Spying for fun and personal profit
by digby
Greenwald was on Anderson Cooper last night talking about James Clapper’s contention that they need to spy on pretty much everyone in the world and will continue to do so whether anybody likes it or not. (Ok, I exaggerated a little. But Clapper was pretty arrogant. )
Glenn makes a point that just cannot be overstated: yes, everyone spies on everyone. But there’s only one nation that’s making a fetish out of it with unlimited resources and no accountability. Glenn also appeared on Andrea Mitchell a couple of days ago and pointed out that it’s entirely possible that the president didn’t know anything about this.
We’re dealing with an agency that’s clearly unaccountable to anyone. The volume and complexity is just too great for anyone who isn’t deeply enmeshed in the system to fully understand it. And on this issue of tapping foreign leaders, I’m going to guess it’s actually likely they didn’t tell the president they were doing it — because he’s a world leader too, a member of a very select club that probably doesn’t much like the idea of other leaders being privy their private conversations. It’s very believable to me that they’d think this was something he was better off not knowing about.
There is a long history in this country of rogue agency collection of dirt on politicians. There is every reason to believe that this “intelligence” was used by the head of the agency for his own purposes. I guess everyone assumes that was in the olden days and it could never happen again. I just don’t know why they would think that.
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