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Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know something about U.S. spying. The NSA, with its 35,000 workers and a budget of $10.8 billion a year, is listening to everything everywhere in the world.

Allies? All lies! [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

But it is not acting alone. It is working in close cooperation with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which recently featured prominently in the news when The Independent revealed Britain's secret listening post in the heart of Berlin.

NSA documents and aerial photographs provided by Snowden suggest that Britain is operating its own covert listening post within a stone's throw of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament and Angela Merkel's office in the chancellery, using hi-tech equipment on the embassy roof.

The revelation comes after the NSA's tapping of Merkel's phone caused a diplomatic crisis between Germany and the United States, and further poisoned the atmosphere among Western allies. The EU asked David Cameron's government to explain the activities of GCHQ in Europe. Cameron's official spokesman said, "We don't comment on intelligence questions."

According to Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, the U.S. and U.K. have worked in close cooperation over the last ten or so years to put entire populations under surveillance. Their aim is to collect and store "all signals all the time." They have worked closely with Internet service providers and telecom companies to collect enormous quantities of data -- including internet searches and all phone calls, texts, and e-mails that people send each other. In Edward Snowden's words, the U.S. and U.K. have "the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history," and "they (GCHQ) are worse than the U.S."

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