NSA snooping: Merkel likes her phone, Obama likes it better

For decades intelligence agencies in the United States have stuck to the Russian proverb made famous by former President Ronald Reagan ‘trust, but verify’ as a guiding principle in its relations with other countries. In September, speaking in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Washington had updated Reagan’s quote to “verify and verify”. This is not surprising given the reports of large-scale electronic snooping by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), made public after intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked the data to news agencies.

What makes the latest expose on US snooping startling is that it says Washington was extensively spying, not just on potential terror suspects, but also on close allies, right up to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. Earlier French President François Hollande had raised objections with US President Barack Obama after it was revealed that the NSA had indulged in widespread phone and Internet surveillance of French citizens. The heads of the European Union meeting in Brussels have raised serious concerns over the NSA’s actions. Merkel was quoted by her spokesman as having told Obama that: “between close friends and partners, there should be no such surveillance of the communications of the head of government”. These acts of snooping by the US seem to reiterate that Washington still holds on to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's idea: "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”. Something, it seems, Merkel forgot. On Friday, Germany and Brazil got working on a UN General Assembly resolution to safeguard Internet privacy.

That this information would not have been available to the world if not for the revelations by a whistleblower, and consequentially, the NSA and other agencies would have gone about snooping not just terror suspects but also government heads and officials, points to how close we are today to the dystopian world seen in George Orwell’s 1984. Also pertinent is the issue that at present all the major internet-related data storage is America-centric. Last month, Brazil had planned a legislation to ask Google and other major networks to locally store data after widespread electronic snooping by the NSA was reported. Unfortunately, there is at present no better alternative to secure data storage than the US. It is in the interest of every nation, including India, that this imbalance is addressed to protect national-level confidential data from going into the wrong hands, even if it is the NSA.