10 Creepiest Government Secrets
2. Wikileaks Debacle & Edward Snowden
So basically, the NSA is spying on everyone, friend or foe, everyone knows this, and still nothing has been done. On top of that, there's a good chance rape charges were concocted to take care of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Creeped out yet? You should be. When Wikileaks began publishing over 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables in 2010, it changed the world and the spy industry as we know it. No longer did we believe our governments were working in our best interest.
Those people we used to think of as tinfoil hat wearing paranoids? Turns out they were right. It has become clear that the U.S. government in particular, and the NSA and other agencies, were completely out of control and in violation of multiple U.S. and international laws. The wikileaks debacle was so bad that the U.S. government began warning other nations in advance of how damaging the leaked cables would be.
Among the revelations: Hillary Clinton had been spying on the UN, the U.S. had secretly carried out bombings in Yemen, the UK weaseled their way around a ban on housing cluster bombs, Israel was working to bring Gaza to collapse, the U.S. used Turkey as part of a secret rendition (read: kidnapping) program, and China had been cyber attacking Google.
After the leak, rape charges were brought in Sweden against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (who had files leaked from U.S. military member Bradley Manning), however, one of his accusers turned out to be linked to the CIA. Coincidence? Assange became a political refugee. There was enough info in the cablegate documents to last a lifetime, but then a bigger bombshell hit: in 2013, former CIA system administrator Edward Snowden began leaking classified documents showing that the NSA was running a data mining/surveillance program named PRISM that was overly broad and collected data from just about anywhere on court-approved search terms.
The program also had the involvement of the UK government. The Snowden bombshell was even bigger than wikileaks, and once again revealed that the US and UK governments could not be trusted by their allies or citizens. Snowden went on the run, was eventually helped by Wikileaks (the two leaks had a lot of similarities), and wound up being housed in Russia, while he awaits word on acceptance into the E.U. Multiple books can and will be written on these cases, more than we could ever include here - but considered your privacy in this day and age shot.