America Spies on Europe

French President Francois Hollande demanded that the United States immediately stop spying on its allies. He said, “We cannot accept this behavior between partners and allies. We demand that it stop immediately.” He added that enough evidence was gathered to justify asking Paris to demand an explanation from Washington. The European Commission has announced in its statement last week that it contacted American administrators in Washington and Brussels to inquire about what was published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which accused the CIA of spying on European Union envoys, calls and letters. That newspaper quoted American secret documents, saying that the United States eavesdropped on half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany per month. These documents were revealed by the former contractor with the American National Security Agency and current fugitive, Edward Snowden.

The disclosure of these documents has caused great embarrassment for American officials. The officials contended that if spying did occur, that it was an individual act and that they were not aware of it. The truth is that the United States was not spying on Europe alone. They were spying on the whole world. Under its plan to govern the world, the U.S. has worked to link all countries through online communications, the principal centers of which are found in its territory, and to undertake the building of giant electronic servers in Atlanta and in the Internet city called Silicon Valley, in California. Each server can complete 5 trillion processes per second. The mission of these servers is to spy on all international communications, whether produced by phone or Internet. According to complicated electronic plans, every kind of communication is individually excreted. Each conversation about social relationships is recorded in a different place than conversations concerning politics and politicians. The political conflicts of different countries are documented in a different location. Conversations about trade, economic exchanges and economic processes are put in a third category. This organization continues to cover most human activities. After that, the agency undertook the process of individually studying each individual subcategory in the array of affected countries. For the American strategic agencies that undertook these studies, their goal was to accurately determine global trends and supply American decision-makers with the information they need to make the appropriate calls in international affairs.

Two million Americans work for the NSA. They isolate information as they are instructed to. The existence of the World Communication Center on American soil provides a fitting opportunity to spy on international communications. They collect information from anywhere in the world by placing filters on servers receiving information and diverting it to their own servers. In 2005, the issue of America’s control of the World Communication Center was raised in the corridors of the United Nations. China, India and Russia have asked that the World Communications Center be placed under international administration, with the intention of spreading the benefit across the world instead of allowing the United States to monopolize the benefits of the program. However, the European Union remained loyal to the the United States. It opposed that suggestion. In June 2012, Russia and China returned to the issue, asking that the U.S. no longer maintain control of the international network. Despite this, American representatives and government officials refused to place the Internet under the supervision of the international United Nation’s regime. The official in the State Department in charge of coordinating information technology, Philip Verveer, said, “In all bilateral encounters and multilateral meetings, the United States consistently opposes the extension of intergovernmental controls over the Internet.” He added that “[i]t inevitably would diminish the dynamism of the Internet.”

For its part, the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the U.S. House of Representatives, before which the hearing took place, announced that “[p]ending international proposals to regulate the Internet could jeopardize not only its vibrancy, but also the economic and social benefits it brings to the world.”

There is no doubt that it is of interest to the United States to monopolize the administration of the international network in order to obtain the information such services provide. However, the question that must be asked is whether or not the European Union will change its position after this spying scandal. Will they stand with the countries demanding the distribution of communications under international administration, or is the current dispute with the United States nothing more than a summer cloud?