The White House yesterday came up with the simplest of explanations on the spying controversy that has taken the world by storm after new leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden claimed that the US monitored tens of millions of phone calls in France and hacked into former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s e-mail account.
The US’s National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said “all nations” conduct spying operations. “As a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” she said.
That should settle it, really. Or should it? Nation spy on nations. It’s no secret even Israel and the US, considered inseparable allies, spy on each other, but there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in the way the American establishment has dealt with the issue in recent times.
If spying was such an accepted thing, why did the US hound WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the extent that American politicians wanted him to be sentenced to life in prison? The US used its clout to arm-twist its allies, with the result that the Australian had to take refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London where he is holed up for more than a year now.
Or take the more recent case of former US security contractor Snowden himself, who has been in Russian protection ever since he blew the lid on US and British mass surveillance programmes. The US was particularly riled with the revelations that it spied on its own citizens. He was dubbed a ‘traitor”, and a “dissident” by many in the US establishment, although former President Jimmy Carter applauded his actions.
There were even debates on whether Snowden deserves the death penalty or not for his actions, underlining the hysteria surrounding the issue, although the former CIA employee maintains his motives behind leaking the documents was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”
It’s highly unlikely that the French don’t spy, but the US has taken the activity to a new level by monitoring private communication between people in the name of security. It is a dangerous precedent and amounts to interference in the lives of ordinary citizens who are fooled into thinking that they are living in a country that swears by the democratic principles of free speech and expression on one hand and does exactly the opposite in practice.
French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was “deeply shocked” by the Snowden revelations.
“It’s incredible that an allied country like the United States at this point goes as far as spying on private communications that have no strategic justification, no justification on the basis of national defence,” he told journalists in Copenhagen.
But France itself has also been accused of spying, with a newspaper reporting that intelligence services intercepted all communications in the country.
So there you go.
