Brazil said it!

[thir]

What is making this more than just a routine exchange of diplomatic notes is the sheer scale of the operation; it's not one or two bought civil servants or microphones in offices, it's other nations' entire business potentially laid open.

Excatly. Big brother, together with all the rest of the surveillance.

The astonishing thing, and a sign of how much the US is still feared and/or admired around the world, is that there hasn't been a comparable outcry by all of Europe.

There has been complaints from EU, but I agree not nearly as much as one would expect. It is possible that the chock has not sunk in yet.

It depends entirely on how the power that it gives the US is used.

No, it doesn't. Taking freedom away from citizens and countries can only be BAD!

But Latin America has reason to fear US interference in the operation of its democracies.

Along with a number of other countries that might not do what the US thinks it should..

The biggest thing politicians don't understand about the Net is that it was designed to be decentralised and unblockable. The fact that all the big servers are in the US is an accident of history, not a necessary part of the architecture, and it would certainly be an improvement if there were more elsewhere.

Whatever it was designed to be be, it ca obviously be controlled - and is.

But breaking it up would mean rolling back twenty years of industrial and commercial progress. There is WAY too much money invested for that to happen.

Maybe. maybe not. Governments still have something to say - if their voters back them/push them. But I doubt that businesses are in favor of this industrial spying.

On a smaller scale, we see this in countries like Egypt where the gov't tries to shut down the Net because it's being used by rebels, and has to switch it on again because the entire business community is screaming.

And maybe because the freedom of the net can also be the best spying instrument ever invented.

What would make a difference, and will surely happen, is the much wider adoption of open source high-level encryption (open source, because nobody can plant state-sponsored backdoors in it without being caught.)

That would be great - at least it would be harder. But it takes much more than that.

Agreed. Even gov'ts like Brazil can't do anything about this at their level.

Why not?

This is not a fight between gov'ts: more clearly than ever before in my life, it's a fight between rulers and the people, and friendly rulers can just hold our coats while we take on the other sort.

I hope you are wrong. But it is not just rulers, it is also the multis, who will be the rulers in a not too distant future if we do not get off our hands.

But we know the ground and hold the strongpoints. I'm hopeful.

I am not, so much, I fear the lethargic of people who have too much, the too hard pressure on people who have too little, and the general propaganda of our societies: sleep on, buy, you deserve it (if you can pay) do not concern yourself...