What we learned about spies

The Edward Snowden saga playing on the front pages are giving us a lot of insights into the business of spying.

1. Spies look like ordinary people living upper middle class lives.
2. Even a high school dropouts can pull in six figure salaries if they're good with computers and can keep their mouth shut.
3. It's pretty tough to keep anything secret with 1.5 million people having top secret clearance.  About one-third of those people work for private contractors.  The US has outsourced a lot of their spying business to industry.
4. They can get any information they want, phone calls, emails, the works.  They can record your phone conversations and store them digitally and keep them as long as they want.