Mastering the art of French Spooking
by digby
Oh look, new revelations about NSA spying on the French. Ah well, I'm sure they deserve it. They are French, after all. (And I'd bet their emails are sizzling...) But once again, I find this sort of thing particularly interesting:
The documents which Le Monde has been able to see have not enabled the provision of further details on these methods. But they give sufficient explanation to lead us to think that the NSA targets concerned both people suspected of association with terrorist activities as well as people targeted simply because they belong to the worlds of business, politics or French state administration.
Sure. You just never know when a French businessman or politician is an al Qaeda operative or Chinese double-agent. Better to be safe than sorry. (And hey, if they happen to find out some little morsels that could be used for commercial means in the course of their terrorist and commie hunting, well that's good too.)
Speaking of which, now that he's leaving the military, where's NSA chief Keith Alexander going to land in the private sector do you suppose? Not that he'd ever use the information he's obtained running the most powerful global spy operation in the history of the world for anything but national security purposes. Unfortunately, as we've seen, "national security" is probably a more amorphous term than many people realize.
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