This is not just Big Brother watching over its citizens. The US has crossed into sacrosanct territory and is spying on its closest friends and thickest allies too.
This is not the Cold War anymore,” says an upset Germany. This was the mildest of rebukes thus far in the wake of the revelations about the American NSA courtesy Edward Snowden. Spying has been taken into another dimension altogether and the present battle could well be called the “Great Cyber War”.
The United States, caught spying, does not have a fig leaf of deniability. This is not just Big Brother watching over its citizens, as portrayed in the landmark novel 1984. The US has crossed into sacrosanct territory and is spying on its closest friends and thickest allies as well.
European Union nations have been forced to undertake security sweeps to ensure their computer systems are not being hacked into and their telephone conversations eavesdropped upon. China, first typecast as the world’s original cyber bad boy, is mockingly pointing to its great rival across the seas to show the world there isn’t just one culprit in modern espionage. If all nations do not get together and sign a treaty to stop cyber espionage, things are only going to get worse.
The US’ spying on its allies takes the issue beyond the fundamental argument that the threat of terrorism overrides the tenets of privacy and justifies invasion of individual liberties. What the great NSA spy programs of Maryland and Utah have been doing is to spy on governments, their trade, science, military and political secrets. All explanations regarding PRISM and other programs studying only metadata, and not prying into individual interactions over the Internet and telephone, cut no ice with a world that is aghast at the temerity of the most powerful nation in a virtually unipolar world.
Much like Germany, India, too, protested so mildly that its voice was hardly heard when US secretary of state John Kerry came calling last week. So protective of his guest was our foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, that the media could not question the visiting dignitary on what his country’s real intentions are in setting up this elaborate $40-billion-plus spying apparatus that snoops on the world. China came through far more aggressively in questioning the US on all that the world has heard since a sub-contractor went on the lam and spilled the beans from Hong Kong with the help of WikiLeaks.
If clarity and transparency are the qualities most needed to cool tensions among nations and passions among privacy-seekers, what will really serve society is for the UN to pay serious attention to this crisis of confidence and come up with an action plan to mark cyber boundaries and make them as inviolable as possible by common consent.
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