Emma Bonino, What Do You Have To Say about Being Spied On by the US?

We are being spied on. All of us. All the time. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn after The Guardian and The Washington Post unveiled two U.S. government spy programs a few days ago. The National Security Agency (NSA) is overseeing one of the two programs, which involves gathering data from telephone calls. The aim of the other program is to collect information found on social networking platforms.

Obama told Americans yesterday, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls” which, in the best-case scenario, is a half-lie. There are many instances of legal court-ordered telephone tapping in many U.S. households. Furthermore, many Americans are being spied on for “metadata”: who called whom, when and from where. The pinnacle of hypocrisy, however, is purporting that gathering this information is harmless and doesn’t violate people’s privacy. If a woman calls her gynecologist and then calls a clinic where abortions are performed, we don’t have to listen to every word of her telephone conversations to understand that she is probably making an appointment to get an abortion.

It was precisely in the verdict of the case that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade (1973) that the Supreme Court established that the decision to have the procedure must be guaranteed as a “fundamental” right and protected under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The verdict recognized that Americans had a right to privacy, a “half-lit” zone of their lives free from government intrusion.

Additionally, the gathering of information from phone communication has direct political implications. Consider the kinds of calls that could be made: between leaders of opposition groups, parties discussing meeting details meant to be confidential or communication between the administration and the opposition. The fact that an intelligence agency is aware of all of this calls the government’s guarantees of freedom of speech into question and moves the present-day U.S. closer to Putin’s Russia than to the country that pledged to uphold a “limited government” when it was established by its constituents in 1787.

Finally, the indiscriminate gathering of information from the Internet (which, as we know, is very detailed) is in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which clearly states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” Clearly, there can be no well-founded reasons for gathering information on American citizens, but this is not the case for a substantial number of foreign nationals.

Seeing as Washington has declared that the surveillance mainly concerns the rest of the world, maybe it would be useful to know whether, in spying on the world, the United States has violated the privacy rights of Italian citizens, clearly stated in Article 15 of the Italian Constitution: “Freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and of every other form of communication is inviolable.”

In light of declarations made by Obama, who specifically stated that the gathering of data via Facebook, Google and Apple is aimed at non-American citizens, maybe the Italian government should ask itself two questions: whether European regulations concerning privacy have been respected, and whether the constitutional rights of Italian citizens have been violated. When will Minister of Foreign Affairs Emma Bonino react?