Addicted to Information

Precisely because the moral sphere, governed by the ethics of conviction, is separate from the political sphere, governed by the ethics of responsibility, we are obliged to consider the best way to reconcile the two. As the political philosopher Michael Ignatieff has argued, the worst aspect of this task is not the risks it involves, but its low returns: At best, rather than discovering an illuminating truth, we are forced to choose from a series of evils.

That said, and starting from the premise that spying is wrong but necessary, it is important to make some distinctions. The easiest cases to resolve are those involving enemy governments or potentially dangerous individuals. Spying on them seems more than justified, given that their actions potentially threaten citizens’ rights and wellbeing. The problem, from what we are seeing, is that the U.S. government has gone far beyond this and moved into three much more dubious areas.

The first of these is spying on friendly and allied governments, which, especially when those under surveillance are heads of state or government—Dilma Rousseff, Angela Merkel and the others on the long, still-emerging list—demonstrates a lack of faith which is bound to erode the mutual trust between leaders that is as essential for creating a sense of solidarity in key moments as it is for reaching important agreements. This will make it more difficult for the U.S. to achieve its worldwide diplomatic aims. However, the problem comes not only from the top, but also from lower down the hierarchy. It is vital for Europeans and Americans that their intelligence services can exchange information freely and easily on a daily basis; this requires a level of trust which is as difficult to build as it is easy to lose. The succession of European governments which refused, on the United States’ demand, to allow President Morales’s plane to enter their airspace because Edward Snowden was believed to be onboard are now left feeling humiliated and ridiculous. In retrospect, it would have served them better to take the chance to interrogate Snowden and then decide whether to hand him over to the U.S. or grant him asylum.

The second problematic area is spying on foreign businesses, a practice which seems to be becoming more and more common. This not only hurts individual companies, which lose access to markets and technologies that are vital for their survival, but also disrupts the functioning of markets and, in the long term, may lead to protectionism which will damage the U.S. itself. Just when the U.S. and the European Union want to negotiate an important commercial or investment deal, this type of practice could jeopardize initiatives which would not only create jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, but would also have significant geopolitical repercussions, showing the extent to which the Old West is still a player in a globalized world whose dynamic is defined by the rise of Asia.

The third realm that the U.S. has entered with complete impunity is the mass surveillance of individuals, collecting data from their profiles, activities and communication. Here too, the U.S. seems unable to clearly recognize the extent of its assault on the global digital middle classes’ privacy, who are a powerful regulatory force capable of putting a great deal of pressure directly on their governments or on companies in the communication sector—whether that means phone companies, hardware and software manufacturers such as Microsoft or Apple or social providers such as Google or Facebook. Washington is right to believe that it can ride out the anger of European governments; they are small and dependent on the information that the U.S. provides. However, if individual citizens perceive that their rights are being systematically violated, and at the same time businesses feel that their survival is under threat, those governments will be forced to put up barriers limiting the capacity of the U.S. and its corporations to band together to the detriment of others.

There is still some hope, in the most extreme scenario, that the U.S. government is in part a victim of its own technological over-development—that its savage intrusion into world communication has largely occurred because the technology exists, rather than as a deliberate policy chosen after considering the political consequences of all this surveillance. A plausible argument in support of this hypothesis is that the damage which the U.S. is suffering as a result of the actions of isolated individuals like Snowden and Bradley Manning is being built up to such an extent, and is making the U.S. so vulnerable, that it is in Washington’s own interests to resolve the situation and start treating this deadly addiction.