The Goal Remains Security

Obama has made promises but does not want to refrain from collecting data. Washington has decided to defend its advantage over Beijing and Moscow.

Nobody knows how to enchant Europeans with words better than Barack Obama. In 2009, the American commander-in-chief charmed the Germans as he painted them a picture of a world without nuclear weapons. No one complained that the president did not immediately scrap all American nuclear missiles. Admittedly, after five years in the White House that were more cursed than enchanted, Obama could hardly repeat the trick. Disillusioned Europeans would hardly accept anymore a vision of a world without spies, code crackers and secret compartments from the man who once was the bearer of their hopes. If the president were after approval from overseas, he probably would have had to blow up the National Security Agency headquarters.

Instead, Obama made it clear that the U.S. will not unilaterally disarm itself in the fight against terrorist attacks on America and her allies, against foreign espionage, cyberattacks, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or cross-border crime. Washington is much more determined to defend its advantage over Beijing and Moscow in order to arm itself against the threats of the future as well. The disappointed Atlanticists in Berlin, who accused Obama of missing the starting pistol, had their words turned around on them by the president: The Germans and others who are outraged, according to his implicit accusation, have been oblivious to some loud bangs near them because American spies prevented them. Or else, they have forgotten the big bang of Sept. 11, 2001, which taught America’s intelligence agencies that the enemy can lurk anywhere — in Afghanistan, Florida, Hamburg.

Although the attackers in Boston recently bombed away the illusion of total security, American intelligence agencies, even today, proclaim a goal of 100 percent protection. To Germans, for whom America’s tendency toward the superlative is foreign, this might seem foolish, but the Europeans, who see new threats turning up in their southern neighbors, also have a hard time telling how many attacks are acceptable. The Americans claim to have prevented more than 50 acts of terrorism with their worldwide surveillance program. In contrast, the worth of the trillions of pieces of telephone metadata on their own citizens on the servers of the NSA has not yet been clearly proven. The disproportionality seems obvious, but Washington responds that, under this program, the 9/11 conspiracy would likely have been uncovered. Obama has come to the conclusion that, at the moment, there is no functional replacement for mass data collection, and he will not consider declaring surveillance-free zones to appease his partners.

Is it worth nothing then, if the president simultaneously admits that the insatiability of the data collectors in the digital age is a cause for concern? In any case, Obama has given his promises the force of law. According to him, every individual has a legitimate interest in the protection of his private sphere. Human dignity should be considered when authorizing espionage programs, as well as disadvantages for America’s partners and the economy. Mass collection of data must then not be an end in itself, but instead, a last resort for obtaining information that is vital to national security. No, Washington is not about to thwart its spies with a generous right to informational self-determination. Also, the president did not replace the old decree about foreign espionage, which defined its goals more broadly, but instead just edited it. In spite of this, one can take its new guard rails seriously. The NSA is supposedly known for following rules strictly. This culture of obedience to orders is often smirked at in the German Intelligence Service, whose workers have more latitude in completing their missions.

Another question is how (future) political leadership affects the agency. Obama therefore acknowledges that new precautions to protect against misuse of data are necessary. However, the U.S. — like the rest of the world — has the right to better protect its own citizens. With reference to the 1960s, when the American government had civil rights and anti-war activists investigated and harassed, this means that a government can wreak more havoc with data about its own citizens than with information about foreigners. This, however, is a questionable premise in the globalized world, which Obama so eloquently describes, and so is the promise to no longer wiretap state and government leaders of close partners, which is not worth much, as long as the guarantee does not include their cabinets or employees.

For the price of closer cooperation, and thus complicity, Berlin could perhaps achieve a confidential agreement with Washington, which would make espionage excesses on German soil less likely. The Germans must also ask themselves, however, if they could not, once again, put a little more trust in the U.S. than they claim to at the moment. They did once trust in America’s terrible atomic power, after all.