Whenever anyone challenges yet another power grab by government bureaucrats to spy, harass, and otherwise push their noses where it doesn’t belong, the post-9/11 "explanation" is always the same: It’s all the fault of the terrorists, because, don’tcha know, we’ve got to keep our Eye on them all the time. So shut up, whiner, it’s for your own good!

The Snowden revelations prove this is all so much BS.

The scooping up of phone "metadata" and online content, so it can be stored away for a rainy day, is just the tip of the iceberg. Now it turns out that much of what Snowden exposed is all about the US ginning up a cyberwar offensive by sniffing out "targets" overseas. Please don’t tell me the NSA is snooping around the European Union’s government computers because they’re out hunting "terrorists." And what about Japan – are we really supposed to believe the US is all that concerned about Al-Qaeda-in-Nippon, or is something else going on here? The Japanese, for their part, are just a little taken aback: