Oh, and while we’re at it: The NSA had bribed / contracted RSA to use the Dual Elliptic Curve Random Number Generator with a $10M contract, a sum that represented 30% of their income the year it was signed. I thought RSA were meant to be basically trustworthy? Shame on them.
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In fact, EVERY SINGLE spook (and overseeing legislator) who’s spoken on the Snowden leaks has justified overreach in surveillance as the key to fighting the existential threat of terrorism. Every. Single. One.
If it’s a straw man, it’s not my straw man.
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Allies can never trust each other entirely, and their interests never coincide completely. Some amount of spying on allies will be necessary, and it will depend on how reliable they are judged to be (e.g. the UK and Pakistan are both US allies but not to the same degree). You can hardly expect that sort of decision to be discussed in public; gauging reliability is itself going to depend partly on secret intelligence.
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Cool. I believe you have just assembled several reasonable sounding statements into a an inaccurate conclusion. Your conclusion seems to be that you should never truthfully disclose your level of trust or your intentions to an ally. However I believe that conclusion is false.
Countries (and peoples) interests never coincide completely. This is true. But interests are not the primary basis of reliability. The primary basis of reliability is predictability. If you and your ally are predictable, then you can greatly eliminate the need for spying, even as your interests diverge.
So, what level of predictability is necessary before we can say that massive, bulk surveillance of an ally is unnecessary?
There has been a great deal of NSA mission creep. The original mission of the NSA was “No More Pearl Harbors.” We hardly need massive surveillance of England or Germany to know if they are going to launch a surprise military attack. They are stable, democracies. Just reading their newspapers once a month should tell us all we need to know.
It is doubtful that the US needs massive surveillance of any stable democracy to predict or avert a surprise military attack. Stable democracies are predictable that way.
Unstable countries like Pakistan might try anything. They might even give aid and comfort to our greatest enemies. But, I don’t see how telling countries that we believe they are unpredictable is going to make a difference. Making ourselves less predictable by lying seems to be counterproductive. In the long run, it will cause us more problems than it avoids.
The US only needs massive bulk surveillance of England or Germany if we wish to influence or control their populations. The sovereign nations of England and Germany should rightfully consider our surveillance of their populations to be a threat to their sovereignty.
Of course, the current mission of the NSA seems to be: “Never allow a bad thing to happen.” This absurd mission requires absurd levels of spying. Our first step in addressing the absurd spying must be to clearly define and limit the mission of the NSA. Then we can proceed to an effective list of “Thou Shalt Not’s”.
I agree that mass surveillance is bad whether it’s in the US or overseas. That’s not the issue raised by this story though. Here Der Spiegel (The Guardian’s source) revealed that UK intelligence spies on specific individuals, governments and organizations which are neutral to friendly to it. NSA involvement is just assumed, though I’d say it’s a safe assumption that NSA both participated and has its own program. I would argue that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such spying as I can think of examples where the US would have a legitimate interest in knowing what allies are really up to such as:
- allies secretly planning an attack on a third country like in the
Suez Crisis - German companies violating nuclear sanctions against Iran
- France spying on American tech firms
- Airbus using bribery to make sales (until 2000 foreign bribery
was tax deductible in France) - French companies making illegal arm sales to Angola
- pervasive bribery and fraud in a UN-run program
This doesn’t mean there’s no wrongdoing here; spying on the head EU anti-trust official in particular sounds really dodgy. I do think specifics matter though.
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