The US Spying Scandal

The fallout from the “scandal” that former American spy Edward Snowden broke, revealing the comprehensive spying operations U.S. intelligence practices on heads of state and foreign governments, some of them U.S. allies, has snowballed, demolishing the wall of trust between allies and revealing the darker side of international relations.

This scandal has motivated two diplomats from Germany and Brazil, among the nations whose officials U.S. intelligence has monitored, to prepare a United Nations resolution allowing for protection of personal freedoms. This resolution would be an expansion of the International Bill of Human Rights,* which the U.N. approved in 1966 and which was put into practice in 1976 to protect individual rights, including Internet activities.

If the U.N. were to successfully issue a law that would require nations to protect the private lives of individuals, this would send a message to all who exploit the system to spy on or arbitrarily and illegally intervene in a person’s life or that of their family, residence and mail. It would also send a message to those who would impinge on a person’s honor or his or her reputation, in that international law would not allow for such infringements, under penalty of legal action.

Now up to its ears in scandal, after the news that it had tapped the phones of 35 world leaders, the U.S. is attempting to convince its allies that “information gathering is a basic element of counterterrorism.” However, the increasing number of U.S. ambassadors to ally countries, who have been called back to Washington to come up with an explanation for why the U.S. set out to spy on its allies and friends, reveals the major hole the U.S. has fallen into, as well as the climate of distrust that has clouded Washington’s relations with its Western allies in particular.

It is worth pointing out that the National Security Agency’s phone-tapping, carried out in many nations, was not confined to government personalities; rather, it included millions of people’s phone numbers from all over the world, to the point that hundreds of millions of their personal messages are now available to U.S. intelligence agencies on an arbitrary and illegal basis.

The international community should not accept what the U.S. is presenting to its allies as justification for spying and privacy violations; the “war on terrorism” excuse should not persuade America’s allies to turn a blind eye to its espionage. Spying on allies and friends diminishes trust and puts a big question mark over the veracity of what the U.S. calls its war on terror. The majority of this war’s victims are civilians, particularly women and children, the hundreds who have fallen in Afghanistan and Pakistan from U.S. drone strikes among them.

*Editor’s note: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights together are informally known as the International Bill of Human Rights.