Privacy is an emotional issue in Europe, where memories of state-sponsored snooping by communist and fascist regimes still linger.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/global/us-internet-spying-draws-anger-and-envy.html?ref=world  And so the revelation Thursday that the U.S. National Security Agency had obtained routine access to e-mail, Web searches and other online data from many of the biggest U.S. Internet companies — whose users stretch far beyond U.S. shores — prompted hand-wringing about America’s moral authority. “If the U.S. complains about foreign governments spying and then it turns out it is doing the same thing — well, what are you complaining about?”
“The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny,” The Guardian wrote. “They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.”
Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency, had been given access to Prism since 2010.
“Retrieving information from private companies’ servers, without the knowledge of either the companies or the users concerned, does not comply in any way with European data privacy standards,”
“There’s a big difference between a national security investigation into a foreign individual who poses a terrorist threat to the U.S., and foreign individuals or corporations being spied on because they happen to use an e-mail service that runs through California,”
“There’s no liberty anymore, But this is no surprise, Big companies want to know who their enemies are,”