Here we are in one word — Friday!
Chilly and overcast up here on California’s north coast as we gleefully trot off into the weekend.

Despite a lot of other shit happening, the NSA soap opera continues apparently unabated — beyond the leaders of Mexico, Germany, France, the Netherlands, others I forget, the US intelligence agency monitored at least 35 world heads-of-state at last count:

(Illustration found here).

Another Eddie Snowden exclusive — how did that guy get away with a ton of material?
From the Guardian:

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its “customer” departments, such as the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their “Rolodexes” so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.
The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named.
These were immediately “tasked” for monitoring by the NSA.

WTF — “customer” departments. What is this? JC Penny’s?

Clincher of all this bullshit: But the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced “little reportable intelligence.”

Yeah, right. And NSA honcho Gen. Keith Alexander wants this Snowden-like leaking to stop:

“I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department’s “Armed With Science” blog.
“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” the NSA director declared.
Alexander did not elaborate on what he meant by reporters “selling” documents or what options he might consider for halting the disclosures.
An NSA spokeswoman declined to expand on the general’s comments.
The NSA director’s frustration with the flurry of leaks appears to be building.
The interview was posted Thursday, the same day the Guardian reported that the U.S. monitored calls of 35 world leaders after obtaining their phone numbers from other U.S. government officials.

Jason Ditz at antiwar.com reflects on the good general’s total bullshit: Alexander’s comments during the NSA scandal have mostly been blanket denials, and even after some of those denials have been proven flat out untrue he has stuck to that story. He seems to still be holding out hope that after months of confirmed reports based on official documents, everyone will somehow be convinced to forget about everything and just trust him.
Another, “yeah, right.”

A wonder these clowns can even think is such a manner — but they’re so self-assured and so above the fray, the rest of us are not real worthy of watching them watch all us. The NSA has so grown because every-freakin’-body has been so frightened of terror, of being in the bomb sights of a suicide nutcase — and no matter the loss of rights and freedoms, we must have “security” first.
And these snoop-dog boys have no respect for the turnaround. Former NSA head-hole Michael Hayden is not too happy with his conversations going worldwide — a little talk on a train ride got Michael all upset.
Via HuffPost:

Progressive activist Tom Matzzie found himself on a train sitting near Hayden on Thursday, and quickly sent out tweets describing the former director’s conversation.
Matzzie wrote on Twitter that Hayden was “blabbing ‘on background as a former senior admin official.'”
When HuffPost asked Hayden over email whether Matzzie’s version of his phone conversation was faithful, Hayden replied that the depiction was “not especially accurate.”
Hayden didn’t respond to another email asking for specifics.
…
“He was suggesting that the administration should have known that this was going on, the foreign intelligence eavesdropping,” Matzzie alleged Hayden said on the train.
“He was suggesting to reporters that the administration was naive. It reminded me of that scene from ‘A Few Good Men’ — ‘You can’t handle the truth.’
He was casting himself as Colonel Jessep.”

None of these shitheads could handle the truth, which is all this spying is crazy and illegal and immoral, and anti-American. And stupid.
Marcy Wheeler, who follows this shit way-closely, commented this morning on how transparency is multi-faceted:

For the moment, I’ll just bracket the many examples where stuff happens in secret — being put on a no fly list, having your neighbor recruited as an informant using data the NSA found, having your computer invaded based on equations of Anonymous with hacker — that still have effects.
On those, no one can now assess whether something bad has happened unjustly, because no one will ever see it.
And I’ll bracket all the things everyone has ever written about how living in a Panopticon changes behavior and with it community.

The bottom line of all this shit?
Right now, Germany and France are pissed, and the current EU summit in Brussels is all aghast at how the US is watching everything that moves and speaks on this planet.
And some of those European peoples understand:

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said, in reference to life in Communist-era East Germany, that not so long ago “there was a part of Germany where political police were spying on people’s lives daily”.
“We have recent experience of what totalitarianism means,” he said.
“We know what happens when a state uses powers that intrude on people’s lives.”

And we know them snoop dogs wore jack boots.