The NoW affair is nothing new. People react so surprised. Isn't eavesdropping on people what police and intelligence agencies have been doing for the last 200 years? People should look at the story of French policeman Vidoq and the birth of modern policework, spying and corruption. The Roman Praetorian Guard did it too, and we are talking over 2000 years ago.

The only reason why people are scandalized is because it is a private company instead of "good and decent" people like the CIA and MI5. I wonder how much cell phone companies eavesdrop on people, as do Internet companies. People very quickly forget that companies like Google have for years been storing and data mining e-mail and other forms of communication, and the privacy policies behind Internet companies remain murky and ambiguous.

The reason why NoW is under pressure is because they used the eavesdropping for profit. Not that intelligence agencies don't engage in industrial espionage that will later end up in the hands of private companies for profit.

Where NoW really hits a low point is when it eavesdropped on vicitims of crime and terrorism. But then, police and intelligence agencies do that too, except not for profit. Well, except when paid up by somebody to disclose the information (like NoW did). Then if politicians (like a minister, for example) put pressure on the police or intelligence agencies to spy on people, isn't winning an election a form of profit too? Watergate comes to mind here.

The reality is that the media, the police, intelligence agencies and politicians play a game that is well integrated to ensure that money and political power fall in the right place. It is a scandal and a crime only when they get caught. Then there is "plausible deniability". "We were so busy doing something else that we never noticed". The public thinks that they are getting the news and the truth, when in reality they are getting sensationalism, propaganda and indoctrination. Newspaper and TV editors are central to the scheme. It is a vice that our governments learned during the Cold War when propaganda was central to the general anticommunist indoctrination of the population. Now the media and politicians merely use it for profit.