<![CDATA[Some Observations on ‘Obamacare’ and the NSA Spying Scandal]]>

<![CDATA[Some Observations on ‘Obamacare’ and the NSA Spying Scandal]]>Two events have dominated the news over the past few months. One has been the “Obamacare” reform in the United States. The Republican Party, which controls the U.S. House of Representatives, threatened to default on the debts of the federal government unless Obamacare was repealed.

The other big story has been the continuing revelations of Edward Snowden about the widespread spying by the U.S. National Security Agency. Snowden’s revelations have lifted a corner of the curtain that hides the extent of U.S. spying on its European NATO “allies”—both the governments and the peoples of Europe.

This spying included the NSA’s tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone. More important has been the revelation that hundreds of millions of phone calls of people in Europe have been monitored by the NSA. As a result, Washington’s recent campaign against spying by the Chinese government on users of the Internet in that country has fallen flat. The world’s biggest “computer cracker”—someone who breaks into computers or computer networks with malicious intent—turns out be Uncle Sam himself.