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

[JDPriestly]

203. Did you read the entire article carefully?

"The files also make clear that GCHQ played a leading role in advising its European counterparts how to work around national laws intended to restrict the surveillance power of intelligence agencies.

The German, French and Spanish governments have reacted angrily to reports based on National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Snowden since June, revealing the interception of communications by tens of millions of their citizens each month. US intelligence officials have insisted the mass monitoring was carried out by the security agencies in the countries involved and shared with the US.

. . . .

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-spy-agencies-mass-surveillance-snowden

The German laws prohibit this sort of thing. It is of course appropriate in the case of criminals. But I seriously doubt that Germany is wiretapping Obama's phones or the c?ommunications at the UN.

Every country has intelligence capacity. But no country is as hogwildly ignoring the human right to privacy to the extent that we are.

And that article talks about the potential of other countries and states that the British are advising other countries on how to circumvent the legal restrictions other countries have placed on the surveillance.

That means to me that other countries are not spying anywhere near the extent that the British and Americans are.

I know people who are employees involved in these sorts of activities and apologists for the NSA would like us to think that "everybody is doing it," but the fact is no other country would be so stupid as to employ 35,000 people in this sort of useless random surveillance. That is especially true of Angela Merkel who grew up as the daughter of a pastor in East Germany. What a fable.

"Having initially trained as a physical chemist, Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, briefly serving as the deputy spokesperson for the East German Government. Following reunification in 1990, she was elected to the Bundestag for Stralsund-Nordvorpommern-Rügen in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a seat she has held since. She was later appointed as the Federal Minister for Women and Youth in 1991 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, being promoted to become Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in 1994. After the CDU/CSU coalition was defeated in 1998, she was elected Secretary-General of the CDU, before being elected the party's first ever female Leader in 2000.

. . . .

Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg, West Germany, the daughter of Horst Kasner (1926–2011),[12][13] native of Berlin, and his wife Herlind, born in 1928 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) as Herlind Jentzsch, a teacher of English and Latin. Her mother was once a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.[14] Merkel has some Polish ancestry as her paternal grandfather, Ludwig Kazmierczak, was a German[15] of Polish origin.[16]

Merkel's father studied theology in Heidelberg and, afterwards, in Hamburg. In 1954 her father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (near Perleberg in Brandenburg), which then was in East Germany, and the family moved to Templin. Thus Merkel grew up in the countryside 80 km (50 mi) north of East Berlin. Gerd Langguth, a former senior member of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, states in his book[17] that the family's ability to travel freely from East to West Germany during the following years, as well as their possession of two automobiles, leads to the conclusion that Merkel's father had a "sympathetic" relationship with the communist regime, since such freedom and perquisites for a Christian pastor and his family would have been otherwise impossible in East Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel