Edward Snowden’s ‘1984’ by Ian Bond
From his refuges in Hong Kong and Moscow, former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has given the world one shocking revelation after another: the American government spies on Americans! The American government spies on its allies! The Germans are in bed with the Americans! The British spy on everyone! The British government has wisely kept its head down, but most of Europe has reacted with real or simulated shock to this evidence that the US and Europe are separated by more than just an ocean. Some politicians urged the Commission not to start the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), while some Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) threatened not to ratify it. There are two aspects of the story, often conflated, which raise different issues. The first is the extent to which preventing terrorism or organised crime justifies collecting data or ‘metadata’ (that is all information about a communication except its content) from everyone. The second is the morality and the value of spying on allies. US comments on the issue of security versus privacy have mostly focused on what Snowden has said about the NSA’s domestic spying, and on the extraordinary access granted to contractors. Few care about the impact on Europe. With its memories of Nazi and Communist secret police, Germany has shown the
most sensitivity about violations of privacy. Chancellor Merkel has steered a careful course, defending the need for intelligence services in a democracy and stressing the value of America as an ally. But at the same time, as criticism grew, she proposed in an interview on July 14th that there should be strict new EU rules on privacy and data protection, replacing the current mishmash of national interpretations of the 1995 data protection directive. Merkel complained that Facebook avoided strict German privacy laws by operating under a more relaxed regime in Ireland, and that the British had a different philosophy on privacy from the Germans. Indeed, the UK has been a major obstacle to the Commission’s efforts to update the 1995 directive. Much European commentary on whether allies should spy on allies has been either hypocritical or naïve. After the US had accused France earlier this year of hacking US computers for economic intelligence, it was perhaps natural for President Hollande and Foreign Minister Fabius to respond in kind; but when Le Monde revealed that the French external intelligence service, the DGSE,