https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...
It may, but democracy goes beyond mere voting.
I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient.
At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.
Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to).
Understatements of the century.
How many more recursive understatements before we hit a base case?
Can the news start reporting on facts?
Read the article only to find out that we don't know who the kidnappers are, if and how much they got, how much cash qatar sent to iraq, etc.
Whenever I read articles like this, it leaves me angry and wanting to never read anything from the BBC again. What's even more frustrating is that the BBC is government funded and not dependent on advertisers and they have no reason to clickbait.
Sorry, understanding the world requires engagement and judgment. Sometimes there's a lot of evidence pointing one way, but it's been manipulated and the other side is actually correct. When news organizations try to boil down the complexity to simple answers it doesn't go well (see: Iraqi WMDs).
In this case, the Qatari story is pretty ridiculous. They say they talked to terrorists about a ransom, then flew a large sum of cash into Iraq in secret, and then that large sum of cash was taken by some people in black masks, and then they got their hostages back. But it wasn't a hostage payment and terrorists didn't get it, it's being held in an Iraqi bank for development or something. This is a pretty far-fetched story and they probably did pay a large ransom, perhaps $1 billion or perhaps something smaller or larger, but in the same ballpark.
How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries?
Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.
Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar.
The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a president to his wife, misinterpreted by another powerful nation state.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that our politicians self-preservation instincts, strong as they may be, trump their egos (sorry for the pun.)
Not that the intercept abilities in Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Ericsson equipment is much less robust, it's just not as commonly used in these environments.
Here's a really old but reasonably well documented instance of the same type of event:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...
In the case originally referenced, I would be totally unsurprised that some other nation-state has inserted an advanced persistent threat into the SMS core infrastructure of Qatar's telecoms. One of the reasons why proper end to end crypto (Signal, etc) is so important. At least if you can be reasonably assured of the security and OS of the endpoint devices, you don't have to trust the network in between them.
Israel?
EDIT: I think the contextual question that arises from that book is: How does the idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" play out in multi-sided negotiations with such high stakes?
"These were obtained by a government hostile to Qatar and passed to the BBC."
Uhuh. So... how did you verify them?
“Qatari officials accept that the texts and voicemails are genuine, though they believe they have been edited "very selectively" to give a misleading impression.”
