President Barack Obama didn’t attend The Rolling Stones concert in Washington, DC Monday night, but lead singer Mick Jagger said that wasn’t likely to keep the commander-in-chief from checking out the show.
During the course of a two-hour-long show in the nation’s
capital on Monday, the legendary singer stopped to briefly
address the National Security Agency scandal that has plagued the
presidency in recent weeks.
According to the Washington Post and other eyewitnesses at
the sold-out show, Jagger stopped at one point to say to the
crowd, “I don’t think President Obama is here tonight. . . .
But I’m sure he’s listening in.”
Other attendees tweeted during the show that Jagger’s
mention of the president’s name prompted audible booing from the
audience, and a message from Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)
regarding the NSA quip accumulated nearly 1,000 retweets on
Twitter.
Monday’s show was the last American date of the Stones’ 50
and Counting tour and came in the midst of the Obama
administration’s manhunt for Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former
intelligence contractor that began leaking classified NSA secrets
to The Guardian newspaper earlier this month. Snowden is reported
to currently be in Russia and could be seeking asylum from the
likes of Ecuador, Iceland or elsewhere, although the White House
has demanded he be extradited back to the US where he faces
charges of espionage.
Shortly after The Guardian’s first NSA disclosure, Snowden
identified himself as the source of the documents. Articles in
the British newspaper and others have since detailed classified
materials released by Snowden that regard the US government’s en
masse surveillance of people around the world, American or
non.
In the first document attributed to Snowden, the
government was shown to be accumulating the phone records of
millions of subscribers to telecom company Verizon each and every
day. In another, he linked the NSA with accessing the personal
correspondence conducted over private Internet services, such as
Google and Facebook. Monday’s show in DC took place at the
Verizon Center, an 18,000-person arena that’s been named for the
telecom company since they absorbed the venue’s original owner,
MCI Inc., in 2006.
This article originally appeared on: RT