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.

Snowden exposes Obama's hatred towards whistleblowers

For all its sermons on democracy and freedom the United States has been exposed so much so that the totalitarian and communist regimes that it has been in the forefront of blaming, pale in comparison to the magnitude of US’ highly classified eavesdropping. Edward Joseph Snowden, alarmed by the duplicity of the establishment, decided to share the data he had acquired while working as a technical contractor for the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on its mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and Tempora. After releasing the data Snowden went to Hong Kong and from there to Russia.
Snowden’s is not the first and will not be the last case in which a whistleblower has been on the run after exposing the grey areas in which a particular government works without the knowledge of the people of that country. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Bradely Manning, who provided the vital information to Assange, are the most prominent recent examples that come to mind. No government is comfortable with a whistleblower. Washington’s rage is evident in that it has slapped charges on Snowden using the Espionage Act — an Act of World War I legacy — though prima facie his actions are not related to espionage or anti-American. What Snowden has done is to effectively pull the mask off the US administration, especially the Obama administrations claims of respecting civil liberties and the privacy of its citizens. His revelations about NSA’s snooping have confirmed what many people suspected. That Obama has been increasingly intolerant towards leaks and whistleblowing is evident in that Snowden is the seventh person to be indicted by his administration under the Espionage Act.

As of now Snowden’s next port of call is not clear. Speculation is rife that he will travel to Cuba or Ecuador or even the United States. The earlier two countries are top on the list because of their open disdain for the ‘Big Brother’, and by nature a ready willingness to embrace anything anti-US. The bets are also that the US will use its diplomatic muscle to get the whistleblower back home. So while William Hill, the British online gambling website, has opened betting on Snowden’s location on New Year’s Day 2014, a lingering question remains: Has the United States grown too intolerant that it is no longer safe for whistleblowers who expose government irregularities?