WASHINGTON // European anger at reports that the US has conducted surveillance of allies’ telephone calls and emails glosses over a basic truth, former intelligence officials say: everyone does it.
“All governments collect information on nearly all governments,” said John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, said. “The posture of most governments is, ‘We want to collect as much info as we can, so we can be as fluent as we can when we make decisions.’ It’s just what governments do.”
US president Barack Obama’s administration has been dogged this week by a series of disclosures detailing allegations of US surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private mobile phone, of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s email while in office, and of the collection of data on ordinary French citizens.
The leaks, all traced to documents stolen by fugitive security contractor Edward Snowden, led Mr Obama to call Mr Merkel yesterday to assure her the US government “is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor”, White House press secretary Jay Carney said at a briefing in Washington.
Complaints from Europe and Mexico about surveillance echo those from Brazil. Last month, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff cancelled a state visit to Washington after revelations that the National Security Agency had monitored her email and telephone exchanges with top aides.
Government surveillance has a sinister resonance in Europe and news about US spying may have economic ramifications, Fran Burwell, a vice president at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group, said. It may complicate pending talks about a trans-Atlantic trade pact and has exacerbated long-standing tensions between the US and the European Union over privacy, she said.
A European Parliament committee this week backed draft rules intended to toughen a 1995 privacy-protection law and impose penalties on domestic and foreign companies that violate it. The proposal would require companies such as Mountain View, California-based Google Inc. to let users fully erase their personal data and subject violators to fines of as much as the greater of 100 million euros ($138 million) or 5 per cent of annual sales for violations.
“That legislation is now moving much more quickly than it probably would have without that continual flow of revelations,” Ms Fran Burwell Burwell said.
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said this week that the US collected more than 70 million “recordings of French citizens’ telephone data” were false.
“While we are not going to discuss the details of our activities, we have repeatedly made it clear that the United States gathers intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” Mr Clapper said.
He could have added that intelligence gathering has occurred throughout history. The ancient Hebrews used spies to capture the city of Jericho, Chinese strategist Sun Tzu extolled using subterfuge, while the Aztecs sent people in local dress to infiltrate the enemy before battle. In 1970s Moscow, the Soviet Union bugged 16 of the US Embassy’s IBM Selectric typewriters that were tracked by engineers at listening posts nearby.
“I work on assumption that 6+ countries tap my phone,” Tom Fletcher, the UK ambassador to Lebanon, said on Twitter. “Increasingly rare that diplomats say anything sensitive on calls.”
Even so, for Europe and particularly Germany, the prospect of government surveillance has dark echoes. The Nazis deployed spies and, after World War II, the East German Stasi, or secret police, created massive networks that had friends, families and spouses watch and inform on each other.
“This has very bad resonance,” Ms Burwell said. “When Angela Merkel speaks about this, she grew up with the Stasi.”
Der Spiegel magazine reported that US intelligence may have been monitoring Merkel’s private mobile phone for years. German authorities conducted an investigation and gathered enough information to confront the US with the findings suggesting that Merkel’s phone had been monitored, Spiegel said.
Bloomberg News
