Category Archives: Five Eyes

The NSA has harmed transatlantic relations more than any al Qaeda operative could

Josef Joffe writes: “Every good spy story,” my friendly (former) CIA operative told me, “has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so, the snooping on the German chancellor and her European colleagues will surely stop.” He didn’t say: “It won’t resume.” Because it always does in a new guise, perhaps more elegantly and subtly.

For states need to know what other states are up to – friends or foes. Even so-called friends are commercial and diplomatic rivals. Some of our friends deal with our enemies, selling them dual-use technology good for insecticides, but also for nerve gas. Or metallurgical machinery that can churns out tools as well as plutonium spheres.

Let’s take an earlier story. Recall Echelon, the spy scandal that roiled Atlantic waters in the 90s. It was set up by the Five Eyes – the Anglo powers of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – to monitor signal traffic in the Warsaw Pact. After the cold war – spies always look for gainful employment – it was turned inward, on the Europeans, to scan satellite-transmitted communications, allegedly for industrial espionage, too.

Was it stopped? Yes, the US handed over its listening station in the town of Bad Aibling to the Germans, but the game never ends. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Snowden asks U.S. to stop treating him like a traitor

The New York Times reports: Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American security contractor granted temporary asylum by Russia, has appealed to Washington to stop treating him like a traitor for revealing that the United States has been eavesdropping on its allies, a German politician who met with Mr. Snowden said on Friday.

Mr. Snowden made his appeal in a letter that was carried to Berlin by Hans-Christian Ströbele, a veteran member of the Green Party in the German Parliament. Mr. Ströbele said he and two journalists for German news outlets met with Mr. Snowden and a person described as his assistant — probably his British aide, Sarah Harrison — at an undisclosed location in or near Moscow on Thursday for almost three hours.

Mr. Ströbele had gone to Moscow to explore whether Mr. Snowden could or would testify before a planned parliamentary inquiry into the eavesdropping. Any arrangements for Mr. Snowden to testify would require significant legal maneuvering, as it seemed unlikely that he would travel to Germany for fear of extradition to the United States.

In his letter, Mr. Snowden, 30, also appealed for clemency. He said his disclosures about American intelligence activity at home and abroad, which he called “systematic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act,” have had positive effects.

Yet “my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense,” Mr. Snowden wrote. “However, speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA pushed 9/11 as key ‘sound bite’ to justify surveillance

Jason Leopold reports: The National Security Agency advised its officials to cite the 9/11 attacks as justification for its mass surveillance activities, according to a master list of NSA talking points.

The document, obtained by Al Jazeera through a Freedom of Information Act request, contains talking points and suggested statements for NSA officials (PDF) responding to the fallout from media revelations that originated with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Invoking the events of 9/11 to justify the controversial NSA programs, which have caused major diplomatic fallout around the world, was the top item on the talking points that agency officials were encouraged to use.

Under the subheading “Sound Bites That Resonate,” the document suggests the statement “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”

NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander used a slightly different version of that statement when he testified before Congress on June 18 in defense of the agency’s surveillance programs.

Asked to comment on the document, NSA media representative Vanee M. Vines pointed Al Jazeera to Alexander’s congressional testimony on Tuesday, and said the agency had no further comment. In keeping with the themes listed in the talking points, the NSA head told legislators that “it is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.”

Critics have long noted the tendency of senior U.S. politicians and security officials to use the fear of attacks like the one that killed almost 3,000 Americans to justify policies ranging from increased defense spending to the invasion of Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA chief Keith Alexander blames diplomats for surveillance requests

The Guardian reports: The director of the National Security Agency has blamed US diplomats for requests to place foreign leaders under surveillance, in a surprising intervention that risks a confrontation with the State Department.

General Keith Alexander made the remarks during a pointed exchange with a former US ambassador to Romania, lending more evidence to suggestions of a rift over surveillance between the intelligence community and Barack Obama’s administration.

The NSA chief was challenged by James Carew Rosapepe, who served as an ambassador under the Clinton administration, over the monitoring of the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.

Rosapepe, now a Democratic state senator in Maryland, pressed Alexander to give “a national security justification” for the agency’s use of surveillance tools intended for combating terrorism against “democratically elected leaders and private businesses”.

“We all joke that everyone is spying on everyone,” he said. “But that is not a national security justification.”

Alexander replied: “That is a great question, in fact as an ambassador you have part of the answer. Because we the intelligence agencies don’t come up with the requirements. The policymakers come up with the requirements.”

He went on: “One of those groups would have been, let me think, hold on, oh: ambassadors.”

Alexander said the NSA collected information when it was asked by policy officials to discover the “leadership intentions” of foreign countries. “If you want to know leadership intentions, these are the issues,” the NSA director said.

The exchange on Thursday night drew laughs from the audience at the Baltimore Council on Foreign Relations, but did not seem to impress the former ambassador, who replied: “We generally don’t do that in democratic societies.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama administration seems ‘almost helpless’ in face of NSA scandal

Der Spiegel reports: German diplomats have traveled to Washington to express anger over surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone — but they have yet to make headway. The Obama administration seems “almost helpless” in the face of continued leaks, says one diplomat.

Both groups sit together in a White House conference room for about 90 minutes. On one side are a half a dozen members of the European Parliament. Facing them is an equally-sized American delegation, including Karen Donfried, senior director for European affairs in the National Security Council (NSC) and a fluent German speaker.

The agenda is full of issues that have become day-to-day business in trans-Atlantic relations: the scandal surrounding US monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, NSA espionage and accusations of spying. They’re all uncomfortable topics that diplomats of allied nations usually prefer to keep quiet about. But shortly before the meeting’s end, the Americans appear to look inward. How should we proceed, they ask contemplatively.

“They seemed almost helpless, as if they’d become obsessed,” says Jan Philipp Albrecht, a Green Party MEP and one of the participants in the meeting. “The US government representatives honestly looked like they didn’t know what to do. And they left no room for doubt that more spying revelations are to be expected.” The odd exchange is an accurate reflection of the mood in Washington. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Angry over U.S. surveillance, tech giants bolster defenses

The New York Times reports: Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops.

It is all reaction to reports of how far the government has gone in spying on Internet users, sneaking around tech companies to tap into their systems without their knowledge or cooperation.

What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives.

So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies.

Yet even as they take measures against government collection of personal information, their business models rely on collecting that same data, largely to sell personalized ads. So no matter the steps they take, as long as they remain ad companies, they will be gathering a trove of information that will prove tempting to law enforcement and spies. [Continue reading…]

Dan Gillmor writes: It is dawning, at long last, on the major American technology companies that they are under attack – from their own government, not just from foreign powers and criminals. They’d already been co-opted by spies and law enforcement, forced to obey secret orders targeting their customers and users. Or, in some cases, they’d willingly collaborated with the government’s mass surveillance schemes.

Now they are realizing that their own government considers them outright adversaries. They understand, especially in the wake of the Washington Post’s report about western spy services hacking into the intra-corporate networks of internet giants Google and Yahoo, that no amount of cooperation will ever satisfy the people who wage a relentless campaign to spy on anything and everything that moves. (The NSA, of course, has issued a denial of sorts, but it’s more of a non-denial denial of the Washington Post report).

For the users of cloud services and computing/communications technologies, the evidence mounts that we have to be skeptical (I would go as far as to say highly skeptical) of what the tech companies are telling us. We can appreciate their avowed good intentions, but they have created an architecture that obliges us to believe they may be selling us out at just about every opportunity, even if they are not. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. surveillance has gone too far, John Kerry admits

The Guardian reports: John Kerry, the US secretary of state, conceded on Thursday that some of the country’s surveillance activities had gone too far, saying that certain practices had occurred “on autopilot” without the knowledge of senior officials in the Obama administration.

In the most stark comments yet by a senior administration official, Kerry promised that a previously announced review of surveillance practices would be thorough and that some activities would end altogether.

“The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there,” he told a conference in London via video link.

“In some cases, some of these actions have reached too far and we are going to try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Edward Snowden’s shadowy life in Russia

The New York Times reports: On very rare occasions, almost always at night, Edward J. Snowden leaves his secret, guarded residence here, somewhere, in Russia. He is always under close protection. He spends his days learning the language and reading. He recently finished “Crime and Punishment.”

Accompanying him is Sarah Harrison, a British activist working with WikiLeaks. With far less attention, she appears to have found herself trapped in the same furtive limbo of temporary asylum that the Russian government granted Mr. Snowden three months ago: safe from prosecution, perhaps, but far from living freely, or at least openly.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has written extensively about the security services, said that the F.S.B., the domestic successor to the Soviet-era intelligence service, clearly controlled the circumstances of Mr. Snowden’s life now, protecting him and also circumscribing his activities, even if not directly controlling him.

“He’s actually surrounded by these people,” said Mr. Soldatov, who, with Irina Borogan, wrote a history of the new Russian security services, “The New Nobility.”

Hints of his life nonetheless flitter in and out of the public eye. On Thursday, his lawyer, Anatoly G. Kucherena, said that Mr. Snowden had agreed to take a job with one of the country’s major Internet companies, beginning Friday. Mr. Kucherena would not disclose the company or any other details, and he declined to discuss Mr. Snowden’s life in exile “because the level of threat from the U.S. government structures is still very high,” he said in a telephone interview. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Amid NSA spying revelations, tech leaders call for new restraints on agency

The Washington Post reports: Mounting revelations about the extent of NSA surveillance have alarmed technology leaders in recent days, driving a renewed push for significant legislative action from an industry that long tried to stay above the fray in Washington.

After months of merely calling for the government to be more transparent about its surveillance requests, tech leaders have begun demanding substantive new restraints on how the National Security Agency collects and uses the vast quantities of information it scoops up around the globe, much of it from the data streams of U.S. companies.

The pivot marks an aggressive new posture for an industry that often has trod carefully in Washington — devoting more attention to blunting potentially damaging actions than to pushing initiatives that might prove controversial and alienate users from its lucrative services.

Six leading technology companies — Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — sent a letter to Senate leaders Thursday reflecting the sharpening industry strategy, praising the sponsors of a bill that would end the bulk collection of phone records of millions of Americans and create a privacy advocate to represent civil liberties interests within the secretive court that oversees the NSA. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Fear of al Qaeda has become more harmful than al Qaeda

David Rohde writes: Three disclosures this week show that the United States is losing its way in the struggle against terrorism. Sweeping government efforts to stop attacks are backfiring abroad and infringing on basic rights at home.

CIA drone strikes are killing scores of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. The National Security Agency is eavesdropping on tens of millions of phone calls worldwide — including those of 35 foreign leaders — in the name of U.S. security.

And the Department of Homeland Security is using algorithms to “prescreen” travelers before they board domestic flights, reviewing government and private databases that include Americans’ tax identification numbers, car registrations and property records.

Will we create a Minority Report-style Department of Precrime next?

Obama administration officials have a duty to protect Americans from terrorism. But out-of-control NSA surveillance, an ever-expanding culture of secrecy and still-classified rules for how and when foreigners and even Americans can be killed by drone strikes are excessive, unnecessary and destructive.

Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA’s MUSCULAR secretly breaks into the cloud of U.S. tech companies, siphons off data, fouls up revenues overseas

Wolf Richter writes: The cloud is where the NSA goes to pick through everyone’s data. Under the PRISM program, revealed by Snowden some time ago, the NSA has enjoyed easy access to user accounts and their data. Companies cooperate. It’s permitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We just didn’t know about it.

MUSCULAR is darker. It secretly targets American companies. Google and Yahoo have been named in top-secret documents that Snowden had pilfered and that landed at the Washington Post. To get around legality issues in the US, the NSA broke into Google’s and Yahoo’s overseas data centers. If you have anything in the cloud – and you do, whether you want to or not – it’s stored in numerous locations, including overseas.

In March last year, when David Petraeus was still CIA Director, before emails, ironically, about an extramarital affair unraveled his career, he spoke at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit. He was accompanied by NSA specialists. He raved about how startups that had been funded by In-Q-Tel – the CIA’s venture capital branch – were “providing enormous support to us as we execute various critical intelligence missions.” He talked about “innovative technologies developed by the firms represented in this room.”

It was just a speech, and no one really paid attention. But he was disclosing the true nature of our perfect surveillance society, on the eve of the Snowden revelations.

“We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. In the digital world, data is everywhere,” he said. “Data is created constantly, often unknowingly and without permission” – emphasis mine. “Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent, and probable behavior.” The data “that can be collected is virtually limitless,” he said, which presented “enormous intelligence opportunities.” And in closing he thanked the executives and tech gurus for “helping to keep America’s Intelligence Community at the forefront of global innovation.”

So far, the Snowden revelations have shown exactly that: an intense, hand-in-glove cooperation between the Intelligence Community and American tech companies, from scrappy startups to corporate mastodons, at every level, whether adding backdoors to Windows operating systems or compromising the keys to encryption.

But the revelations about the MUSCULAR program show that, in parallel, the NSA also worked against these tech companies – Google and Yahoo so far, but more documents are likely to trickle out, as they have done in the past, like Chinese water torture, to reveal that other American companies got hit as well. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA’s Mideast spying ‘intense’ amid regional upheaval, say experts

Al Arabiya reports: Leaked documents disclosed earlier this week revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted 125 billion phone calls and SMS messages in January 2013, many of them originating in the Middle East.

The NSA’s attention on the Middle East and the surrounding region is far more “intense than anything comparable in Europe,” according to Matthew Aid, a Washington, DC-based intelligence historian and expert.

Strained relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia over resolving the Syrian conflict could be a possible reason for the NSA’s particularly large targeting of Saudi Arabia – over 7.8 billion times in one month – said Aid.

Saudi-U.S. tension may have also resulted in Obama’s administration being “quite curious” over the kingdom’s thoughts on Syria, as the countries have consistently disagreed on the issue.

Aid, who in 2009 published a history on the NSA entitled “The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency,” said that most of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have not focused on the agency’s surveillance in the Middle East.

“We’re waiting for that shoe to drop, but it hasn’t,” Aid told Al Arabiya News, stating that leaks by Snowden’s associates have been largely focused “on those countries which will generate immediate reaction in the press and from the governments in question.”

Saudi Arabia and Iraq witnessed 7.8 billion wiretapping incidents from the NSA each, while Egypt and Jordan saw 1.8 billion and 1.6 billion respectively, according to Cryptome, a digital library that publishes leaked documents.

Additionally, over 1.7 billion wiretapping incidents were recorded in Iran. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA issues non-denial denial of infiltrating Google and Yahoo’s networks

TechDirt: While NSA boss Keith Alexander issued a misleading denial of this morning’s report of how the NSA has infiltrated Yahoo and Google’s networks by hacking into their private network connections between datacenters, the NSA has now come out with its official statement which is yet another typical non-denial denial. They deny things that weren’t quite said while refusing to address the actual point:

NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation. The Washington Post’s assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true.

The assertion that we collect vast quantities of US persons’ data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies attorney general-approved processes to protect the privacy of US persons – minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination.

NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we’re focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.

Note what is missing from all of this. They do not deny hacking into the data center connection lines outside of the US. They do not deny getting access to all that data, especially on non-US persons. As for the claim that they’re protecting the privacy of US persons, previous statements from Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have already made it clear that if they collect info on Americans, they’re going to use this loophole to search them:

“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

So, for all the claims that this kind of information will be “minimized,” it certainly looks like they’ve already admitted they don’t do that. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Congressional inaction prompts states to take up issue of privacy law

The New York Times reports: State legislatures around the country, facing growing public concern about the collection and trade of personal data, have rushed to propose a series of privacy laws, from limiting how schools can collect student data to deciding whether the police need a warrant to track cellphone locations.

Over two dozen privacy laws have passed this year in more than 10 states, in places as different as Oklahoma and California. Many lawmakers say that news reports of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency have led to more support for the bills among constituents. And in some cases, the state lawmakers say, they have felt compelled to act because of the stalemate in Washington on legislation to strengthen privacy laws.

“Congress is obviously not interested in updating those things or protecting privacy,” said Jonathan Stickland, a Republican state representative in Texas. “If they’re not going to do it, states have to do it.”

For Internet companies, the patchwork of rules across the country means keeping a close eye on evolving laws to avoid overstepping. Many companies have an internal team to deal with state legislation. And the flurry of legislation has led some companies, particularly technology companies, to exert their lobbying muscles — with some success — when proposed measures stand to harm their bottom lines.

“It can be counterproductive to have multiple states addressing the same issue, especially with online privacy, which can be national or an international issue,” said Michael D. Hintze, chief privacy counsel at Microsoft, who added that at times it can create “burdensome compliance.” For companies, it helps that state measures are limited in their scope by a federal law that prevents states from interfering with interstate commerce.

This year, Texas passed a bill introduced by Mr. Stickland that requires warrants for email searches, while Oklahoma enacted a law meant to protect the privacy of student data. At least three states proposed measures to regulate who inherits digital data, including Facebook passwords, when a user dies. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Glenn Greenwald: On leaving the Guardian

Glenn Greenwald writes: As many of you know, I’m leaving the Guardian in order to work with Pierre Omidyar, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and soon-to-be-identified others on building a new media organization. As I said when this
news was reported a couple of weeks ago, leaving the Guardian was not an easy choice, but this was a dream opportunity that was impossible to decline.

We do not yet have an exact launch date for the new outlet, but rest assured: I’m not going to disappear for months or anything like that. The new site will be up and running reasonably soon.

In the meantime, I’ll continue reporting in partnership with foreign media outlets (stories on mass NSA surveillance in France began last week in Le Monde, and stories on bulk surveillance of Spanish citizens and NSA’s cooperation with Spanish intelligence have appeared this week in Spain’s El Mundo), as well as in partnership with US outlets. As I did yesterday when responding to NSA claims about these stories, I’ll also periodically post on my personal blog – here – with an active comment section, as well as on our pre-launch temporary blog. Until launch of the new media outlet, the best way to learn of new stories, new posts, and other activity is my Twitter feed, @ggreenwald. My new email address and PGP key are here. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Rogue intelligence agency: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The real privacy problem

Evgeny Morozov writes: In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.

It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention. Baran also wanted policies that could “offer maximum protection to the preservation of the rights of privacy of information”:

Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems … At present, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper … Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems.

Sharp, bullshit-free analysis: techno-futurism has been in decline ever since.

To read Baran’s essay (just one of the many on utility computing published at the time) is to realize that our contemporary privacy problem is not contemporary. It’s not just a consequence of Mark Zuckerberg’s selling his soul and our profiles to the NSA. The problem was recognized early on, and little was done about it. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Too many Americans believe all means are justifiable in the fight against terrorism

Stephan Richter and Jan Philipp Albrecht write: The latest wave of spying scandals should prompt close scrutiny of the often bizarre mechanisms that shape the transatlantic relationship. There are of course numerous European transatlantic apologists. For them, any hint of holding the US accountable as a responsible global power goes out the window. Such lofty talk is reserved for China.

And then there is a group of largely American analysts, diplomats and journalists who make a point of challenging the Europeans on any point of principle. Their mantra goes: everyone spies on everyone – what else did you expect? They regard Europeans collectively as naive, not cut out for the tough world that’s out there.

What gets lost in all this is the root cause of the current scandals. It is decidedly not that Europeans live on Venus. It is the catastrophic lack of effective checks and balances in the US.

In one sense the spying revelations show that other nations have little to complain about. They are, after all, not being treated any worse by US authorities than American citizens themselves.

What the European unease, at both the popular and senior political levels, highlights, however, is the big difference between the US and Europe. Europeans still operate under the assumption that it is critical to uphold the rule of law. The US government is more than flexible with the rule of law by turning any notion of privacy into Swiss cheese. The dangerous implications this holds for the core ideas of democracy are obvious.

But it isn’t just that the US government has undermined the rule of law at home. It is that American citizens themselves, to a stunningly large extent, have bought into the notion that the “war on terror” and “Islamic extremism” justify all means. Their acquiescence, if not active tolerance, is what allows Washington to operate above the law, from drones to routinely spying on the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish people, to name but a few of the targets. [Continue reading…]

To be blunt, what this boils down to is America’s ill-conceived response to 9/11.

No doubt, the attacks were devastating to those directly affected and had a traumatic effect on the whole nation. Yet the appropriate function of political leadership in a democratic country at such a moment was not to channel and amplify collective fear; neither was it to allow fear to legitimize a desire for revenge; nor was there a need for trumpeting American pride.

The need at that moment was to express grief, clean up the mess, and take stock. The need above all was for an expression of wisdom, not power.

Al Qaeda’s goal was to trigger an over-reaction which would itself then serve as a global rallying cry for jihad. George Bush and Dick Cheney rose straight for the bait without a moment’s hesitation. They delivered a simple-minded response — a war on terrorism — for a nation that had forgotten how to think straight.

Facebooktwittermail