Secret European deals to hand over private data to America

Since this Snowden story broke, there has been a lot of (justified) criticism of the US government. And rightly so. But I think anyone - living in the US or not - would be foolish to think that most (if not all) other world governments don't do similar things. Especially the more advanced, "first world" governments. Maybe the government of Botswana or Nicaragua or Kenya doesn't have such well developed intelligence facilities as those of the USA, but I expect their governments are spying on people as well.

It's just that this story is particularly galling to Americans since we like to think that the 4th Amendment to our Constitution provides some measure of protection against indiscriminate snooping by our government... so finding out (well, really, confirming) that they are doing this, points out a hole in our system.

Other countries may not have the explicit wording in their founding documents that would seem to protect against this stuff... but then, maybe some do. I'm not familiar enough with every world government to say. But regardless of what your nation's charter says, I'd pretty much be willing to be money that they are doing things in the name of "national security" that you wouldn't approve of if you knew about them.

"This article has been taken down pending an investigation."

WHAT?

In any case, here's the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.gua...

When Merkel tried to defend Obama (but not in a completely obvious way), I realized Germany must be up to no good, too. It reminded me of when Obama made a speech about Egypt, when the revolution was going on. It was pretty obvious he didn't want to criticize the leader (the one the people were creating a revolution against) too much, because they had huge ties with Egypt, and they supported him a lot in the past (like US does with Saudi Arabia, and other dictatorships around the world).

Hopefully Merkel loses her position over this at the next election, but I want her to lose it over this issue, so the ones coming after her know not to repeat her mistake.