Alphen, Netherlands. 20
January. President Obama said Friday
that, “People around the world should know that the United States is not spying
on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security”. The reforms Obama has ordered of the National
Security Agency and its practices come as Edward Snowden released details of
the Dishfire programme and the collection
by the US of some 200 million text messages daily. Civil rights groups say that Obama’s reforms
go nothing like far enough to protect privacy.
Any yet full disclosure would effectively wreck the national security
strategies not just of the US but the UK and other Western democracies. Is a new balance possible between strategy,
politics, privacy and intelligence?
The essential dilemma
that Snowden has highlighted is the enormous gulf in the world views of those
responsible for national security and those not. Just before Christmas I had a conversation with
a senior British officer with responsibility for signals intelligence. He told me that Britain was under daily “massive
and rapacious” cyber-attack from Chinese, Russian and other intelligence agencies
in addition to the very real terrorist threat.
Contrast that
perspective with the world-view of Snowden and his supporters such as Julian
Assange and Glenn Greenwald. They appear
to live in a virtual world of perfect civil liberties and much like 1960s
hippies and ‘free love’ they want information to be unbounded. They are part of Generation X that was
spawned by the borderless-ness of the Internet and information idealism and any
power that constrains information anarchy is an enemy.
That is not to say Western-states
do not have a very real duty of care for the privacy of citizens both their own
and others. And, it could well be that the
NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ crossed privacy thresholds in pursuit of
security. 911, the pressing intelligence
needs of the Afghan and Iraq wars and the march of technology brought motive,
opportunity and capability together. Proper and legitimate oversight of such
power is what distinguishes between democracies and non-democracies.
The politics of Obama’s
speech reflect transatlantic tensions over strategy and politics. To hear the likes of German Chancellor Angela
Merkel say on Friday that Germans were “rightfully concerned” by American and
British intelligence practices is a bit rich to say the least. First, German intelligence and its French and
other European counterparts benefit hugely from the data gathering of the NSA
and GCHQ. Second, German and French intelligence
in particular are excellent practitioners of what the information anarchists
regard as dark arts.
The smell of hypocrisy
is emerging from Berlin and not for the first time. It was particularly irritating recently to
see German politicians affecting mock outrage that Britain was trying to
discover Berlin’s policy intentions. As
a British citizen I would be outraged if Britain was not trying to discern
German intentions by all possible means.
Germany is Europe’s most powerful state and the decisions it takes on
the future of the EU have the most profound strategic implications for
Britain. Even this weekend the new
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned David Cameron that some
of his views on the EU were beginning to “affect German interests”.
There is a very real
danger that British Intelligence will be most damaged. London is trapped between an America engaged
in a dark real world and a European political elite obsessed only with the
European order.
At root the cause of
this seemingly endless controversy is the refusal of elites in many Western democracies
to be honest about the dangerous nature of the twenty-first century world. The West failure in Afghanistan and Iraq has
much to do with strategic dissonance between the US and its European
allies. Whilst the US was on a
war-footing much of Europe was determinedly not. Transatlantic strategic dissonance is
reinforced by a European elite culture particularly that tries to lock the
citizen into a false sense of security.
This state is most apparent in relation to the Eurozone crisis but it
extends across the security spectrum.
Therefore, by creating
false security the individual citizen is left in a child-like state led to
believe that his or her freedoms are like the air that they breathe. The thousands of men and women working in
intelligence across the West walk daily past their fellow citizens to and fro
work but might as well be on a different planet. The world they engage on behalf of their
citizens is massively different from that perceived by ordinary people and dangerously
and ideologically different from the world of information anarchists such as
Assange, Greenwald and Snowden.
The greatest immediate
threat to the cohesion of the West is breakdown in the balance between
strategy, politics, privacy and intelligence.
Indeed, without agreement over a new balance and soon the West as
security actor will cease to exist.
Julian Lindley-French
