Slashdot Mirror
Snowden: NSA Spying On EU Diplomats and Administrators
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report dated 2010 recently provided by [former NSA contractor Edward] Snowden to the German news magazine 'Der Spiegel', the NSA has systematically been spying on institutions of the EU in Washington DC, New York, and Brussels. Methods of spying include bugging, phone taps, and network intrusions and surveillance according to the documents."
All part of a grand tradition.
Could we just get the list of who the NSA isn't spying on? It seems to be much shorter.
Only on
I'm probably wrong here, but isn't it against international law to spy on diplomats? If yes, does this apply to only spying on diplomats residing in your country, or elsewhere?
Yarrgh there be trolling to do in yonder slashdot thread yaargh!
Seems like another slow news day.
I wonder what poor sap at the White House press room will have to figure out a way to try to smooth over this one, or manufacture a distraction...
Our government is a bit like a sociopath. We are nobody's friend. Everyone is merely a potential enemy. We spy on everyone. No exceptions. I'm sure we even spy on the UK and Canada as utterly pointless as that may be. If we ever ended up at war with either Canada or the UK then we'd almost certainly be better off losing anyway.
Of course, from Washington's POV the problem is not so much that we spy even on our friends, but that someone blabbed about it. They won't think about changing their behavior toward our allies. About acting honorably at least toward our allies. Rather they will think more about how badly they can punish the leaker. I can only imagine how badly they are itching to get Snowden's ass to gitmo and torture him to death in very creative ways.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
They spy on everyone. Politicos hardest hit.
They brought the half of the world at war in every country that owns oil for supposedly chasing terrorists when they are the only actual terrorists that we have a reason to fear.
Well done USA leaders and dumb part of the American people.
At least I've been thinking precisely this for many years but now it isn't shameful to say it in public so that's a win already.
Now comes retribution for what is an act of war against allied nations and the free world.
Have you missed the Washington Post PRISM 2 leaks just released?:
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/inner-workings-of-a-top-secret-spy-program/282/
It proves what Google and Facebook said all along.
When Google Microsoft and Facebook deny they gave *direct* access to the NSA, they were telling the truth. They gave direct access to the *FBI* who gave direct access to the NSA! See! Not a lie!
In the same way I'm not accessing Slashdot, I'm accessing my router! In fact I've never visited Slashdot! You can't prove I'm lying so its the truth!
And they only collect Metadata: Meta-Chats, Meta Emails, Meta File Transfters, Meta VOIP, Meta Logins, Meta IDs, Meta-Metadata (!), Meta Photos, Meta Social Networking, Meta Stored Data, Meta Video, Meta Video Conferenceing.... why, hardly anything at all!
And they do have due-process. They 'duly process' everything with an NSA controlled filter known as PRINTAURA. See, no lie there!
And they told the truth when they said they don't collect files on everyone. 49% is not everyone! Why, it's not even half of everyone!
And they do have warrants to look at the data, the cloud warrants even have a checkbox "[X] are you sure this is legal?" *see*! double checked!
And checks and balances too, Dwayne checks Wayne's filled the form in correctly "[X] is Dwayne sure this is legal?"
So move along citizen, nothing sickening to see here.
Some of you will know that Carnegie wrote a book called "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
The NSA is currently writing a book which could be titled : "How to Make Enemies and Influence People".
The NSA, CIA, FBI are all from the USA (UNITED STASI OF AMERICA). Their behaviour is eerily familar to those who lived in the DDR, yet many Americans and Canadians seem to be unconcerned with the massive spying they are doing when we really should be outraged.
Well so far Russia seems to be absent from the revelations which, if true, would be amazingly ironic. Perhaps that's why Snowden went there.
The leaks seem to be coming out in a clever order, starting with the most credible. An obvious benefit of this is that each lends credence to the next. Perhaps less obviously, each time the government passes up an opportunity to come clean, it makes the lies more obvious. We might have already known (or guessed) all this stuff, but now we have government officials on record lying about the extent of surveillance, over and over, just before backtracking to defend it.
Tell me something I don't know. They spy on diplomats. Really? Say it ain't so.
you don't need enemies. Anyway, some of them could had been aware, at least the NSA had a data collection agreement with several european countries. But i suppose that the information they gave didn't included the part where they were a target too, and how much truth were in the provided information, the best lies are half truths.
it is after all their job to spy.
Is anyone honestly going to claim no one else is spying? Who thinks the EU doesn't spy on the US? etc?
Everyone is spying on everyone else. Its part of diplomacy.
Why? countries lie. Countries manipulate. And no one really trusts anyone in the end. So you spy.
Every nation spies on every other nation to the extent that they care and have the resources. This is why the US catches Russian sleeper agents occasionally... or busts Chinese spies. This happens all the time. And the general convention on the matter is that if we don't punish their spying we won't punish their spying.
How many spies has the US executed recently? None. And we could by international law. Same thing with the spies they catch. They aren't killed. They're exchanged.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
All part of a grand tradition.
That doesn't make it right.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Of *course* the NSA is intercepting foreign communications. That is their mission. That is what they are funded for. If anyone is surprised that a government agency charged with intercepting (possibly relevant) foreign communications/information than they need to get their head out of the sand. Every country does it (they just tend to not have whistle blowers that make it to Hong Kong/Moscow). From all the reports I can read, at least the NSA seems to actually be doing what they are funded to do (unlike some other agencies).
Does anyone have a copy of the article?
I always wondered if GCHQ was more loyal to the UK or the USA. If US tried to smear a UK politician to get a more friendly one in power, which side would GCHQ stand? What about the Dutch Secret service?
I noticed smears and leaks have moved much of Europes leadership to the pro-America right wing and I wonder how deep this goes.
It's interesting how the "revelations" from "former" CIA employee and short-term NSA external contractor are so ground-breaking and not just what people who don't own a TV have known for years. Bread and circus, knew the Roman Empire, keep people from revolt. Snowden is a circus. Putin said it best when he pointed out that FSB had no interest in Snowden, it would be like trying to skin a pig: Lots of screams but no wool.
Yeah, I know this is too true information even for slashdot, I'm guessing this will be modded down.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Every government spies on every other government, both enemies and allies. This has pretty much been the case since the dawn of civilization. To be surprised or outraged by this is to show that you are an uneducated fool or, to repeat myself, an American.
The source for the spammy blog that the "summary" references:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nsa-spied-on-european-union-offices-a-908590.html
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
European online editions of newspapers have it all over their title pages. Scores of EU politicians and servants indignated. I suddenly wonder if, ironically, this could be one of the many little pushes the EU needs to attain more internal unity. Sad it should be brought along by the discovery of a new intimate foe... But then again, the sun has been going down over the US for some time already now.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Lives there a human so resolutely benighted as to be unaware that the EU spies on other countries, as do the Russians, Chinese, and every other government, with the possible exception of the Kingdom of Polish Bohemia?
I don't see any issue with governments spying on each other. You kind of expect they would do that.
I see far more of a problem with spying on arbitrary citizens with pretty much no oversight (although it amazes me that this comes as a surprise to anyone at all).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With friends like this, who needs enemies?
-- Cheers!
This shouldn't be at all surprising to anyone. Countries have been spying on each other and their own citizens since the dawn of civilization. And anyone here who thinks only the US does this and their country doesn't spy on its citizens is living in a dream world.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I am expecting that the newspapers soon find documents linking the NSA to the Athens affair and the death of Kostas Tsalikidis.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
States or "state-likes" like the EU spy on each other, ok.
I find it much more worrying that normal EU citizens are being spied on by UK services. My government (German) tells me they didn't know about it, and of course I am inclined to believe they are not telling me the truth (new default reaction to free world government officials saying something). The reaction our minister of justice got when she dared to demand some clarification from the Brits, a polite "go f**k yourself", is still interesting. Oh, and literally while I write this comment, this just in: (article in german) the NSA also massivcely spies on the german public.
How naïve you are.
Of course they do spy on each other, that we know already. The gross part is that they *collude* to spy on *us* in ways they aren't allowed by law.
The NSA wants to spy on you (an USA citizen, I assume)? They aren't allowed by law? No problem. The MI6, for example, would have no qualms with that and would, by virtue of some secret international treaty, gladly oblige to forward this information to the NSA. Or whatever (MI6 was just an example among dozens of possibilities).
How are democracies supposed to work under this mess?
The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it. They spent billions and came up with nothing. The countries in the treaty are just way too autonomous and have their own language and culture. Every county is in it for themselves, not for the greater good of the whole, except maybe the Dutch politicians, that don't want to listen to their people and keep pumping money in. Ask any citizen in the EU if they want the EU to have influence on their local legislation and most of them will say no. They just want the money from the EU to subsidizing their economical project, but not the meddling.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Such a big pile of junk.
Notice how this hollow phrase jusitfies anything?
It's not the defense of "a country" (whatever this might mean, if anything), it's the defense of the cronies in power all this mess is about.
Watch our most sacred values being trampled on in the name of "defending our values".
And now excuse me. Gotta go barf.
They are just keeping the EU safe from terrorists
Everyone spies on everyone, even so called friends. Certainly the countries with the financial resources to spend on large intelligence budgets do. I'm sure that the UK, Germany and Israel are spying on us. You'd be quite ignorant to think otherwise. It's the nature of the Spy Game.
The only difference is that the United States has been embarrassingly exposed with its pants down. And of course, foreign leaders are going to feign shock and wag their fingers at us. Naughty USA. How could you!
In reality, I doubt that their intelligence experts are at all very surprised. They're probably cracking up that we can't even keep a "30-year-old hacker" from leaking sensitive secrets. No need to spy on the USA. One of our own will leak everything.
There is probably a difference to kind of spying we do, and the kind other countries do. I would assume we do most of the high-tech spying, at least compared to our allies. The other countries are probably still doing more of the old-school spying. I doubt we do much of that anymore. Maybe a few wetjobs here and there. But Americans are lazy. Why bother with training secret agents to go deep undercover to get intel, when you can push a button and let all the information come flowing to you. I'm sure that's the whole point of PRISM. It's laziness. Why bother to find out what data you need when you can simply collect all the data?
So what's Snowden up to?
It's understandable that he would want to inform Americans of their civil liberties being abused. But now he's just going around the world, smearing egg on our face. Like he's got some kind of vendetta or something. Honestly, no one cares if we're bugging the EU. I doubt that the EU even cares. But of course it's bad PR. I'm sure that Putin is asking himself, "How did we ever lose the Cold War to those pussies?" If Snowden had been a KGB agent, he'd have been terminated by now.
More than half of the discussion I hear recently is about how awful it is that the US is spying on other countries. I'm baffled by this. Of course we spy on other countries. And they spy on us. And each other. That's what the CIA/NSA/KGB/etc are for. That's their role, am I incorrect?
The issue isn't "ermagherd, we're spyin' on other countries!". It's "holy fuck, our own government is spying on its own citizens, even though they are expressly forbidden from doing so".
A lesser example of this type of data sharing attitude to get around laws ( or in this case just to avoid feeling like a police state ) can be found in the recent developments with border crossings between Canada and the U.S.
Canada reports entries from the U.S. back to the U.S. and vice versa. This has been happening for a while now but as of later this year it will include U.S. and Canadian citizens.
Of course.. it's not quite the same as having to get an exit visa as Morocco and some(?) others require!
Article in German
Now that they themselves, and not just EU citizens are also the target, they EU-representatives don't like the whole spying thing anymore
Everyone, start communicating in Klingon! That'll stump them!
Instead of
"... the NSA also massivcely spies on the german public."
should it be
"...on the german population."?
"Spying on the public" seems kind of silly when I look at it now.
We made our bureaucracy so vast it's impossible on spy on all of it.
Every country is now and always has spied on every other country. That's the way of the world since the dawn of time. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either profoundly naive or dangerously deluded; like the people who enable "private browsing" in their browser and think no one can find out they're watching pr0n.
Pick the nation, I can likely name the intelligence agency. How about Canada? Those nice Canadians surely don't have one. Oh wait, they have the CSIS, modeled after the British SIS. Ok well not the Norwegians, I mean they are such a wonderful country. Oh, no, wait, they have four of them, three mostly foreign (NIS, FOST, NSM), one mostly domestic (PST).
I really can go on for basically any nation. Nations have collected intelligence on each other for basically as long as we've had nations. This shouldn't surprise you if you've studied history at all. There are also some fairly recent (in historical terms) events that remind nations of the importance of intelligence, like the second world war.
That the US spies shouldn't surprise you. If you think it shouldn't, ok that is valid, but understand it would be essentially the only nation that doesn't. You also might want to learn up on problems that would cause, and then see if you are still ok with the tradeoff.
The UK's SIS is one of the all-time legends of the intelligence community. Not surprising, given the importance that intelligence played in WWII and the threat that the UK faced. The SIS is one of the best of the best. Likewise France's DGSE is a pretty heavy hitter, with a number of publicly known operations (and likely many more not known) and a six hundred million Euro annual budget.
So ya, the EU itself has no central intelligence agency, but if you think its members don't, well then you haven't bothered to check.
In case you are wondering, they HAVE in fact killed people. One example that is publicly known? The DGSE sunk a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand, which killed one person. It was called Opération Satanique.
So sorry to burst your bubble about the EU and members being nothing but noble, but they are nations, with interests, just like all the others and they have intelligence agencies to that end.
Blackmail
Bribes
Beliefs
H-1B Visas
NO MORE SECRETS
I watched the movie last week and Snowden was in my mind while doing so (to be fair, Assange was in my mind last time I watched it, earlier this year).
Everyone is a suspect. Or so it seems.
BlameBillCosby.com
Everyone spies on everyone, even their friends, in case friends turn out to be enemies.
Jesus people, this is geopolitics 101 going back to the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
Only in this, the most-informed but apparently most-naive culture in human history, could this possibly be a surprise.
-Styopa
Governments spy on governments, that's expected,but usually not aired in public because it's not polite conversation.
Snowden 'revealing' this just makes diplomatic discussions/relations on everything harder.
It won't change this reasonable/customary/necessary behavior.
On the whole, the world is worse off for these leaks.
He started off doing something extremely useful.
Revealing that the FISA process was subverting democracy by using secrecy to prevent public debate.
If he had stopped after the first release, then we could assume his goals were noble.
Since then, he seems to have left the moral high ground.
At this point, it's looking more like his goal is notariety at the expense of us all.
(Other possibilities are trying to cause intentional harm, still trying to do good but very naive, or feels it's necesary to stay on this earth.)
Regardless of his intentions, he's still morally responsible for the harm (and good) he has caused.
He should have stopped while he was ahead.
At this point, he's just digging himself into a deeper hole.
water is wet.
The statement that they didn't know about it is very bad.
1. If they didn't know about it they are completely incompetent.
2. If they did know then they are lying.
Someone wake me up when some actual news gets released
So we spy on other countries.. They do it too.. and its always been going on... Why is this even considered news?
The NSA budget last year was around $75 Billion.
The sequestor for each year is around $85 Billion.
When given a choice of what it should cut instead, the executive branch (Obama), chose White House tours, FAA air traffic controllers, and everything else possible to harm the public as much as possible so he could blame the GOP. What he chose NOT to cut was the NSA spying on US citizens because that was apparently more important to him than the public flying safely and conveintly. The IRS, prosecuting non-law breaking citizens, was also not cut because that was also more important to him.
The Federal government has taken the stance that you are the enemy and you are to be punished long before any of "their illegal programs" will be cut a dime. You either agree to pay increased taxes to pay for this spying or you will be punished even harsher by the NSA and IRS.
Kapiert Ihr endlich, dass ihr nur Vasallen dritten Grades seit ?
Wählen dürft ihr im Imperium nicht, aber sterben in den Kriegen des Imperiums schon.
Prost mit einer Cola !
I believe the US has been spying like this for years. Tapping our phone conversations, planting bugs, and even sitting outside our house. Its just that technology has caught up so that alot of this information is digital and can be aggregated over time and searchable. Honestly, if you can't trust your government who can you trust. You hope that they use this information wisely. Also other countries would love all of this information as its a new age of espionage.
This is what the NSA is actually supposed to be doing! Why would this surprise anyone? They are supposed to spy on foreign entities to get intelligence. The problem started when the Bush administration took the 'foreign' out of it.
Morocco does not require an exit visa... Many nationalities do not even need an entry visa
Small leaks and implications by former government employees, reasonable deductions, disclosures from other nations, proper expert speculation and historical references have been telling us the sort of information that Wikileaks and Snowden have been leaking for over a generation.
The difference is that it isn't released with so much attention so the masses become aware of things that an informed elite were already aware of. Sure, you can't prove a lot of things in court or scientifically but that does not make them false. This is why you ask competent experts for their guesses and opinions; the odds are in their favor.
When the proven truth leaks out, one should go back an evaluate the experts and the winners should get higher standing. The press does not do this; less now than ever before. When somebody who just competently does a simple job like election polling, and that man becomes a celebrity genius you know the system is broken... and that is a rare situation today, most the time being correct is not rewarded.
Snowden is doing a great deal of good in his attempt to wake up the public. Diplomats KNOW all this stuff already or at least suspect it - they are professional liars after all... It's complete propaganda that this changes diplomacy much, each side always suspects the other - they just get to enjoy little jabs and fake excuses to stick it to US diplomats for a while. Diplomats eat shit for a living they can handle it and continue to smile. (people who don't understand this should shut up; sadly, Americans are raised to be over confident - and scientific studies back that statement up.)
Cold War budgets didn't go down and the NSA has many times the budget as the CIA, how anybody can think they stopped doing all those things that have been leaked or declassified from that era? We may not crash planes as much but that doesn't mean that we are not giving mildly radioactive items to people we don't like...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Because for all the hand wringing and whining no one seems to have grasped the obvious based on all the evidence that all governments do this. Namely that whether a government is a dictatorship, democracy, or somewhere in between when they have the technological ability to spy on everyone they will do so. Why? Because technology gives them the ability to do it.
And it's not a matter of constitutionality, morality, legality, or ethics, only ability. This goes for all surveillance methods, including biometric databases, surveillance cameras, drones, metadata collection, etc.. Moreover, such methods will only grow in their sophistication and extensiveness.
And for those who are familiar with the writings of Jacques Ellul you'll recognize that he saw this occurring when he wrote his informative book "The Technological Society", his thesis was that regardless of what a government intends to do it, or what the people want, it will ineluctably move towards greater and greater control of its populace.
This was bound to happen when the government privatizes it's services. It is extremely foolish and moronic to take such secretive organizations and begin to privatize them.
The GOOD thing is naive young consultants gain access to things that were out of reach (until they were ready) and can let the public and officials know definitively what is going on. This is the only good aspect to this privatization religion we've subscribed to. On the flip side, we have created the largest most powerful and up-to-date private corporations in the security, intelligence, and military realms probably in modern history. They won't or don't exclusively work for 1 client...
The CIA won't be the one crashing your plane, blowing up your car or giving you cancer in the future (arguably, it has been going on since the mob hired vets.) Powerful corporations can ask their security firms to take care of people and more skillfully than a mob boss ever could. If you do catch them, they are extremely well protected. We already have some disclosures of private firms spying on activists and don't forget the mercenaries going in on their own after Katrina (where looting was not the problem... at some point the contractors will influence the news as a form of advertizing.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
American citizens have become so god damn complacent about their own privacy, we need the International World Courts to restore our Constitional Rights!
the solution is simple: the rest of the world should null-route all traffic "from" and "to" usa.
it's simple, but it won't happen, thus this internet monitoring is here to stay.
sooo sorry everyone else, the country with the most debt (and the strongest army) will continue to know every
move you make (financially or economically or politically) before you do it : )
and down we all go into the abyss with an usa made anchor tied to "..as in beer"-dom
Mrs. Susan (US DoS Benghazi Compound fame) just got is wrong again !
She was quoted by CNN et al. news outlets saying the NSA leaked documents will have no effect on US foreign policy.
And just a day before she assumes here new job as National Security Advisor.
Is the FBI/NSA/CIA going after Snowden for what the public already knows? Every country tries to listen in on what the Embassies are saying and doing. If you FARTED in an Embassy it is going to be recorded by Russia/French/USA, etc.
The PATRIOT ACT and other crazy laws that was created by the Republican Party allows Billions of people including citizens to be wire tapped ie phone/cell phone, Internet, mail, email, etc. The government used to break into my home every month doing things that would freak-me-out. ie. taking my weapon, creating leaks in facets, replacing doors, etc.
On the one hand the NSA is one of those agencies that really seems to deliver value. And now it's being damaged by being put in the spotlight and having details of its most basic data-gathering methods advertised on the Internet. For a spy-agency, such leaks can ruin its effectiveness because smart targets can now take specific measures to evade this particular system.
And about the whole PRISM business: its such a lot of data that you really don't know what to look for. So unless you want to risk missing something vital, you collect *everything* and then scan the lot. And since you probably can't do that in real-time, you need to store it for awhile. Like e.g. the NSA seems to do with its PRISM program.
It can't come as a surprise really, in view of this slashdot story: http://slashdot.org/story/06/06/15/1829246/government-adds-consumer-databases-to-mining-queries . Remember that admiral Poindexter with his Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme? It looks as if his ideas have been implemented from the first to the last, only better.
On the other hand, I'm getting a bit worried in that the NSA really does seem to be operating outside its original brief and that politicians don't seem to be aware that it does. Of course it's terribly inefficient to have two agencies monitoring communications when one party happens to be in the US. And even if you did hand over to the FBI as soon as it involves anyone on US soil, it would probably still have to be the NSA that operates the computers.
In this respect however I was uncomfortably reminded of the following quote from Henry Kissinger:
Judging from the context he probably was only half joking. Clearly the executive arm really does have a dynamic of its own and should therefore be adequately monitored. Even if its power against well-prepared enemies might be "barely sufficient", its current abilities and modus operandi carry a definite potential for wide-spread abuse against ordinary US citizens.
The problem is of course that there is tension between being effective, cost-effective, and safe: you can only get two out of three.
If the NSA can monitor me so can other intelligence organizations. We already know commercial entities are monitoring us. Just look at the bandwidth shaping practices of communications companies and other actions they have taken. Bandwidth shaping may not be monitoring so to speak. However when you mistype into your browser and it redirects to your ISP's search page what do you think is going on? They are monitoring your activity and then selling advertisements based on it. They also are intercepting and falsifying traffic. For instance Comcast was shown to be disconnecting bittorrent traffic (I believe) by injecting a fraudulent packet.
I'm sick and tired of it. I'd like to fund a project like Tor for for things like cellular and similar.
Any time there's significant news that's bad for the NSA, they fire up the Kardashian news generators to distract the public.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because you know of a few examples of "failure" to manipulate power with wealth you think you have the rich pegged.
They buy and sell you my friend. You have no idea of their reach and power, nor of what they really think of you, if they bother to think about you at all.
Stalin had his useful idiots. The rich in the west have minions like you.
The NSA is enormously effective at intercepting communications and sifting through them. Agencies such as the CIA, FBI, USN, USAF, US Army generally depend on it for their signals intelligence. The current trouble isn't about the NSA being ineffective, it's about it being too effective and going outside its mandate.
There is no substitute for SIGINT work, in fact it's becoming increasingly important. It provides tremendous value for money in that it can dig up needles in haystacks you couldn't otherwise find.
Even if there really are people out that who don't seem to realise that.
The shock of the Europeans to the fact that they are being spied on is comical. Euro business and industries DEPEND on industrial espionage to compete and keep the jobs in their countries. At a conference on Internet Security, I asked the question of a panel. "Who are the biggest countries in espionage?" The answer varied, but France (chemicals) and Germany (process and electronics) were right up there with the US, China, and Russia. To think that only 'evil' countries spy is childish. This whole affair calls into question the intelligence of the average EU citizen. So many fell in love with Obama and his 'message'. Now, they act as jilted teenage girls. The 'sophisticated' EU citizen fawned over Obama, and, indeed, a subset awarded him a Nobel Prize for accomplishing NOTHING. Hope runs eternal, so does white guilt, apparently. Of course, your politicians don't seem to care. They are too busy with their lavish lunch meetings and arguing for hours over the shape of apples and how many Kumquats can be shipped to Italy. Memo to the citizens of Planet Earth.... stop being so childish about your objects of worship. Christianity in Europe has apparently been replaced with US politician worship. You didn't learn from the huckster Al Gore, nor the inept Jimmy Carter either. When a politician promises something too good to be true, IT IS. Are you listening France?
I tend to believe that Snowden IS Legit, however it seems awfully convenient that the Benghazi scandal (not to mention all the other scandals before it) has conveniently disappeared. Wasn't Obama going to be impeached? Didn't people in his own party say he had lost credibility to lead? Either this was set up for the US 98% state run media to conveniently wash over all that or they have used it to that effect. And what did he really tell us? Only that he had proof that what all the conspiracy theorists have been saying for the last 15 years+ is true, which was no surprise to anyone whose been paying attention, but admittedly welcome nonetheless in terms of waking up the sleeping masses... If the media was any way honest they would be framing the Snowden thing in context with the Bengahzi thing and asking "Hey, hasn't our government just become one big criminal operation?"
Coupled with a heaping helping of, "No shit, Sherlock?"