The NSA doesn't even try to mask its disdain for the average citizen

Sep 10, 2013 09:07 GMT  ·  By

The NSA's strategy to dealing with the continuing string of leaks detailing its massive surveillance operations is the same it has always been, ignore the scandal and wait for it to go away.

Thankfully, it's been about three months since the first leak and the scandal hasn't gone away. If anything, there's a new troubling revelation every few days.

Still, the agency continues to claim that illegally spying on Americans, snooping into the private affairs of large foreign corporations, spying on the UN or the European Commission, and so on are all done to thwart terrorists.

But if you want to know how the agency really feels about you, the average citizen, don't listen to the public statements. The NSA claims it's doing it all to protect Americans, but then goes and calls the majority of those Americans "zombies."

In one internal NSA presentation, leaked by Edward Snowden and seen by the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, the author makes several references to George Orwell's 1984, quite proud it seems that the agency has managed to achieve many of the things the book warned about.

In fact, he congratulated Steve Jobs for being "Big Brother" and putting surveillance devices into the hands of so many, and comparing smartphone buyers to "zombies."

In a recent report, Der Spiegel has revealed the extent to which the NSA is tapping into smartphone data to gather intelligence. The fact that the NSA has ways of breaking into phones isn't too surprising or indeed too worrying. It is its job after all. What is worrying, though, is how happy it is with the new smartphone culture and all the new possibilities of attack.

The NSA is ecstatic that companies take little care of user privacy and that users themselves do even less to protect themselves, making the agency's job a lot easier. The disdain the NSA shows, at an institutional level, for the people it's supposed to be protecting, is emblematic of the agency's attitude. In its view, if the "zombies" are making it so easy, they deserve to be spied on.