Is Snowden buying asylum by fanning the flames of anti-Americanism?

[JDPriestly]

73. No other country except maybe China is spying like we do.

No other country would waste the money and manpower on this obsessive-compulsive endeavor.

35,000 employees according to the New York Times yesterday. And they are collecting and sorting and analyzing your credit card bills. It's ridiculous.

I figure it probably costs at least 3 billion dollars per year to keep this obsessive-compulsive stuff going. Think what we could do with that money. What a waste.

Some surveillance is useful and necessary. But the NSA program is way out of bounds.

And they should not be spying on communications between lawyers and clients or between companies and their employees, especially not if it is intercontinental or between countries.

Think of the opportunities for patent thefts, research theft. This is absolutely horrible.

The only reason people approve of it is that they don't understand what it means. It does not amaze me at all that the leaders, especially the business leaders in other countries like the innovative Germans are just furious.

This program may be hiding untold crimes. We don't know, but if I were Angela Merkel, I would be furious.

Other countries do not have the means or money to conduct a surveillance program as vast and invasive as the NSA program. They have quite a few different collection databases, surveillance programs, etc. according to the New York Times article yesterday.

If you have never worked with information, then you may naively think this is much ado about nothing, but it is absolutely horrific.