The latest revelations that the US National Security Agency may have tapped Angela Merkel's own cell phone brought an earful of denunciations to Barack Obama from the German chancellor who has demanded a complete explanation of the claims. Apparently, through the years the United States has monitored the phone conversations of 35 unidentified world leaders, according to classified documents leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. Phone numbers were passed on to the NSA by an official in another government department. Staff in the White House, State Department and the Pentagon were urged to share the contact details of foreign politicians. Merkel was taken aback because the US is a friend, not a foe, but the fact is that during the Cold War, this sort of surveillance went on all the time. Merkel is from East Germany which had one of the biggest intelligence services in the world and spied on everyone. Many nations went and continue to go to great lengths to acquire inside information on other countries covertly; it's just been fine tuned.
There are no longer shady characters in trees or wearing sunglasses behind a newspaper with a hole in it. Spying has become second nature to practically all nations and leaders and no country is immune from this manner of eavesdropping in the hunt to find national secrets to gain advantage and monitor the progress made by another country in a critical field. The difference is that before there may have been high priority targets in foreign lands, but never before has information been collected on such a colossal scale involving hundreds of millions of ordinary people, what they do and to whom they speak – as was shown with more than 70 million phone tap records in France. The White House did not deny the Merkel tap which raises the question of how much Obama knew of these practices, and if he allowed them go on. The confidential memo released by Snowden is from 2006, which is before Obama became president. What happened after that is not clear. As for Merkel, she should not to be too critical of the snooping. Her government declared the NSA spying scandal, which centered on charges of surveillance of millions of citizens' phone calls, emails, chats and other communications, effectively over several months ago. But now, when it comes to the confidentiality of communications of the chancellor, she voices personal indignation. This protest was missing when the population at large was being spied on. The worrying thing about these scandals is that they were only revealed because of one individual. How many years has this been going on? How many employees at security agencies have been keeping it a secret that Big Brother is watching? And there is concern that if friendly nations can spy on each other, what about traditional enemies? Most likely this so-called revelation will change nothing. The White House says the tapping of Merkel's phone will not happen in the future but when one system is put in operation, even before it is found out, its replacement is already ready. The people involved figure out how it was discovered, block yesterday's system and a new better model is immediately activated. The Merkel phone allegations have shattered trust in the Obama administration and have undermined the crucial transatlantic relationship. Of course, the ties are too strong to be too adversely affected, but when friends spy on each other, especially when they are heads of state, concepts about fairness, how nations should act and what's right and wrong become badly distorted.
