Happy Thanksgiving from the NSA

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/michael-winship/52913/happy-thanksgiving-from-the-nsa

Happy Thanksgiving from the NSA
by Michael Winship | November 28, 2013 - 10:20am

Here’s this week’s news from the NSA. Yes, when it comes to international espionage and snooping, in less than a century we’ve gone from a US Secretary of State declaring, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” to a former French foreign minister recently telling a radio interviewer, “Everyone is listening to everyone else.”

In other words, we have so much to be thankful for. Weekly, even daily, revelations of National Security Agency prying have become the norm and whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden has become so well-known he recently was leading TIME Magazine’s readers’ poll for Person of the Year by some 65 points, running far ahead of President Obama, Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al Assad and Miley Cyrus. (Although as of this writing, Miley suddenly has pulled into the lead. God bless America.)

~snip~

Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt, the chairman and former CEO of Google, told CNN earlier this month that he and his fellow executives there were shocked and outraged by news that the NSA had tapped into Google’s fiber optic cables, along with those of several other tech companies and siphoned off huge amounts of data.

This week, Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff of The New York Times confirmed the tapping – the fiber optic cables are the weak link in the Internet privacy chain – and wrote that “recent NSA disclosures make clear that even when Internet giants like Google and Yahoo do not hand over data, the NSA and its intelligence partners can simply gather their data downstream… ”