US & UK spies hacked/stole encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications

[bigtree]

41. that's not the point of those with objections

...apparently you believe it's proper and legal for the U.S. to spy on our allies and hack and steal propriety information from people committing no crime at all, just to accomplish a dubious task of stealing data and other private information in bulk from a vast majority of individuals who have likely not committed any crimes at all.

Or, maybe you didn't read the article...

"An internal top-secret GCHQ wiki on the program from May 2011 indicated that GCHQ was in the process of “targeting” more than a dozen Gemalto facilities across the globe, including in Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Spain, Japan and Singapore."

...do you see any U.S. allies on that list?

On January 17, 2014, President Barack Obama gave a major address on the NSA spying scandal. “The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” he said.

The monitoring of the lawful communications of employees of major international corporations shows that such statements by Obama, other U.S. officials and British leaders — that they only intercept and monitor the communications of known or suspected criminals or terrorists — were untrue. “The NSA and GCHQ view the private communications of people who work for these companies as fair game,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian. “These people were specifically hunted and targeted by intelligence agencies, not because they did anything wrong, but because they could be used as a means to an end.”