Fog mostly this Sunday on California’s north coast with a bit of sunshine on occasion, and bad heat just about everywhere else.

And talk about a way-hot scandal — the NSA has become a rolling playbill of serious surveillance hijinks with a new episode near daily, complete with international outrage and screams of WTF!

(Illustration found here).

In a narrative seemingly endless, the latest from yesterday:

Information obtained by SPIEGEL shows that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions.
The information appears in secret documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL has in part seen.
A “top secret” 2010 document describes how the secret service attacked the EU’s diplomatic representation in Washington.

And, of course and quite naturally, European leaders are flabbergasted:

If the reports are correct, the U.S. approach to intelligence-gathering is reminiscent of Cold War practices and “utterly inappropriate,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Germany’s minister of justice, said in a statement today.
Every month about 500 million connections from Germany were tapped, including phone calls, e-mails and chats, according to Spiegel.
The U.S. agency classified Germany as a “third-class” partner and “target,” the magazine said.

This little Ed Snowden pop-up is pretty nasty. And the NSA covers a lot of earth ground, everybody but these guys: Only Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand were explicitly exempted from spy attacks.
And this whole affair throws shit in the fan for negotiations upcoming in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), which starts in a week, and is a major joint effort between the US and the EU. T-TIP is fairly impressive and covers tariffs, and taxes on imports and exports, among other stuff. Considered way-important by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who claims T-TIP is “…a once-in-a-generation prize and it must be seized.”
Looks like around the neck, however.
Can a negotiating table work when one of those parties at that table is a snooping asshole?
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding: “There should be no spying between partners.
We can’t negotiate a large transatlantic market if there is any doubt that our partners are bugging the offices of European negotiators,” Reding said at a meeting with EU citizens in Luxembourg, according to her spokesperson.
Spying on the world.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano blubbered out an ominous, ironic denial on all these continual surveillance disclosures by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies, and no worries:

“I think people have gotten the idea that there’s an Orwellian state out there that somehow we’re operating in. That’s far from the case,” she told Errol Louis during an appearance on Road to City Hall.
Despite civil liberties advocates’ fears that monitoring efforts have gone too far, “there are lots of protections built into the system,” Ms. Napolitano said, pointing to a privacy office embedded in her own department that is “constantly reviewing our policies and procedures.”
She further stressed the court review system.
“No one should believe that we are simply going willy-nilly and using any kind of data that we can gather,” she said.

Interesting to see how the Obama administration tip-toes willy-nilly through the TV tulips this coming week on this yet another snoop bomb with awful national security implications — or watch NSA head honcho Keith Alexander to seek words and phrases to side-step some terrible news.

And so it goes — end of the weekend.