USA spying on its own allies Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
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Being Brazilian, Ciro Santilli is particularly curious about the existence of a Brazilian-focused website one mentioned in the article, as well as in other democracies.
WTF the CIA was doing in Brazil in the early 2010s! Wasn't helping to install the Military dictatorship in Brazil enough!
Here are the democracies found so far, defining a democracy as a country with score 7.0 or more in the Democracy index 2010. In native language:
In English, so more deniable:
"Almost democracies":
Ciro couldn't help but feel as if looking through the Eyes of Sauron himself!
It is worth noting that democracies represent just a small minority of the websites found. The Middle East, and Spanish language sites (presumably for Venezuela + war on drugs countries?) where the huge majority. But Americans have to understand that democracies have to work together and build mutual trust, and not spy on one another. Even some of the enlightened people from Hacker News seem to not grasp this point. The USA cannot single handedly maintain world order as it once could. Collaboration based on trust is the only way.
Snowden's 2013 revelations particularly shocked USA allies with the fact that they were being spied upon, and as of the 2020's, everybody knows this and has "stopped caring", and or moved to end-to-end encryption by default. This is beautifully illustrated in the Snowden when Snowden talks about his time in Japan working for Dell as an undercover NSA operative:
NSA wanted to impress the Japanese. Show them our reach. They loved the live video from drones. This is Pakistan right now [video shows CIA agents demonstrating drone footage to Japanese officials]. They were not as excited about that we wanted their help to spy on the Japanese population. They said it was against their laws.
We bugged the country anyway, of course.
And we did not stop there. Once we had their communications we continued with the physical infrastructure. We sneaked into small programs in their power grids, dams, hospitals. The idea was that if Japan one day was not our allies we could turn off the lights.
And it was not just Japan. We planted software in Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Austria.
China, I can understand. Or Russia or Iran. Venezuela, okay.
But Austria? [shows footage of cow on an idyllic Alpine mountain grazing field, suggesting that there is nothing in Austria to spy on]
Another noteworthy scene from that movie is Video "Aptitude test scene from the Snowden 2016 film", where a bunch of new CIA recruits are told that:
Each of you is going to build a covert communications network in your home city [i.e. their fictitious foreign target location written on each person's desk, not necessarily where they were actually born], you're going to deploy it, backup your site, destroy it, and restore it again.
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