Portside

There has been widespread outrage in Europe over the scope of the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program. European experts, however, are not surprised by American whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations.

Every time there is a so-called terrorist attack on American soil, pressure to ramp up the reach of our increasingly omnipresent surveillance state spikes, sweeping ever-larger numbers of people and more intimate information concerning their lives into national databases.