N.S.A. Dragnet Included Allies, Aid Groups and Business Elite

Petrobras is one of the largest NOCs and one of the biggest trends in the oil & gas industry has been the shift in power from multinational oil companies like Shell and BP to national oil companies like Petrobras and Sinopec.

As you can imagine, the balance of obligation of national oil companies leans in favor of the governments which they represent over shareholders, making the pursuit of profit a lesser factor when political issues are at play.

No Petrobras has no known ties to organized crime. However if you were to ask a Brazilian citizen, they may think otherwise since we consider many of our politicians to be as corrupt as professional crime organizations. Then again, as a US permanent resident, I consider our politicians here to be as corrupt as the Brazilian ones. The Brazilian politicians steal while in office, while American politicians have institutionalized corruption by setting up a system where they get paid back indirectly after leaving office for all the favors they did while in office.

So to answer your question, some would say both the NSA and Petrobras have ties to organized crime, or, more accurately, institutionalized crime.

You know that the NSA doesn't have to give information to US companies for industrial espionage to have occurred. Any of the hundreds of thousands of Americans indirectly employed contractors providing services to the NSA could have committed industrial espionage. If you don't think people at Booz Allen, Stratfor and other companies largely staff by psychopaths are unlikely to engage in such unethical activities, I have a bridge to sell you.

Individuals are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, but organizations being made up of many individuals, some of which are likely guilty to to statistical frequency of guilty people in a random population of people, are to be assumed guilty until proven innocent. If we know anything for certain from the last ~7 months, it's that "trust us, we're not doing anything wrong" is a bald-faced lie.

Because who would be so foolish then as to invest in R&D?

"Do you have a source for that?"

Yeah, I get the reason for asking that, but as a question, its rather devalued these days as far as the US and its TLA's are concerned. Given the disturbing unrestrained scope of US spying its reasonable to start with the assumption that the US has stolen any information that exists and used it to promote itself at the expense of even its allies. Problem is, when the likes of the NSA boldly claim to be able to access literally anything, anywhere, we must assume that all information and data are compromised. Doing anything different would be negligence.

Now the USA is in the same position Iraq was prior to the illegal invasion. It now has to prove a negative. Here is why:

Iraq was accused by the US and its lap dogs of having WMD (which incidentally was redefined to stitch up Iraq. Prior, WMD was understood to mean nukes. It got re-defined to mean bio and chem), and was expected to prove that it did not have them, or face the consequences. It failed in US eyes, and the US responded by killing many thousands of Iraq's people in its OTT invasion of "shock and awe". This was impossible as it is impossible to prove a negative. Iraq could not win in any way. Now, I think, the rest of the world, including its allies, would be reasonable in suspecting the US of having anything it likes in data terms, and must now prove it has not in order to regain any level of confidence. The US has to prove that it has not literally stolen money, IP, and business form non US companies by using stolen data to its advantage. The US has been stinging in its fines for banks acting illegally and defrauding government and public, acting like a moral god. Well, the same standards must apply to the US. If the US cannot prove its innocence, the rest of the world has every right to act in response. Unfair, and very difficult, but the US did set that standard. Like Iraq, the US must now some how prove its innocence. Or admit to its wrong doing.

The UK had no defence here either. We conspired in this. And I as a UK voter would like to know what we got out of it. Or did the US steal our information too? I wonder what Aussies and Kiwis think. Are we willing partners who knew what was really going on, and getting something valuable out of it, or were we all duped by the Americans?

Also, given the fact that the NSA is government organisation, it could be argued that what the US has engaged in is literally an act of war. There for its reasonable for countries like Germany, or regions like the EU, to investigate the US and if found guilty, demand reparations.

IMHO, its getting close to cards on table time, or the US get treated like an outcast.

Or, do we do what we always do, and ignore it?

I say it time to take a stand. If we dont, we all might as well make our countries US states and be done with it.

UNICEF help people who can't help themselves. There for they are leftie liberal socialists and a great threat to the American way...