Dear Josh Marshall: Please explain which allied countries are spying on which "US Leaders"

[struggle4progress]

38. After WWII and the Cold War, no competent intelligence service would wait until a conflict broke out

to begin keeping its intercept and code-breaking abilities as up-to-date as possible

One clear lesson from twentieth century conflicts is that allies today can become enemies tomorrow

The prewar work of Polish cryptologists on the German enigma codes, and of American military cryptologists on Japanese codes, provided critical advantages in WWII

Such advantages are hard-won and easily lost

There's no reason to think a high-school drop-out like Snowden, with a handful of community-college credit hours, or a libertarian ideologue like Greenwald, with a background in corporate law or porn-industry consulting and a history of nuisance lawsuits, who gained attention as a misleading columnist, would have developed the background and expertise to understand in any detail what is involved in intercept and code-breaking work or protection of the assets obtained thereby

The NSA, of course, is unlikely to inform the world accurately about its capabilities: to do so would immediately nullify any of its accomplishments