> Miyashita, now an associate professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, said it was his understanding that NSA operates in the country outside Japan’s legal jurisdiction due to an agreement that grants U.S. military facilities in Japan extraterritoriality.
Is America's agreement with Japan in this respect unique? It sounds something like Guantanamo Bay being both outside the purview of Cuban law but simultaneously not under the aegis of the Constitution.
This maybe isn't the best example, but there's the NSA listening station that operates from the US Embassy in Berlin. Being an embassy would give it extraterritoriality, but I don't think Germany is happy about the Americans doing it, especially since it was used to tap Angela Merkel's phone.
> Is America's agreement with Japan in this respect unique?
No. Each agreement with each country granting territory to US for military bases is somewhat unique - see for example all the trouble with Turkey and Saudi Arabia recently.
Obviously there are some guidelines and principles the US will always push for (typically that bases are considered US territory in respect of any jurisdiction claim the host country might have, that military personnel gets local immunity for their actions, etc etc), but that does not mean they are automatically considered US territory for the purposes of US law.
The parent post is a great example of the "the Russians did 9/11"-style hysteria sweeping low-information political communities due to the election interference. Let's not inflate the Russians into Illuminati masterminds on HN.
No Snowden document has ever been reported as fake, and much to the contrary, the Snowden reporting actually won the Pulitzer prize. The entire reason it's famous is because the documents were verifiably authentic.
There have been a lot of allegations against Snowden by his critics, but even the Congressional intelligence committees didn't make the claim that he is a Russian agent. In fact the former NSA guy who was in charge of the Snowden investigation said on camera there's no evidence of that, and that if Snowden were a spy, they would know by now.
The primary person at NSA who investigated him has stated publicly that it's unlikely to be true, due to the actions taken on his behalf by various individuals who appeared to be making sincere efforts to get him to South America (rather than Russia). He was stuck in Russia due to his passport being revoked by the Obama admin. That official did state that it's possible that Russian or Chinese handlers could have faked those efforts, but he still believes there would be some telltale signs and that the most likely conclusion is that he was not in fact a foreign intelligence agent.
Somehow I doubt this random internet guy has a more informed assessment.
The winning bid for this system was by Accenture, same company that handles US's fingerprinting system, and their bid was 100,000JPY, or approximately $900 at the time. This doesn't cover even the cost of one single machine.
A stateless corporation in Bermuda in control of millions of biometric IDs (fingerprints) that are usually hard to obtain for the US gov/spy agencies? In this post-Snowden world, I'm having trouble believing that there's nothing shady going on here.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadIs America's agreement with Japan in this respect unique? It sounds something like Guantanamo Bay being both outside the purview of Cuban law but simultaneously not under the aegis of the Constitution.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...
No. Each agreement with each country granting territory to US for military bases is somewhat unique - see for example all the trouble with Turkey and Saudi Arabia recently.
Obviously there are some guidelines and principles the US will always push for (typically that bases are considered US territory in respect of any jurisdiction claim the host country might have, that military personnel gets local immunity for their actions, etc etc), but that does not mean they are automatically considered US territory for the purposes of US law.
These are pretty bold claims - what's your evidence for either of them?
No Snowden document has ever been reported as fake, and much to the contrary, the Snowden reporting actually won the Pulitzer prize. The entire reason it's famous is because the documents were verifiably authentic.
There have been a lot of allegations against Snowden by his critics, but even the Congressional intelligence committees didn't make the claim that he is a Russian agent. In fact the former NSA guy who was in charge of the Snowden investigation said on camera there's no evidence of that, and that if Snowden were a spy, they would know by now.
Somehow I doubt this random internet guy has a more informed assessment.
Japan has started fingerprinting all non-citizens in 2007. at immigration checkpoints in airports and harbors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-BIS
The winning bid for this system was by Accenture, same company that handles US's fingerprinting system, and their bid was 100,000JPY, or approximately $900 at the time. This doesn't cover even the cost of one single machine.
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/accenture-japan-visit-and-the-...
A stateless corporation in Bermuda in control of millions of biometric IDs (fingerprints) that are usually hard to obtain for the US gov/spy agencies? In this post-Snowden world, I'm having trouble believing that there's nothing shady going on here.