Will Obama Crush the Bug?

Washington keeps promising that it will no longer wiretap the leaders of its allies. Not everyone believes this.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was the one to announce the spectacular change of strategy in the National Security Agency’s tactics. According to her statement, she was supposed to have learned of it directly from the White House.

“With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of US allies … let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed,” Feinstein stated.

According to the senator from California, Obama is supposed to deliver the declaration about stopping the monitoring in the near future. So far, the president himself has agreed to “review” the current strategy. Also, the NSA sources that the British Broadcasting Company quotes claim that, despite the White House ordering a partial change to some data collection projects, there is no “total revolution” so far.

“I doubt Americans would stop this kind of monitoring. Access to information is the foundation of the sovereignty of each country,” Jacques Follorou of Le Monde told Rzeczpospolita. Based on data received from Edward Snowden, he was disclosing information on the NSA’s interception practices on France.

The data Snowden has provided shows that Washington monitored the telephones of 35 world leaders, including Germany, France, Spain and Mexico. We do not know whether Donald Tusk was on the list.

The Americans were supposed to have been hacking Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone from 2002 and monitoring her for another 11 years, until summer of this year. Allegedly, a special unit within the NSA, the Special Collection Service, carried out this assignment. Contrary to what Bild-Zeitung reported, Obama had no idea about this initiative, claims NSA Director Keith Alexander.

“It is my understanding that President Obama was not aware Chancellor Merkel’s communications were being collected since 2002,” Feinstein told CNN.

However, there is discussion in Washington as to whether such an arrangement is safe.

“It’s a fundamental question: how much control the politicians have over the NSA and how much of a great machine it has become, taking on a life of its own,” says Follorou.

After coming to power in 2008, Obama declared an end to George W. Bush’s practice of advanced intelligence activities in the name of the war on terror.

“The bug stops with me,” the American leader would repeat.*

“When you’re talking about the surveillance of world leaders and an issue that’s been controversial for a while now, you would expect that there’s some knowledge either by the president or people surrounding him,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University. In his opinion, the “Obamacare” paralysis is already the second signal of the dysfunction of the American state.

Despite Feinstein’s declaration, Brussels does not believe the wiretapping issue has been solved. The European Union delegation to Washington decided that the NSA’s practices mean “a breach of trust” between allies.

U.S. Ambassador to Spain James Costos was called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after El Mundo reported that, only within one month, the NSA had managed to collect 60 million telephone signals and recordings of telephone calls in Spain. That is not much less than in France — 70 million. The data collected so far shows that, as far as the EU is concerned, the NSA is mostly focused on the United Kingdom and Germany, but the former has been disclosing information to the U.S. voluntarily, based on the “Five Eyes” agreement between Anglo-Saxon countries. None of the other European countries has a privilege like that.

The outrage in Berlin continues too. Chancellor Merkel declared she was sending her own intelligence representative to Washington, and Social Democratic Party Secretary-General Andrea Nahles announced the creation of a special parliamentary committee for clarifying the case of the German leader’s phone having been intercepted.

“European leaders were aware of intelligence activity as is, but not as to its scope. It was a real shock for Merkel and Hollande to learn that their cellphones were hacked,” claims Follorou.

Not only Europe is outraged at U.S. intelligence activities. As Kyodo News reported, the government in Tokyo rejected the NSA’s request to provide all the electronic data coming from Southeast Asia and being transferred via transoceanic cables to Japan.

*Editor’s note: The author actually quotes President Obama in English. The quotation could not be verified.