The NSA is staffed with voyeurs and peeping Toms who spy on everybody they can, all over the world, just because they can – even when there is no US national security interest. (See WaPo: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say.) And their pay comes out of the pockets of US taxpayers.
I’m not a Roman Catholic and I don’t keep up on everything that goes on in the Roman Catholic Church. But even I know that the Vatican does not pose a national security threat to the US. It isn’t harboring, training, or funding terrorists that might attack us. It isn’t calling for any acts of violence against the US or its citizens. It doesn’t have weaponry that could damage us. It isn’t engaged in political manipulations against the US.
Hey, NSA staffers: If you want to spy on some religious leaders, I suggest that the world is full of hostile imams and shaikhs and mullahs and ayatollahs who ARE involved in those things. It’s your job to spy on THEM. What the rest of us do is none of your business.
Telegraph (UK) has the story:
The National Security Agency spied on the future Pope Francis before and during the Vatican conclave at which he was chosen to succeed Benedict XVI, it was claimed on Wednesday.
The American spy agency monitored telephone calls made to and from the residence in Rome where the then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed during the conclave, the secret election at which cardinals chose him as pontiff on March 13.
The claims were made by Panorama, an Italian weekly news magazine, which said that the NSA monitored the telephone calls of many bishops and cardinals at the Vatican in the lead-up to the conclave, which was held amid tight security in the Sistine Chapel.
The information gleaned was then reportedly divided into four categories — “leadership intentions”, “threats to financial system”, “foreign policy objectives” and “human rights”.
At that time, Benedict XVI was Pope, suggesting that the Vatican may also have been monitored during the last few weeks of his papacy.
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