[rdtsc]

Granted they could have done it before as well, it is just that the shining example of "open" and "free" has been revealed to suck up and spy on everything and everyone so now they can easily do it because there NSA did the PR bit for them. "Oh look the evil NSA is taking out citizens' data". You see, it actually is so and no matter how sarcastic you want to get it is still true.

Same with terrorism. When we attacked Afghanistan and Iraq with the War Of Terror. That opportunity didn't escape the Russians, they quickly issues a letters of support of American people blah blah and then proceeded to switch to running their own War of Terror in Chechnya. This was very nice as they just let the US Dept Of State do all the PR for them.

> of their democratic government.

Well presumably our democratic government is terrific. We have great income inequality, we torture people in some hidden loophole prison on a island, we invaded multiple countries with some WMD fake pretest. We are blasting away even our own citizens with drones in countries we are not even at war with. So one can argue democracy is not really that nice, it obviously doesn't work very well or out people are just mean and evil. Which, then, maybe they don't deserve democracy.

[ThePhysicist]

Just to clarify: In my comment I was not actually suggesting that I consider Russia to be a democratic country, quite the contrary in fact. Sorry if that didn't become clear.