The Dead Moose on the Table at Angry Birds

I was amused by the story on the BBC News Web site about how hackers broke into Angry Birds and changed it to Spying Birds. It was also interesting that the Rovio response was that the company did not "collaborate or collude" with any government spy agency. However, I have to wonder whether or not they should have extended that quote by beginning it with "knowingly." What has struck me most about the latest round of news stories following up on the latest round of disclosures from Edward Snowden is the absence of any suggestion that organizations like the NSA and GCHQ were not harvesting any data that were not already being harvested by advertising companies. Indeed, it would not be hard to create a "shadow" advertising company that would be promoting itself on the basis of the power of its data analysis abilities without anyone ever finding out that the company did not have any customers. Could it be that all this fuss is about nothing more than NSA struggling to know just as much as Google already knows?