Turkey. France. Brazil. The European Union. Mexico. Russia. The list goes on. These are the latest to express their anger over revelations that the United States and its networks of listening and surveillance agencies spied on emails and telephone conversations.
These aftershocks have been triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggesting that the National Security Agency and its British counterparts evesdropped and snooped on their allies and partners as a matter of course and with the full knowledge and tacit approval of the White House. The words of condemnation are loud though one wonders if these nations, who have advanced electronic surveillance technologies and capabilities of their own, for security and economic purposes — are turning up the volume because the US has been seemingly caught red handed. Is it really surprising that the US had been listening in on and reading emails of other nations? Hardly, though the sheer scale of the operation outlined by Snowden seems to suggest that it exceeded all expectations and was carried on with such regularity that evesdropping and electronic snooping became the normal course of operations.
The standing of both Britain and the US has no doubt been harmed by their spying activities. For nations engaged in free trade talks with Washington, there is little to gain by trying to negotiate in good faith — the US delegations across the table certainly haven’t come to talks in good faith or with a clean slate. Those deals will get done, though not as swiftly nor as easily as Washington would like.
What is obvious is that the spymasters developed and shared sophisticated software that trolled through billions of pieces of email from millions of people in the search for information deemed of value. What’s equally obvious is that any terrorist will have hidden those nuggets so deep that those programmes likely came up empty handed — save spying on us all. So when political leaders in London and Washington assume the moral high ground and lecture other nations about their failings, shortcomings or policies, they are speaking with all the authority of carnival hucksters — cheaters playing with a marked deck of cards.
