

How the NSA could stop sucking and be awesome instead - hamburglar
http://teddziuba.com/post/58735980543

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jacquesm
What is it that makes US citizens so gung ho on spying on _other_ countries
but get all upset when they are being spied on?

Why should it be ok to have warrant-less surveillance of all the people in
Spain (for example) but Texas is right out?

By seeing the rest of the world as the enemy and by not respecting the rights
(as enshrined in the privacy directives of the various nations) of every
citizen of every other country on the planet the US is placing itself in a
position where sooner or later the rest of the world will start to see it as
the enemy.

Maybe that's the goal, I don't know anything about what goes on behind the
scenes other than what's leaked but I think this is a very bad development
that could backfire.

America is fast losing its benevolent and 'on our side' image. It may not be
all too visible from the other side of the world but people elsewhere are
shifting their stance in relatively large numbers and that's as far as I can
see uniformly negative.

The NSA could stop sucking and be awesome if they not only stuck to their
charter of providing intelligence on 'persons of interest' but did that in the
narrowest way possible and only _after_ they obtained specific warrants.

Remember the ruckus over that spy plane downed in China?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident)

What do you think would be the US response if the Chinese, the Russians or
even some Latin American state would fly spy planes right off the coast of
Washington, New York or LA?

This goes way beyond the NSA, an article along the line of 'How the USA could
stop sucking and be awesome instead' would be a much needed refresher. After
9/11 the US had immense political capital and most if not all of that has been
spent by now and the general worldview of the US has slipped from 'friendly'
to 'possibly hostile'.

Writing this isn't going to change anything, I realize that. But I really
wished we could get out of the 'us and them' phase.

------
carbocation
This is very constructive. I think this post could be expanded a bit when it
comes to key signing and basically ELI5 the concept to make it crystalline why
this would be useful and why it would still be private. (It gets the point
across, to be sure, but it could be more accessible to less knowledgable folks
by being more explicit in marching out its explanation.)

