A comment by Bob Jones on Facebook is typical of one type of response to disclosures of U.S. spying on foreign leaders and, more generally, widespread data collection and eavesdropping on foreign businesses and governments.
Bob wrote:
At the risk of repeating myself, this “don’t spy on us” demand by Germany and others is ridiculous. We use satellites and eavesdropping to get all the intelligence we can. Friends? They sometimes deal with enemies. They know we spy and so do they. So why this hurt feelings stuff? There’s something much deeper going on and it will eventually come out.
I’ve heard the same perspective put forward in other news reports in recent days.
But the suggestion that our spying on friends and foes is no big deal, and that protests by other governments are for public consumption only, seems to miss the point.
First off, there’s an issue of scale. Try this analogy. Everybody knows athletic teams scout their opponents and try to learn as much as they can about the strategies and tactics they will eventually face. But we would all be genuinely appalled if we learned that UH bugged the hotel rooms of visiting teams and their coaches, or put listening devices in their bedrooms and vehicles.
In some ways, our technology has transformed the whole spy game. The unprecedented extent and intrusiveness of the spying revealed by these latest revelations goes far beyond the kinds of things properly dismissed as just “a mutual dirty diplomatic secret.”
And when allies spy on us? We do take it seriously.
Remember Jonathan Pollard?
He was busted for spying for Israel, a U.S. ally. No big thing? Just a little game among friends? No way. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison.
It’s a big deal.
This was the reaction of David Brooks and Mark Shields Friday on the PBS NewsHour.
JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, another big headache for the administration in — just in the last few days, these revelations, David, that the NSA is spying on our allies, our friends in Europe, all the way up to heads of state, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, President Hollande of France, how much damage has been done by this?
DAVID BROOKS: I think a lot.
I’m offended by it. I was offended when they were spying on reporters. And then now they are spying on Angela Merkel? I mean, who are these people? Is there no sense of prudence, of what possibly we can learn from this? Is there no sense of respecting the privacy, some instinctual respect for the privacy of someone you need and trust?
I’m trying — I’m just wondering where these people’s heads are at. If you are going to run a government, you have to have a passion. You have to have a passion to protect the country, but you have to have some sense of proportion, some sense of prudence. And I haven’t seen that in our national security apparatus all over the summer.
One thing after another, where they seem to put — we’re going to invade anybody’s privacy. We place no value on that. And no one apparently thought about what happens if this goes public. Whose trust are we burning her? How do we create a community without trust? So I’m moderately offended by all this.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Offended?
MARK SHIELDS: I am. David — David is right.
First of all, is there a more important ally than West Germany? Is there a more important ally than Chancellor Merkel? And so the idea of listening in on her cell phone, is that the kind of thing we did it because we could do it? I mean, did anybody ask, should we do it, is it the right thing to do? How is it going to be for her when this is revealed we’re doing it, in a country where she — she grew up, with Stasi listening in on everybody’s conversation? What is it going to do for her relations with the United States, the charge that she has been too complicit with the United States and not independent enough?
I just think it’s — there is something — the technology is so fascinating, it kind of takes over and it leaves prudential judgments way in the dust.
Anyway, it’s food for thought on this sunny Sunday.
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Ian
I am presently in France, and this is a BIG deal in the media. It will likely have some short term impact on US relations with our allies.
Yes , everybody does it– just not to the scale of the NSA. And they are a bit more sectetive about it!
Why anyone would consider David Brooks any type of credible person is beyond me. I have tried for years to gain some sort of respect for the man but all attempts have failed. (He did have that column regarding people voting their aspirations which explains partly why some people vote against their personal interests.) He is an out of touch elitist who is naive enough to think that what he thinks is the correct and only way to go. It never, ever is. No reflection you you Ian just my long time feelings about that “talking head.” Regarding surveillance and spying on your citizens and your friends; the bad guys won after attacking the US in 2001 by simply scaring the hell out of us. And out “leaders” are basically clueless as to how to deal with it. The 9/11 attacks cost roughly a half a million dollars and have caused nearly 3.5 trillion dollars in response. We currently spend something like 3 billion a month in the middle east for this circus. Veterans medical and disability cost something like $134 billion. Something is wrong with our National thinking.
I must add this site for current figures.
http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/
“The 9/11 attacks cost roughly a half a million dollars…”?
Yup, the cost of sending those men to the US the training for the flight and accommodations. They did not spend a lot of money for such a return on investment. It was less than 1 mil. To me it shows how impotent our expensive “security” establishment is.
A small part of me thinks I should be concerned about this. The other 99 percent of me says, “It’s national security, dude. Other countries would do this to us in a microsecond if they had the tech and personnel. Better we do it first.”
The harm is to credibility, as it should be, because it proves the lie of “American exceptionalism” and “US democratic values” and “Oh, we’re Americans, we’re different from all those other nasty empires” which, of course, has been a lie since oh, say, at least January 1893, with the invasion and occupation of the Hawaiians’ [sic] Islands and certainly, with much violence, since McKinley’s betrayal of the Filipino independence movement and the US war on the Filipinos 1898-1906 which resulted in the death of about 10% of the population and gave the USG a taste for waterboarding.
I was just yesterday struggling in a train corridor saturated with big bags and such next in line with Jessica Yellin the CNN television journalist – or at least it really seemed to be her (very positive) – on an Amtrak Northeast Regional train, the 143, that had completely broken down mechanically during a circuit breaker problem that had cascaded just before Baltimore, and the complex messy transfer to a “rescue train”, an already loaded service to Savanna, that had pulled up alongside and had one single ramp leading out from our cafe car was taking two hours to transfer all 400 of us from one cold stretch of track to the other.
“Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you,” came over the loudspeaker.
“They should say apologize for ‘all’ inconvenience”, she said, as I was endlessly lifting her very heavy wheely bag sideways through the corridors.
But no. Amtrak did just as well as possible after a catastrophic engine failure. I heard not a bit of complaint from any the 400 of those inconvenienced passengers – and she was mostly just kidding. Amtrak yesterday displayed a passion for making things right and I was not offended.
What the NSA is doing is in concert with a passion for avoiding catastrophes in national security, as it arguably must, and I am not offended.
Interesting that newspaper officials in Britain are on trial for doing similar things — hacking into cell phones and reading texts and tweets. Yet we use the national security umbrella to justify it. Oh yeah, the newspapers belonged to Rupert Murdoch. I wonder if the “hew and cry” would be louder if it had been under Ronald Reagan’s or G.W. Bush’s presidency? Come on, Angela Merkel’s private cell phone? Some one needs to go to jail on this.