The furore over the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal phone by the US intelligence agencies dramatised spectacularly what Edward Snowden’s whistle blowing had revealed recently. The US intelligence agencies have become a state unto themselves. But it would appear that the White House and other state institutions at the highest level were not entirely ignorant of it and some even were collaborating. Indeed, it has been reported that Angela Merkel had her phone tapped for 10 years. She was not the only foreign leader worthy of this ‘honour’. There were reportedly 35 of them under the NSA’s phone surveillance, among them the Brazilian president, who reacted angrily by cancelling her state visit to the US.
In the case of Angela Merkel, it is important to realise that she grew up in what was then East Germany, where the state intelligence agency, Stasi, was omnipotent with almost every family being spied upon through relations and friends. And it was a tremendous relief for Germans when the Berlin Wall dividing the two Germanys (East and West) was pulled down in 1989, and the country reunited a year later. And for the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, an erstwhile East German citizen, to find out now that Germany’s closest ally and protector during the Cold War years, the US, has supplanted Stasi at the international level and is privy to all her personal communications must come as a shock triggering understandable fury. In these circumstances, it was not surprising that she reportedly picked up the phone to vent her fury at President Obama demanding an explanation and satisfaction. Which was followed up with the US ambassador being summoned to Germany’s foreign ministry for a formal diplomatic explanation and a dressing down.
About the same time, the French President, Francois Hollande, was not amused to learn that the US intelligence scooped 70 million of French citizens’ personal communications in one month, demanding an explanation from President Obama, with the US ambassador summoned to explain. And Spain had the ‘honour’ of 60 million of its citizens’ phones tapped in one month alone. Italy was less ‘distinguished’ with only 46 million of the citizens similarly targeted. The issue of US spying on European countries was a hot subject at the recent EU summit in Brussels, with Germany and France sending delegations to find out answers and to set parameters for such US intelligence activities. According to German Chancellor Merkel, there has been a breach of trust and new parameters might be needed to rebuild trust.
Spying between countries is a matter of fact and has been forever. But generally, friendly countries and their leaders have been treated with greater sensitivity, even where, in extreme cases, this might happen. But since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US sees terrorism everywhere, which is not to suggest that it is not a serious problem requiring extensive intelligence gathering to deal with it. But the way US intelligence is operating, as revealed by Edward Snowden, it seems to have developed a momentum of its own for the sake of simply using the technology available. And that is creepy because its potential for misuse against ordinary citizens is mind-boggling. And it is even creepier when the US arrogates to itself the right to equate US security with securing the world, and expects other countries to be grateful for it. It was such errant nonsense that led the US into military adventures like Afghanistan and Iraq, and also contributed to the massive US debt. Remember former president Bush’s dictum about the war on terrorism, which said: if you are not with us, you are against us. Apart from massive data mining, an additional tool to fight terrorism is the mindless expansion of drone killings in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places as terrorist hubs.
Terrorism undoubtedly is a serious problem. But to beat the terrorism drum all the time with an Orwellian terminology and an out-of-control technology is giving it a larger-than-life image, where citizens of democratic countries are required to passively submit to draconian measures to curtail their privacy and freedom. It was, therefore, heartening when thousands of US citizens recently turned out to protest against the use of an ever-expanding electronic spider web that their government has created to snare them and people of other countries. But instead of doing something to rein in the monster of surveillance, the US intelligence chiefs are against any curb on their activities.
Indeed, they are trying to co-opt their European counterparts in the whole business. According to General Keith Alexander, director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), as reported in the press, “ It [data mining] represents information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defence of our countries and in support of military operations.” And both General Alexander and US National Intelligence chief James Clapper defended spying on foreign leaders as being a basic pillar of US intelligence operations that had gone on for decades. Indeed, some are even advocating that the media should be prevented from publishing further Snowden disclosures. As a loyal US ally, the British Prime Minister David Cameron has gone even further, threatening the British media with punitive action, particularly the Guardian newspaper that has been in the forefront of exposing massive NSA snooping by publishing Snowden’s leaked material.
There is an urgent need for greater transparency in the US intelligence collection, like how and why the leaders of friendly and allied countries are ‘worthy’ subjects for spying on. President Barack Obama has hinted things might have gone too far, especially in the matter of spying on leaders of friendly countries. Apart from breaching trust among allies and friends, such massive spying on people also undermines the basic values of democratic societies, like going about their daily business without the fear of ‘Big Brother watching you’. Such disregard for human values is what bothered Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who was recently convicted of leaking material to WikiLeaks.
In his letter to Obama seeking pardon, he wrote, “ …It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing…We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan….” In other words, Manning was acting with a higher purpose to restore humanity in policy making in the US in making secret cables available to WikiLeaks.
In the same way, Snowden is reported to have said, “ …I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.” And he added that he could not “in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will probably agree with this after her personal experience of NSA phone tapping over the last 10 years.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at [email protected]