14 DAY TRIAL // Over and over again, the NSA has claimed that all its spying, even as more and more of it is revealed, has had one purpose, namely to thwart terrorists. The agency may have had a chance to argue that keeping track of all phone calls in the US or snooping in on vast amounts of Internet traffic had something to do with terrorists.
But it can't use that excuse to explain why it bugged the UN building, allied embassies, and friendly world leaders. The NSA explained that by saying that everyone does it, so it's OK. Except, of course, not everyone can spy on the UN or on Obama's phone calls.
But the answer to why the NSA is spying so much is simple: because it can and, until now, because it could do it and get away with it, as no one ever had to know.
The New York Times has a long, really long, review of the agency's behavior. Spread throughout the article are some new revelations from the Edward Snowden files shared by the Guardian, quite a few of them, but nothing major.
That's by design; the gist of the article is that the NSA captures everything, in whatever way possible, without a clear reason why. It shares its data with various government agencies and institutions, but it gathers a lot more data than it needs.
The New York Times uses a great example of this. Back in April, Barack Obama was supposed to meet with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. It was a friendly talk about the Syrian chemical weapons, climate change, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the meeting, but the NSA got involved and produced the UN secretary's talking points ahead of the meeting. It's unclear whether the president ever saw the report from the NSA, but it's hard to see what value it would have had. So why get it in the first place? It's just because the NSA can't help itself.