This one's about the latest leak in our intelligence sieve. Sort of.

     Okay, the NSA is all over the news because they have been listening to people's phone calls.  Actually, they have been doing alot more than that, ever since the agency was founded (in 1952, if memory serves).  The NSA is tasked with providing security for the United States by listening to every piece of communications there is on the planet.  They are not chartered to operate domestically, which is what a good part of the media panic is all about...but the handshake deal they have with all of the major communications providers has been going on for a long time.  Most of them cuddled up to the NSA as soon as they were asked--decades ago--without any kind of court order.  Please note that the NSA does not have a fleet of silent black helicopters or a highly trained cadre of assassins at their beck and call.  They are eavesdroppers taken to the highest degree.  Typically they just have a bank of supercomputers monitoring all the chatter, looking for certain buzzwords like jihad or bomb.  Some of these get brought to human eyes for further examination.  Most get discarded.  A rare few save lives.

     Now, I don't like the idea of any of my phone calls or texts or emails being read by anyone but the person or persons I intended them for any more than the next person.  The harsh truth of the matter is that, unless your browsing with Tor and using Hushmail with the settings tooled all the way up, your communications are not private.  Your phone company keeps this data, as does your email provider.  They data mine every scrap of information they can get and sell it for a huge profit.

     (* I'm pinning this asterisk here because privacy is something I would like to devote an entire post to later.)

     To my readers, please not that I have not written this post in order to condemn or condone the NSA, any other intelligence gathering agency or tool, the White House, the current or any past administration, or the government in general.  I would just like to point out a few things.

     First, if you are reading this, it is very unlikely that anyone in a position like Edward Snowden (the source of the recent leak of what I heretofore thought was common knowledge regarding the NSA) is going to be listening to any of your phone calls or reading your texts unless you are some kind of terrorist.  Second, the United Staes is not the only government that does this--every government on the planet does, or tries to--ours is just one of the best at it.  Third, Mr. Snowden has taken refuge in China.  I would dearly love to know what he is telling the Chinese in exchange for that amnesty, and what his bank balances are--though to be perfectly honest most of the traitors in the espionage history of our nation committed their crimes through some kind of misplaced idealism, rather than for money--though they usually took money as well.  What Mr. Snowden did was no different that what PFC Bradley Manning did.  They both broke oaths that they took to defend you and me and our friends and families--and our Constitution--from our enemies, and then helped those same enemies with their actions.

     Reasons, moralization, or civic outrage notwithstanding, these men are criminals.

     To be more specific: traitors.