Embassies are routinely bugged by myriad parties so I would not read too much into this. It is the expected background noise of working in an embassy. It is the selection bias of people paying attention now because there is a story that people are interested in. There is a reason they constantly search embassies for bugs.
Also, most sophisticated buggings are usually difficult to detect even against a sophisticated adversary. All of which suggests to me that finding this bug in the Ecuador embassy is likely to be coincidence.
I sincerely doubt that this is all about selection bias. Rather, it sounds to me as public outrage is the only viable method in dealing with spying from a suspected NSA.
It used to be that when you found out that a country was using embassies for spying, there was diplomatic actions available to discourage it. You could deport diplomats from that country. You could refuse entering into political discussion with them. in worst case, you could close down diplomatic relations with them. All in all, such retaliation keeps the spying at a low key rather than public. It keeps it at a respectable level.
The big problem happens when its a large country like the U.S. doing the spying. The previous stories has all been about the NSA (which this one clearly relate to). As a country, the diplomatic relations against spying is quite limited. It is unlikely you want throw out the U.S. diplomats or close down their embassy. Its not very practical to close down diplomatic relations with the U.S.
You're attempting to justify these actions with placidity?
Yes, embassies are bugged, it happens, as does rape. Things are not "standard operating procedure" just because they happen, and the lack of outrage when crimes are committed only encourages their perpetration.
Your Hanlon's razor approach would make sense had the bug not just been found recently, suggesting it was put there recently and/or not well hidden, coincidentally in a location that happens to house someone wanted by the nation with the largest "defense" budget on the planet likely targeting someone who is known to communicate with arguably the most wanted man on the planet.
Trying to brush this off as a coincidence is a bit of a stretch, given the circumstances.
Geez. Comparing bugging with rape is a bit outlandish. This is more along the lines of, people agree on having speed limits, people violate them. Gov'ts set protocols on how they respect each other and then do things they've agreed not to.
Why don't you go after diplomatic immunity which allows all sorts of things to happen unpunished?
You're being idealistic. The world does not operate that way, if it did, we would have no need for lawyers as no one would ever take advantage of anyone nor would any one ever want to change the terms --wait, there wouldn't eve be terms of agreement, we'd just know 'the right thing to do'.
when was the last time when a country's foreign policy was actually influenced by its people in a democratic way? besides go / don't go to war or foreign investments policies, I doubt most people have any clue about their "democratic" country's fp ... I know I don't, and if I'd dig into it more, I'd probably get so disgusted by the international ass kissing networks that I'd wanna puke...
If anyone wants to read that FP article without registering at FP you can bypass the register screen by selecting "View -> Page Style -> No Page Style" in iceweasel. I apologize I do not know the equivalent function in chromium.
I used to enjoy reading Tom Ricks Best Defense blog at FP but I stopped reading it once they introduced that monstrosity.
Apparently blocking javascript also lets you read the article - in nicely formatted fashion too. I had not even realized FP had made such a change, I would have stopped reading it if I had run into that roadblock too.
Tecently there have been some misguided statements in the comments on HN that javascript is a requirement for the web and that it is reasonable for designers to always expect its presence. When those designers fail like this - the crap is gone but the important stuff still works great, I think to myself maybe it isn't so misguided. Maybe two wrongs do make a right.
They are supposed to do it for national security reasons (hence the name, one would presume). On actual enemies or potential enemies.
Spying on EU politicians, corporations, trade negotiations and such is not that. It's using spying to get a leverage and exploit/blackmail/bride/take advantage of other countries.
Except if you redefine "national security" to mean: each and every way a country can exploit and fuck with other countries.
The biggest difference between the spying in the past and the spying today is that most effective spying usually involved HUMINT. You had to get someone with access to a secure location to go in there and bug the place or you needed a mole on the inside leaking information to you.
Today we have an Internet infrastructure that for all intents and purposes is centralized in the US. Lots of network collections pass through the US and many commonly used service providers are in the US. HUMINT is now a lot less important because SIGINT became much much much easier.
However abusing the current system for the sake of SIGINT comes at the cost of trust in the current system and architecture. There will be an economic penalty paid by the US of this abuse of trust. At the very least, we're now in a much weaker position to negotiate with the rest of the world when internet governance issues (ICANN for example) come up for discussion.
That is not why the people are shocked. The general mass is shocked(especially foreigners, of course) or rather annoyed about the moral high ground US always seems to take("Chinese are hacking us, we're not hacking them") to which it doesn't own up to.
Also, most sophisticated buggings are usually difficult to detect even against a sophisticated adversary. All of which suggests to me that finding this bug in the Ecuador embassy is likely to be coincidence.