a non-US citizen because a ridiculous amount of traffic travels through the US from non-US citizens, particularly to the services mentioned in the leaked slides. And, because there is real evidence that this information has been shared with foreign intelligence agencies (like GCHQ, as I mentioned earlier), possibly circumventing the judicial process in those countries (in a 'you spy on our citizens and we'll spy on yours' sort-of way).
Furthermore, the letter is being sent to the US Congress because they, as far as I am aware, are the people who have (or at least should have) oversight on the NSA, and the power to demand that they stop infringing on our civil liberties.
Then again, this is just my reading of the letter and accompanying blogpost. It's entirely possible I could have got completely the wrong end of the stick.
~Leo _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
