Not only that, but *obviously* they have the ability to associate a number with someone at some point - if not, then what is the point in collecting and analysing anything? Metadata doesn't allow you to see the *content* of a call, but obviously it has to give you some information or you wouldn't bother with it.

From the point of view of intelligence agencies worldwide, there's no real difference. Both have an impact of their respective countries interests. Both have been done for decades. This ship has sail a long time ago.

You think people are going to vote Republicans because they are pissed at the NSA?
The Patriot Act was voted under a Republican president.

The fact that the NSA was spying foreign nationals wasn't a big secret indeed, considering it's the very reason of the organisation existence. But then, it wasn't a big secret in the US either.

The details of actual operations is a completely different matter. To take the most obvious example, the Germans certainly didn't know Merkel cell phone was compromised for so long, or they would have reacted before. Same thing for the Chinese targets Snowden disclosed. The Chinese knew the US were very interested in what they were doing, but it obviously doesn't mean they knew about the actual targets or the actual vulnerabilities use to compromise them. And that's where the big loss is for the NSA.

The US government isn't pissed about Snowden because "the entire US population" learned about their foreign eavesdropping operations, but because foreign intelligence agencies did.

That's the number of people with Top Secret clearance, some times necessary to merely work on some governments projects. It's not really a meaningful number at all (it certainly doesn't has anything to do with "people employed to monitor web traffic").

It's true for almost anything.

The world isn't divided between thinkers and doers. People who believe that generally see themselves on the thinker side, and they don't want to do, so it's a narrative that fits them well.

In practice, I've met very few good thinkers who weren't also doers in one way or another, simply because it's very hard to actually have good ideas if you never got down to implementing them. An idea can feel good and sounds great, but if you don't have the experience in knowing what works and what doesn't, how to see and deal with edge cases and exceptions, it's probably not that great - or, put another way, you are probably not a good judge of its greatness.

And that's the biggest problem with the "lets reinvent the world" crowd - if you don't know how the world works, why it works, and if you never actually managed to reinvent anything in your house, in your community, in your business, it's quite doubtful your great idea to save the planet is actually interesting. And it's also why so many of the world's doers seem to do so often the same things, and take the same decisions in front of the same situations - not because they are stupid and ignorant, but because more often than not, they already figured out what works and what doesn't, and the difference between what they can dream and what they can accomplish.

Yes, the ones THAT ARE DETECTED are openly published. The ones that aren't remain unknown. Obviously if China would tell us every time they infiltrate a specific corporation, it would make the job of security professionals much easier.

He did disclose very concrete details. For example, he mentioned the Chinese University of Hong-Kong in his interview.

No. I'm not even a US citizen.

It's just obvious to anyone with more than a single brain cell. How the hell do you expect intelligence agencies to work if they have to tell the world what they do every time they do it? It's not a very difficult concept to understand.

You make no sense. If the CIA and the NSA have to tell Americans and the press of all the legal foreign intelligence operations they conduct, well, better just close them because as institutions they just became completely useless.

You can't spy if you have to tell your enemy every time you're doing it.

Cyber intelligence operations on specific and named China targets are not "known by everyone already".

The fact that we know (or highly suspect) the CIA to spy on Russia doesn't make it suddenly ok for a CIA employee to reveal the existence of specific Russia spying operations, or the identity of spies.

The NSA (and the CIA) are institutions designed to perform foreign intelligence operations. The very fact that it's illegal for them to spy on american people implies that it's ok to spy on foreigners: that's their role. That's the very reason they were created. I have a hard time believing how the American people couldn't "know" that.

As for specific intelligence operations, obviously those cannot be made public for reasons that I feel are unnecessary to explain here.

So I fail to see what your point is.

In an interview earlier this week, Snowden mentioned how the NSA conducted cyber espionage operations on Hong Kong and China infrastructures. He even mentioned specific targets.

These are clearly "highly classified state secrets", unrelated to the domestic spying scandals. He had no reason to reveal that to the press, as it is completely unrelated to his whistleblowing claims.

So, he could be "lying" about domestic spying, and still be prosecuted for espionage.

Isn't this just a special case of a honeytoken?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeytoken

No, the goal is to show that information disclosed by Manning ended up helping "the enemy". That this information was "in the public domain" at one point isn't important, since it's the unauthorized disclosure that is being prosecuted.