No excuse

US TV channel NBC News reported that a mainland Chinese government-backed cyber-espionage operation “stole” an email from then Republican presidential candidate John McCain to President Ma Ying-joeu in 2008. Even before the email was sent, the McCain campaign received a call from a Chinese diplomat complaining about it, according to the NBC.

Cyber espionage was one of the talking points in the recent meeting between US President Barack Obama an his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in California. According to the Central News Agency, both sides agreed to the establishment of a Sino-American taskforce to handle Internet safety.

Perhaps the world’s top two economies can share tips on wire-tapping the people in this taskforce. Two leaked documents revealed last week that the US government has been secretly obtaining comprehensive data of Web-based and telephone-based communications from at least one major US telecom operator and nine Internet giants. Secret orders by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court required telecom carrier Verizon to hand in metadata on all mobile and landline calls to the National Security Agency (NSA) on an “ongoing, daily basis”.

While metadata does not include the content of the calls, it consists of details such as caller and recipient phone numbers, the time and duration of the calls, and the participants’ locations when the calls took place.

In a separate operation known as “Prism”, the NSA tapped directly the servers of Internet companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube, accessing online chats, emails and multimedia information shared online.

One US official emphasised in response to the Prism leak that the US government goes to great lengths to ensure that “only non-US persons outside the US are targeted”. In other words, the US government found it less of a problem to invade the privacy of people outside the US.

Indeed, in his response to the revelations, Prsident Obama stressed the fact that these secret wire-tapping programmes “make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity”. In fact, to the US president, the true problem is not the secret tappings but the fact they got leaked.

“If every step that we’re taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or on television, then presumably the people who are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventive measures,” the president was quoted as saying. “That’s why these things are classified. But that’s also why we’ve set up congressional oversight. These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they’re being fully briefed on these programmes.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is sounding dangerously similar to an Orwellian big brother. He suggested that it is okay for the government to engage in comprehensive wire-tapping operations unbeknownst to the people and the service providers involved (several tech giants have said they had no knowledge of Prism) because the people can trust the government. What’s even worse, he clearly assumed the victory of the US’s “war on terror” to be the overriding principle for US policy. It is okay to wire-tap the entire world and keep it a secret as long as it gets the terrorists. By the same logic, every nation in the world can disregard basic rights such as privacy as long as it comes up with a plausible national cause. China can justify tapping McCain’s email because McCain is not Chinese and the tapping serves China’s goal of “preserving national unity”.

“If every step that we’re taking to try to prevent a separation of Chinese sovereignty is on the front page of the newspapers or on television, then presumably the separatists who are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventive measures.” Learn that excuse, Chinese President Xi. This is a gift from your host Obama.