Spying on Merkel is one thing, spying on people another

After a brief relief provided by congressional Republicans during the debt ceiling debate, US President Barack Obama has again found himself handling a snowballing international outcry over US global surveillance operations.

Media outlets the week before alleged that the US monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile telephone, basing their claims on secret files from the US National Security Agency (NSA) leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Obama called Merkel to reassure her that “we do not, and will not, monitor the chancellor’s communications”. The press was quick to point out that past practices were not addressed in his comments. The US president, on the other hand, defended himself by claiming that he did not know about wiretapping conducted on world leaders.

The chancellor has pushed Washington to agree on a “no spying” deal with Berlin and Paris by year-end. Obama is reportedly mulling further moves to ban spying on all allied heads of state.

The news hit home as Taiwanese Presidential Office Secretary-General and former foreign minister Timothy Yang responded to an allegation that the US also operates a surveillance station in Taiwan. Yang told lawmakers at a Legislative Yuan meeting that Taiwanese national security officials will “understand and handle” the situation. Yang said that he and his colleagues use secured landlines to communicate when they are inside the Presidential Office. At the same meeting, National Security Council (NSC) Deputy Secretary-General Lu Hsiao-jung said he personally does not consent to the US setting up and maintaining a surveillance station in Taiwan.

These allegations of top-level global surveillance by the NSA may seem like an escalation of practices first exposed by Snowden earlier this year. In truth, however, they are but sideshows to the real danger of the US’s spying overreach against the people.

The shock and indignation shown by world leaders in response to these revelations of US spying operations, as well as Obama’s protestations of innocence, are most likely a show for the public. It would be ludicrous to suggest that a US president would know nothing about the NSA’s monitoring of foreign heads of state. An unnamed former White House official was quoted by Foreign Policy magazine as saying that it is impossible for a US president not to know of such wiretapping arrangements.

It would be equally ridiculous for the leaders of major economies such as Germany to profess ignorance of spying operations against them.

The Times of London quoted Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University, as suggesting that Merkel would be “completely idiotic” if she did not suspect any NSA spying attempts.

These leaders should not be surprised because monitoring is what nations do to each other, even allies. Bernard Squarcini, head of intelligence under former French president Sarkozy, was quoted by the same newspaper as saying that “all countries, even allies cooperating in the anti-terrorist struggle, are spying on each other”.

Eavesdropping attempts among national governments are not the true crisis unveiled by the leaked NSA files. They are moves by contestants in the same game of international politics. The true crisis is that a nation monitors regular citizens, domestic and foreign. Such eavesdropping is an unfair abuse of power imposed upon the people, who are defenceless against such a governmental security apparatus working in secret.

The Washington Post reported that the Snowden files suggested the NSA has intercepted information sent by fibre-optic cables between Google and Yahoo data hubs “at will”. This infiltration of fibre-optic lines, which can be done outside the US and is therefore not subject to strict regulations, came even as the NSA admitted that they already had authority to access “Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process”, The Washington Post pointed out. It represents the lengths to which a government agency will go to bend the rules and to maximise the reach of its information collection activities. Obama might feel pressed to end spying on allied leaders (at least in words), but the US – or any other nation for that matter – will continue to surreptitiously collect personal information on regular citizens if we don’t better monitor them.