The Spy Who Bored Me : Why Would Anyone Want to Surveille the European Commission?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578581663230962692.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion
News that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely monitor European phone and digital traffic and may even have spied on the institutions of the European Union is causing a political furor in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and other Continental capitals.
“Unacceptable, it can’t be tolerated,” warns Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor. “Abhorrent” inveighs Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. “George Orwell is nothing by comparison,” thunders Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. French President Francois Hollande has even suggested delaying talks on a trans-Atlantic trade agreement until the issue is resolved.
This is one of the better recent Claude Rains’s routines, with politicians shocked to find spying going on between allies. Europe’s governments have robust spy agencies of their own, and those agencies spy on friends and foes alike. So it has always been. The U.S. has ample reason for spying on Germany, for example, since we know it was the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that executed the 9/11 attacks.
The real mystery (assuming the allegations are true) is what sort of intel did America’s spies think they could glean from snooping on the European Union?
Could it have been the early word on the European Commission’s directive this May (soon rescinded) mandating that olive oil be served only in nonrefillable bottles with tamper-proof caps and labels written in “clear and indelible lettering”? Or maybe it was the research notes of the three-year investigation leading to Brussels’s 2011 decision to forbid bottled-water producers from claiming that water prevents dehydration—on the basis that the claim lacked scientific evidence?
Far more interesting is the growing dismay at President Obama among his former idolators in Europe. The folks who gave him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’d brokered any peace are now disillusioned that he uses drones against terrorists, hasn’t closed Guantanamo, and hasn’t repudiated every Bush-Cheney security policy. And Europeans keep saying Americans are naive about the world.
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Spy Who Bored Me.
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