Guardian | 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.
