The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.
As was true for Brazil
previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving
most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story
there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! –
falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless
spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking
surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
There are three points worth making about these latest developments.
• First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel
reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that
the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her
indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also
targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of
many western leaders.
• Second, all of these governments
keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the
violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how
devoted they are to reform. If that's true, why are they allowing the
person who enabled all these disclosures – Edward Snowden – to be targeted for persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the whistle on all of this?
If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy
is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they
exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who
exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his
basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to
being imprisoned for decades by the US government?
Aside from the treaty obligations these
nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from
persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these
exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his
liberty and even life to bring them to light?
• Third, is there any doubt at all
that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when
insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated
by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™? Our reporting
has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.
Can even President Obama and his most
devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this
is all about Terrorism? That is what this superb new Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore
means when it argues that the Manning and Snowden leaks are putting an
end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a key weapon in its
soft power.
Speaking of an inability to maintain claims
with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light
of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that
they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture
and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit
hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable
evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander,
actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted (Techdirt has the full video here):
The head of the
embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing
journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an
end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by
former contractor Edward Snowden.
"I think it's wrong
that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 –
whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these –
you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview
with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to
do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my
perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director
declared. [My italics]
There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and
many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to
the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".
I'd love to know what ways, specifically,
General Alexander has in mind for empowering the US government to "come
up with a way of stopping" the journalism on this story. Whatever ways
those might be, they are deeply hostile to the US constitution –
obviously. What kind of person wants the government to forcibly shut
down reporting by the press?
Whatever kind of person that is, he is not
someone to be trusted in instituting and developing a massive
bulk-spying system that operates in the dark. For that matter, nobody
is.
