Spying on the Elysée Palace: The NSA or American Madness

To be honest, you can’t act surprised. Since June 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the worldwide extent of electronic surveillance and private data-collection carried out by the American intelligence services; since we learned that this mass spying went as far as tapping the German chancellor’s personal cell phone; since we know that the height of sophistication was the German secret services spying on Airbus on behalf of the American intelligence services; nothing can really shock us anymore. Sooner or later, we were going to have confirmation that the Elysée Palace and French officials were also being monitored by the Americans. This is a certainty if you believe the WikiLeaks revelations published on Tuesday, June 23 by Libération and Mediapart.

Still, is this acceptable? No, of course, not. We definitely need to avoid falling into the trap of naive optimism. Intelligence is a crucial part of the fight against terrorism. France itself has brought in a bill to strengthen it; some of the provisions of this text have been heavily criticized by civil liberties campaigners, who have highlighted potential infringements that the intelligence services’ actions have had on the private lives of French people and, even more significantly, foreigners. In this struggle, the French and European intelligence services need to cooperate with their American counterparts, and they must continue to do so in strict accordance with the law.

But that’s not what the madness that has taken over the National Security Agency in post-9/11 America is all about. Listening in on Mrs. Merkel or Mr. Hollande’s private conversations does not fall under the fight against terrorism — no more so than spying on Airbus or environmental advisors. This counts as overzealousness on the part of an infernal machine that has almost unlimited technological means and considers itself outside of judicial, political and democratic control.

The fact that such a machine can operate at the heart of a power like the United States is a very serious matter. Obviously, we want to know if these abuses were carried out by services on autopilot indulging in the exhilaration of their infinite powers, or if they were a result of direct orders from the highest level.

Repairing immense damage

However, in either case, these practices are unacceptable. Washington’s minimal denials of the revelations of wiretapping the French and German leaders betray a secret by virtue of what they don’t say: President Obama was believed to have put an end to these operations in 2013, after Edward Snowden defected. Now the White House is saying that it “[is] not targeting and will not target” Mr. Hollande. It is not denying having done so in 2012, nor is it denying that it may have listened in on his predecessors.

These types of airs and graces are pathetic. The U.S. must now recognize the extent of the problem, admit the danger that it represents to democracy and freedoms, and repair the immense damage that this scandal has inflicted on its relations with its allies. It must start its cooperation with various Western intelligence services from scratch, whether they are English-speaking, Germans or French. A good way to approach this test would be to start by apologizing to the countries targeted. Two years later, this still hasn’t happened.