Folks got peppy over the newest NSA story....released yesterday.....that our guy Snowden now reports that we spy upon 193 countries. Yeah.....there's just four apparently on the forbidden list: Australia, New Zealand, England, and Canada.
Yeah, it must be true then....we spy on Tonga, the Vatican, Monaco (.7 square miles), and Saint Kitts (107 square miles). The significance of what we pick up via the NSA with Monaco? Well....it's best not to ask that, or ever spend an hour trying to answer that. Hotel bills, business men conducting a tractor deal or a fuel deal, or perhaps some guy ordering seventy cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer to be delivered to his private yacht just off the coast of Monaco.
Big news? No. There's really not anyone out there who is surprised. Big news via Snowden? Well....on the scale of things, it's barely worth mentioning.
To some degree, I suspect that the guys have gleaned through all the traffic that Snowden handed them, and this is starting to get to the point of zero value.
So, if you were a bad guy.....should you run off to Canada? No.....the internal cops (their version of the FBI) will spy on you.
About the only thing of interest that Snowden hinted in the newest episode is that we have about 90,000 individuals walking around the surface of the planet that the NSA deems as important to track. The who's who of significance in the world? It's hard to say. The Pope might be on the list.....while the King of Jordan might not be there. Some jihad guy might be on the list.....while the wife of the King of Tonga probably isn't on the list. Entertainers like Madonna on the list? I doubt it, but we might be stupid enough to track her, her expense account, and who she calls on a daily basis.
Now, if they listed the 90,000.....which they didn't.....it might get real interesting. There might be seventy guys in Peru on this list....scratching their head over how they made the list and what's the big deal about their black market deals or drug-dealing.
Course, sitting back in Moscow.....Putin probably is sitting there and asking his guys for the number of folks they track and they indicate it's well over 350,000. Putin might grin for a minute, and then ask how many of the US's 90,000 made it onto the KGB list of 350,000. The KGB guy might grin and then indicate they know precisely because they already have a copy of the US list.
So, a lot of print.....over nothing? Yeah. It's almost of the quality as the NCAA football updates from Mississippi State University for the week.
