The
Snowden Effect: US Facing
International Opprobrium
Yohannan
Chemarapally
LATEST
revelations emanating from the dossier compiled by the
American whistleblower,
Edward Snowden, have provided irrefutable proof that the Obama
administration
has been spying on friends and foes, on its own citizens and
foreigners alike. The
international community is now fully aware that the American
security agencies,
if they so wish, can decipher the political and social
tendencies of millions
of global citizens at a flick of a button. Now it has also
emerged that Western
intelligence agencies belonging to countries like Canada,
and also of Australia,
have been lending a helping hand to the American National
Security Agency (NSA)
in the pursuance of these nefarious activities. The NSA,
according to the
documents that have emerged till now, had hacked into the cell
phones and
personal communications of three heads of state. The list is
expected to grow.
LEADERS
UNCONVINCED
ABOUT
US
EXPLANATIONS
The
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who thought she enjoyed a
special
relationship with President Barack Obama and his predecessor,
George W Bush,
would not have ever imagined that she could be subjected to
surveillance by Berlin’s
closest
political and military ally. Her communications were
compromised by the
American intelligence agencies since 2002, even before she
became the chancellor
for the first time. The German media has said that President
Barack Obama was
first informed about this by the NSA only in 2010. “Obama did
not halt the
operation but rather let it continue,” the Sunday
Bild newspaper wrote. The American embassy in Berlin,
according to the German media, was
transformed into a busy nest of spies, routinely eavesdropping
to monitor the conversations
and mail pertaining to politics and business. Further, it was
revealed in
September that similar activities were ongoing in Brazil
and Mexico,
two countries
having good relations with Washington.
The list of heads of state that were under close American
surveillance, according
to documents released by Snowden, was more than 35. It will
not be much of a
surprise if the security of the India’s
prime minister office (PMO) was also similarly compromised.
The
German chancellor and the Brazilian president have made their
anger very
visible to Washington.
Dilma Roussef, the Brazilian president, took the unprecedented
step of calling
off her official visit to the US
in September to send a strong signal to Washington
that it could not be business as usual till an official
apology was
forthcoming. Merkel, after having a testy telephone
conversation with President
Barack Obama, dispatched her top intelligence officials to the
White House to
get a first hand explanation about the scope of American
intelligence
activities in Germany.
Merkel had described her cell phone hacking and related
activities by the NSA
as a serious “breach of trust.”
On
its part, the White House acknowledged that that the German
Chancellor’s
conversations and mails were routinely monitored but added
that the president
had ordered an immediate stop to this. “It is not just about
me but about every
German citizen. We need to have trust in our allies and
partners, and this
trust must be re-established once again,” she told the media.
German lawmakers
have gone to Moscow to meet
with Snowden and
request him to come to Berlin
to testify in the Bundestag on the NSA spying network.
Both
Merkel and Roussef are evidently not satisfied with the
official American
response.
ANTI-SPYING
INITIATIVE
In
late October, Germany and Brazil jointly announced that they
planned to
circulate a draft resolution in the UN General Assembly that
would call on
member states “to take measures” to end excessive electronic
surveillance, data
collection and other gross invasions of privacy. The draft
resolution being
circulated did not chose to specifically name the US
for the violation of
international human rights laws. The two countries wanted all
the 183 UN member
states to unanimously declare that they “are deeply concerned
at human rights violations
and abuses that may result from the conduct of any
surveillance of
communications, including extraterritorial surveillance of
communications.” The
proposed resolution was also to call on member states to
“create conditions” to
prevent such violations in the future by “ensuring that
relevant national
legislation complies with their obligations under
international human rights
law.”
The
German-Brazilian initiative wanted all UN member states to
establish
“independent oversight mechanisms capable of ensuring
transparency and
accountability of state surveillance of communications, their
interception and
collection of personal data.” But General Assembly
resolutions, unlike the UN
Security Council resolutions, are not binding. It is
improbable that big powers
like the US
would ever agree to totally abstain from spying in third
countries as they
slide into becoming full blown national security states. The
UN Human Rights
commissioner, Navi Pillai,
observed that
mass surveillance poses “one of the biggest threats” to human
rights. The draft
may undergo changes before it is put to vote. Many countries,
including India,
which
have sophisticated and wide ranging surveillance capabilities,
may not come
fully on board. Both India
and Germany
share
intelligence data with the US.
Latest
documents provided by Snowden have evidence showing that
Australian embassies
in Asia collected
intelligence on behalf of
the NSA. A former Australian prime minister, John Howard, a
close buddy of
George W Bush, had once described his country as America’s
“junior sheriff” in Asia. The “Five Eyes” --- as
the US, UK,
Australia,
Canada and
New Zealand
are known in western
security parlance --- have continued to cooperate closely. No
evidence has
emerged as yet of any intrusive spying on the leaders of UK, Australia,
Canada or New Zealand
so
far.
In
India and
the West, China
was being
blamed for most of the cyber spying. Now it has been
conclusively proved that
most of the spying in Asia and Europe was done by the NSA and
the CIA, with China being the
main target. The data released by Snowden exposes the
existence of American
“Special Collection Services” (SCS) listening posts in leading
Asian and
European countries. A recent report in Der
Spiegel magazine said that among the eight listening
posts located in Asia,
two were in the American embassies in New
Delhi
and Islamabad.
The
SCS located in the American embassy in Berlin
was used to monitor the German chancellor’s office. The German
interior minister,
Hans Peter Friedrich, recently stated that running such
operations on German
soil was illegal and “those responsible must be held
accountable.” The scandal
has caused the biggest rift between Germany
and the US
since the end of World War II.
A
PATENTLY
LAME
EXCUSE
The
US
secretary of state, John Kerry, recently acknowledged that the
NSA had “reached
too far” and claimed that the federal agency was in an “auto
pilot” mode, with
the Obama administration being unaware of many of its
activities. There are
many in the US
who actually think that President Obama has very little
control over the
Pentagon and the NSA, dominated as it is by right wing
ideologues left behind
by the Bush administration. The annual security budget is
estimated to be
around 80 billion dollars annually. At the same time, the US
secretary of
state said, without giving any supporting evidence, that the
NSA surveillance
“prevented airplanes from going down, buildings from being
blown up, and people
from being assassinated.”
Under
the Obama administration, however, the NSA has appropriated
more wide ranging
powers than it had under the Bush administration. In late
October, Snowden
revealed that the NSA was allowed to secretly gather all
information from
Google and Yahoo. The NSA program code named “Muscular” had
broken into the
global data centres of the two global internet giants
---Google and Yahoo.
According
to The Washington Post,
the NSA was
able to “collect at will from among millions of user accounts,
among them
Americans.” In January this year alone, “Muscular” programme
was able to access
181 million records for storage at the NSA headquarters.
Another 70 million
phone calls and SMS messages were collected from France and 60
million in Spain,
just
within a one month period earlier this year. Interestingly,
the NSA, under a
separate programme called “Prism” was officially allowed
“front door” access to
the user accounts in these two internet giants.
The
French foreign ministry spokesperson said that the continuing
NSA denials about
their culpability are “not believable,” and that there was a
need to get “more
clarity on the practices of the US Secret Service.” The
Spanish foreign
minister, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, said that if reports of
the NSA snooping
on private phone calls in his country proved to be true, then
it would “break
the climate of trust that traditionally existed between the
two countries.” The
German chancellor and the French president, Francois Hollande,
are planning to
hold talks with President Obama to chalk out the terms of a
“non-spying” agreement
on EU member countries. An Italian magazine, Panorama, has reported that the NSA did not even
spare the Vatican,
monitoring the incoming and outgoing phone calls there. In
June, another
Italian weekly, L’Expresso,
had
claimed that the NSA had monitored more than a million calls
in Italy.
COMPLAINANTS
ARE
COOPERATORS
In
Germany,
many are calling
for the intelligence apparatus in their country to be
strengthened so that it would
be less dependent on help from allies like the US.
Merkel had hinted that intelligence
sharing with Washington
could be reviewed in the light of the latest revelations. Glen
Greenwald, the
investigative journalist who has been closely involved with
Snowden, noted that
Merkel was initially unconcerned when reports about the
massive American spying
on Germany
first came out a few months back. It was only after she
realised that her
personal phone was hacked that she reacted strongly. Grigor
Gysi, the leader of
the Left party that is the third biggest in the Bundestag,
said that Germany
should
give Snowden political asylum so that he could freely speak
before the parliamentary
committee looking into NSA hacking affair.
The
governments in Europe and Asia that have a close relationship
with Washington
are,
meanwhile, trying to keep under wraps their own close linkages
with the
American security agencies like the NSA, FBI and the CIA. The
British intelligence
services also have been collecting cell phone and internet
data on behalf of
the NSA. In return, the Americans gave their British cousins
access to data,
impacting on their national security interests.
The
French and German intelligence services too cooperate closely
with the US
on the world stage, especially in West
Asia. The NSA is now claiming that European
security
agencies had secretly provided records of millions of phone
calls. The alacrity
in which the major European security agencies cooperated in
forcing the plane
of the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, to land in Vienna,
is an illustration. They had believed
that the Bolivian president, who was returning from an
official visit to
Russia, had Edward Snowden as a co-passenger. Bolivia was
among the handful of
countries which had the courage to unconditionally offer
political asylum to
the fugitive whistleblower. Even today none of the European
governments, even
those subjected to massive US surveillance like Germany and
France, are willing
to consider the possibility of giving Snowden asylum.
People's Democracy