Source: Mike Malloy
We're rooting for Norway in the forthcoming Olympics, assuming no terrorist attack closes the games. Two Norwegian lawmakers have nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize because his NSA revelations "contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order."
Wow. Wouldn't it be something if Snowden and Obama won, just a few years apart?
Snowden's steady stream of information has been earth-shattering. The lastest tidbits include the fact that our government is using the popular online game "Angry Birds" to monitor our digital activities -- and the less sexy revelation that our government spied on attendees of the 2009 Climate Change summit in Copenhagen.
Spying on environmental negotiations is almost expected these days. Huffington Post has this to say:
"The document indicates that the NSA planned to gather information as the leaders and negotiating teams of other countries held private discussions throughout the Copenhagen meeting. '[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts -- details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,' the document states. The information likely would be used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama, among others, according to the document.
We've come to expect this type of political espionage. But Angry Birds? Really? And it's bigger than that.
As Time reports:
"Smartphone applications like Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and even games like Angry Birds provide intelligence agencies with riches of data, including location tracking, address books, buddy lists and phone logs, according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
"Google Maps is a particularly rich seam for data miners in British and U.S. intelligence, the documents say.
"'It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a G.C.H.Q. [the British equivalent of the NSA] system,' says a secret 2008 document from the British agency."
Think about that the next time you use your phone to find the nearest fro-yo place. Or the next time you send a little green pig to its final reward.
