EUROPE’S FEIGNED OUTRAGE: BIRDS, BEES, AND NSA SPIES
Europe’s outrage over NSA spying ignores its own history and practice.
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Maybe the leaders of the European Union should have issued a communique at their summit in Brussels Friday, publicly thanking Edward Snowden for stealing U.S. secrets and thus giving them something to talk about other than their own economies.The euro zone’s unemployment rate hit a near-record 12% in August, up from 11.5% a year ago, and the trumpeted European recovery is clocking in at 0.3% after 18 months of recession. But why call too much attention to that unpleasantness when, OMG, the Americans might be eavesdropping?
The latest fit of European pique comes from further Snowden disclosures about the scale of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance programs. Le Monde reported last week that the NSA collected some 70 million French phone records between last December and January. “This type of practice between partners is an assault on privacy, and is totally unacceptable,” says French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who summoned the U.S. Ambassador for a scolding.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Der Spiegel reports that the NSA may have been monitoring Angela Merkel‘s cellphone for over a decade, though it isn’t clear whether the U.S. listened to the German Chancellor’s calls or simply kept a log of her contacts. The Merkel revelation follows similar disclosures that the NSA kept tabs on the electronic communications of Mexico’s Felipe Calderón and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, among other world leaders.
The French outrage is especially hard to take seriously given that Le Monde reported this summer that the French intelligence agency DGSE maintains its own robust data-collection program on domestic and foreign targets. “Le Big Brother français,” Le Monde calls it. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted recently that the French were eavesdropping on her private conversations when she was U.N. ambassador in the 1990s. “This is no surprise to people,” she told a conference in Washington. “Countries spy on each other.”
The German case is more sensitive even if the details remain unclear. Nobody doubts Mrs. Merkel’s personal bona fides as a friend of the U.S. But there are good reasons the U.S. would want to eavesdrop on German chancellors, going back decades.
In the 1970s, Günter Guillaume, a top aide to then-Chancellor Willy Brandt, was exposed as a Stasi agent. The disclosure forced Brandt to resign. More recently, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder formed a de facto alliance with France’s Jacques Chirac and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to oppose the U.S. over Iraq. After leaving office in 2005 Mr. Schröder effectively went to work for Mr. Putin as chairman of Nord Stream AG, a pipeline consortium in which Russian gas giant Gazprom has a 51% stake.
Such history is a good reason the Obama Administration should resist calls from Berlin and Paris to adopt a “no spy” agreement of the kind the U.S. has with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. American and European interests have frequently and sharply diverged and will inevitably do so again. President Obama should not tie the hands of successors who may not have someone as sympathetic as Mrs. Merkel as a Berlin counterpart.
German newspapers with front page photos referring to the NSA eavesdropping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday. Getty Images
The U.S. should also resist efforts at the U.N. led by Ms. Rousseff that would extend the privacy protections in the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to cover the Internet. Expanding the law won’t stop Chinese or Russian or Syrian hacking. But it will make it more difficult for the U.S. and other democracies to conduct intelligence in one area in which they usually have technical advantages over their foes. The alternative is more Western unilateral disarmament in a world in which cyber crime, cyber attacks and cyber terror are becoming more effective and ubiquitous.
No wonder even Mrs. Merkel is trying to tone down some of the rhetoric about the eavesdropping claims. “The chancellor must appear outraged enough to reflect German and European outrage over the allegations,” Der Spiegel noted, “yet she must also avoid publicly denouncing Berlin’s most important ally, the United States.”
Translation: The Chancellor and her colleagues don’t need a lesson in the birds and the bees of statecraft, but they must appease the cries of domestic anti-American outrage. Lost in all this is the obligation of political leaders to educate the public, even in a general way, about the facts of life regarding intelligence and the needs of national security in a dangerous world.
The Obama Administration is even worse, sounding defensive as usual on anti-terror programs. So far it is saying it is reviewing the evidence and NSA procedures, as if the NSA works for some other government. The real problem is the failure of Mr. Obama to defend the programs he has been using so robustly since taking office five years ago. He can’t blame this on George W. Bush.
The danger now is that President Obama will try to placate his U.S. liberal and (former) European fan club by agreeing to sweeping restrictions on the scope of NSA activities. If so, Mr. Obama will have let Edward Snowden set U.S. security policy, compounding the considerable damage the leaker has already done. The price paid in missed intelligence will be paid again in lost lives.
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