Crying Over Spilled Spying

LET THE MOANING AND GROANING BEGIN! Nothing equals the indignation of criminals caught in the act, when it comes to righteous expressions of outrage and exaggerated, pained resentment. And so it is now with the international "intelligence gathering community", on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the British and the American spy agencies are calling the Edward Snowden disclosures "the greatest gift that terrortists ever received", or some such rot. Al Qaeda is jumping for joy, they tearfully claim, because the great satan(s) have had their secrets spilled, and are much weakened. What are we all supposed to do, feel frightened, or guilty, or sympathetic? To find out, merely pick up and activate your telephone. The National Security Agency will be there, us usual, listening, you you can tell your particular monitoring agent just how sorry you are for their misfortune. The information that Snowden spirited away and shared with the rest of us has by now been rather thoroughly itemized. It conatins nothing about the location of any nuclear weapons, the flight schedules of any B52 bombers, nor does it give out the activation code numbers of missiles, warheads, nor even any military strategy, troop movements, nor deployment plans. So what's all the big fuss? Injured pride, most probably. Good, solid, simple, hurt human pride, as in, my toy is broken, and daddy won't fix it. What Snowden revealed to us all is that we, the people of the United States of America, are being watched closely by our own government, and we aren't the only ones. Hell, it looks like all seven billion people on this planet, and the governments that govern them, are being surveilled. Such is the shocking extent of bloated spy budgets, overreaching, out of control NSA & M16 (Britain's spy agency) perfidy and institutional paranoia. If Snowden had actually given any terrorists anything useful, we might have cause for concern. What he gave was a rude awakening to all us good citizen non terrorts types; that we can't trust those who are paid to protect us. So it may be that he did us all who don't work for a spy agency a favor.