Everyone Is Spying

(Image courtesy the U.S. Army)

NSA Spying? Everyone Does It. -- Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor

The latest Snowden revelation in the Washington Post makes it clear that the US and its National Security Agency have lots of foreign help when it comes to intelligence collection.

The latest scoop to come out of the documents that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has been providing to journalists is that the NSA has been harvesting vast numbers of emails and other contacts from online contact lists around the world.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that "hundreds of millions of contact lists" are being sucked up from web servers abroad, many of them inevitably of American citizens. It's the sort of bulk data collection that privacy activists have been angry about. The US isn't going after, say, the contact lists of identified potential terrorists or other foreign intelligence targets. Rather, it appears to be hoovering up everything it can get its hands on.

But given past Snowden revelations about NSA practices, the fact that the NSA was likely to be doing this kind of thing isn't a surprise. Which is why I find this sentence in the thorough article so interesting: "The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes."

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My Comment: Sadly .... everyone is conducting intelligence operations and surveillance.