Spy Irons

For how long will the scandal fired up by the restless Edward Snowden, who leaked data from the National Security Agency’s private servers, echo?

Week after week, new revelations exposing the magnitude of the wiretapping set up by the NSA and its fellow intelligence agencies see the light of day. For now, the executive power in Washington is not significantly shaken — nothing like Watergate — but a degree of nervousness is evident.

Besides nervousness, the American diplomacy has been mobilized to handle the crisis instead of building up on other, more productive assignments. Well-respected ladies with central roles on the world scene, such as Angela Merkel and Dilma Rousseff, have every reason to feel harassed. For millions in Spain, the word combination “smart phone” has a literal meaning at this point. The up-to-now leaders in the fight for a world without secrets, the WikiLeaks guys, realized they are losing ground in the battle for attention and started raising money for the former U.S. intelligence employee now given asylum by Russia. All right … I’ll try not to find fault and to assume the fundraising is in alignment with WikiLeaks’ cause, the founding principle of which I overall support.

It is difficult, though, not to get cynical while contemplating the gray world of secret operations serving political leaders. Or would you ask me to believe that president Barack Obama really didn’t know about the wiretapping of the German chancellor?

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper met the challenge of the leaks by saying before Congress that now “everyone spies on everyone” and that spying on foreign leaders is a matter of mundane activity that doesn’t need to be reported to the White House. Maybe that’s what it is.

As for the White House, by appointing a special committee which will investigate the intelligence methods currently used, Washington is clearly trying to stifle the international disgruntlement (the American public, for now, doesn’t seem very interested in the matter). In the Anglo-Saxon bureaucracy, they used to call this policy style “death by committee.”

Republicans and Democrats jumped as one to defend America’s right to guard its national security. The surrealistic unity emerged from both sides of the ocean — liberals and conservatives in both Washington and London see The Guardian as a weapon used by a national traitor.

Apparently, the leaks have touched a painful spot. Even The Wall Street Journal attacked European intelligence agencies, claiming they also actively spy on their own citizens and even share that information with their colleagues in the U.S. Europeans are hypocrites, concludes the journal, which in general doesn’t harbor many Obama friends (or at least it looks like it doesn’t).

In the field of signals interception, known as signals intelligence or SIGINT (check out www.nsa.gov/sigint/), the U.S. has the equivalent of the atomic bomb while all other countries are armed with howitzers at best. That’s an opinion I heard from a well-established national security specialist. That same specialist points out that the strength of nuclear power has always been in its non-use.

We can all picture the NSA’s immense technical capabilities. Terrorists can picture it too. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, the U.S. has to find ways to do the same things in a new, better disguised way. All that matters is not getting caught, admits that same national security specialist mentioned above. Expecting Washington to think in this direction may be cynical, but I doubt cynicism is unrealistic here, regardless of what Obama and his companions will publicly admit.

This week it was reported that Russia’s custom service caught and “neutralized” a shipment from China containing clothing irons equipped with spy chips. The innocent-looking electrical items are supposedly able to connect to the nearest WiFi and to either transfer information or spread viruses — it is not clear which one of the above. Russian media, which may not be on The Guardian’s level but have no smaller an audience, informed us that an unknown number of the dangerous irons have already penetrated the market in Saint Petersburg.

If you think about it, the “conspiracy” makes sense. A while ago, The New York Times revealed that under U.S. command Siemens sold nuclear equipment to Iran with a spy program integrated within. What stops the U.S. from inventing a Chinese iron plot?

If we see Putin with a wrinkled shirt, we’ll know one more attack has been “neutralized.”